Peter Navarro asks Congress to pass Trump payroll tax cut

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Peter Navarro: Faced with coronavirus pandemic, Congress should pass Trump’s $800 billion payroll tax cut

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro tells ‘Sunday Morning Futures’ payroll tax cut will help small and medium-sized businesses.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro pushed for a payroll tax cut as a way to help American workers and small businesses during the coronavirus crisis, in an interview on "Sunday Morning Futures."

Navarro also wrote an opinion piece on the matter for FoxNews.com, raising the alarm that the virus' negative effects on the U.S. economy will last for "three to six months."

"There's gonna be big headwinds because of these structural adjustments we're making now," he told Maria Bartiromo Sunday. "The beauty of the payroll tax cut until the end of the year: The payroll tax is 15 percent. If you basically cut that to zero, it's like a seven-and-a-half percent raise for workers, it's like one extra paycheck every three months. At the same time, it helps our businesses, particularly our small and medium-sized businesses, manage their cash flow over these times of risk and uncertainty."

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Navarro said the Trump administration has been working with Congress on industry relief, fiscal stimulus efforts and tax cuts, but he said the tax cut would be the most important thing to shield the U.S. economy in the immediate future.

"What the House and Congress are doing now is basically important, but it's a relief package," he said. "It's not primarily a stimulus. We've got to do the stimulus along with some industry assistance. We've got to hit three points of that compass relief, fiscal stimulus in the industry and the industry assistance, and of the three, the most important for the next six months is going to be that payroll tax cut."

Trump also has trumpeted a payroll tax cut loudly, tweeting Friday that if Congress wanted "to get money into the hands of people quickly and efficiently," it needed to pass a payroll tax cut.

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The White House trade adviser asked for unity on the payroll tax cut in his Sunday piece for FoxNews.com.

"We all must come together not as Democrats or Republicans but as Americans," he wrote. "A payroll tax cut needs to be passed now."

In his interview on "Sunday Morning Futures," Navarro also addressed how the U.S. medical supply chain largely has been reliant on Chinese products.

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"We have an executive order that we're racing to the finish line, we could sign it as early as the end of this week," Navarro told Bartiromo. He said the administration's eventual goal was to have "our resources on domestic soil."

China last week threatened to cut off American imports of medical supplies from China that would plunge America into "the mighty sea of coronavirus."

Fox News' Barnini Chakraborty and Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo contributed to this report.