If there were anyone who should be a candidate for an emergency ego intervention, it has to be CNN anchor Jim Sciutto. At a Citizen by CNN conference last week, Sciutto lectured (and hectored) the Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, Peter Navarro over the "fact" that the United States does not collect tariffs.
Sciutto took the idea that the consumer and the manufacturers ultimately pay for the tariffs in the form of increased prices of imported goods to absurdly assert that the United States does not collect tariffs. It wasn't just an unfortunate slip of the tongue on the part of Sciutto because he emphasized his silly assertion twice and both times, as you can see and hear in the video, with an air of superior authority to Navarro who happens to have an extensive academic background in economics.
We now join Sciutto's imagined expertise in trade as he vehemently insists to Navarro that the U.S.A. does not collect tariffs. Got that? Those tariffs that President Trump imposed upon China are completely imaginary because we somehow don't collect them...in Sciutto's world.
PETER NAVARRO: We’ve collected — I think it’s over $40 billion to date on tariffs.
JIM SCIUTTO: We don’t collect tariffs. You know that as well. Everybody in the room knows we don’t collect tariffs. Manufacturers and consumers pay the tariffs.
NAVARRO: You did not let me finish here.
Actually Sciutto was the one who should have finished there since he could have later claimed it was just a slip of the tongue. Instead he returned to his insistence that the U.S. does not collect tariffs with the same tone of smug arrogance.
SCIUTTO: I know, but it’s just one of those statements that’s not...
NAVARRO: But there’s a point to this.
SCIUTTO: You know as well as me it’s not an accurate statement.
Um, Jim, speaking of not being an accurate statement, what was definitely not even remotely accurate was your absurd notion that tariffs are not collected by this country. Thus far no correction from Sciutto for his rude insistence to Peter Navarro (accusing him of not making an "accurate statement") of an obvious falsehood which anybody just a bit familiar with trade policy would know to be...Fake News.
h/t: Breitbart
