This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 9th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Donald Trump's proposed trade team is a triumvirate of protectionist thinkers.

Wilbur Ross as head of the Commerce Department, Peter

Navarro is head of the new National Trade Council, and Robert Lighthizer as

US Trade Representative. Cato Institutes Dan Eikichen and Dan Mitchell discuss the team's

background why U.S. trade policy is now more uncertain than ever.

Yes, the three have in common this economic nationalist view where trade is a competition, a zero-sum competition

between team, USA and the foreign team.

I've happened to debate all three of them at different points over the past decade and a half and they each are

prominent advocates of protection.

Wilbur Ross has been in the business, He's a successful businessman. He was in the business of

purchasing and selling steel companies in the mid 2000s and textile companies around the same time.

So he was advocating for prolongation of textile quotas,

steel restraints that the Bush administration put into place,

primarily because it was beneficial to the transactions he was trying to conduct.

But he is committed to the idea that we need to restrict imports,

that the key to growing the economy is to increase net exports.

He and Navarro believe that the national income identity is a growth equation or growth formula rather than just an income identity

Really what it demonstrates is what we do with national output output is either consumed by citizens, by government, by business, or it's exported.

There's a minus M there, minus imports, because embedded in C, I and G are imports.

So we have to subtract them out.

...