On Friday’s broadcast of C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) stated that the United States’ “big mistake” on China was when we granted China most-favored nation trade status, because giving them that status led to a horribly lopsided trade relationship with China and argued that the way to bring needed change to our trade relationship with China is to impose “tariffs on Chinese goods across the board” that would be far stricter than the tariffs on China imposed under the Trump administration.
Sherman said, “As to China, the big mistake we made was in the year 2000, when we granted most-favored nation status to China. Our economic theories at the time told us that you can’t have free and unmanaged trade with another country that manages its trade and manages its economy, and that if you do, you may have a spectacularly large trade deficit, and now we do. So, we need to change our trade relationship with China. It is the most lopsided trade relationship in the history of…life, and the way to do that is tariffs on Chinese goods across the board. And while Trump talked about doing that, we did very little.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett