Henry Bodkin
2024-11-04 14:31:37 UTC
Reply
Permalinkpart for the rich!
Republicans Closing Argument: We Will Wreck the Economy
The former presidents allies have used the final days of the campaign to
argue for sharp spending cuts that would harm millions of Americans.
November 3, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EST
By Matthew Yglesias
Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and
former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He
is author of One Billion Americans.
In the closing days of the presidential campaign, Donald Trumps allies
suddenly have a new message: The US needs sharp, immediate and ill-defined
spending cuts.
Elon Musk, whos been talking about immigration for more than a year, now
says hes going to oversee $2 trillion in reductions. Thats a third of the
federal budget, so youd think there might be some kind of plan for what
this involves, but all Musk would say last week is that temporary
hardship will be involved. What kind of hardship? Well, House Speaker
Michael Johnson let it be known last week that health care reforms going
to be a big part of the agenda if Trump wins, including a very
aggressive attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Hedge fund
billionaire John Paulson, a Trump supporter, also weighed in last week
about the need for steep cuts.
BloombergOpinion
Americas Green Party Is a Fraud
GDP Is Stronger With a Blue White House and Red States
On Election Night, the Law Must Prevail
Trumps Beautiful Tariffs Would Hurt Red States Most
All of this amounts to an implicit admission that Trumps policy agenda is
an unworkable fraud, and that virtually everything he and his team have
said or done over the course of the campaign has been about avoiding
discussion of the concrete stakes at issue.
Start with the present. The US economy is performing generally very well,
with GDP growth ahead of projections made before Covid happened and Joe
Biden became president. Unemployment is low. Inflation has returned to a
normal level. But interest rates are undesirably high, as is the current
federal budget deficit. And its hard to reduce both of them at the same
time, especially with an aging population.
Into this mix both Trump and Kamala Harris have offered proposals that
would make the deficit larger rather than smaller. This is not ideal. But
theres a huge gap between the campaigns Trump would add twice as much
debt as Harris.
Thats a Lot of Debt
Trump's economic plans would add twice as much to the national debt over
the next decade as Harriss
Source: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
Even this understates the contrast. Not only do Trumps proposals add
trillions in new debt, they do so even though several of his tax ideas
would mechanically force cuts in Social Security benefits. In fact, one
analysis suggests that his tariff plans would lead to higher taxes for
about 80% of the population. Cutting Social Security benefits and raising
net taxes on most people and adding over $7 trillion in new debt it is a
genuinely reckless approach, reflecting the huge scope of the tax cuts
Trump has promised the highest-income minority of Americans.
Trumps Economic Plans Would Hurt the 99%
For most Americans, Trumps proposed tariffs would erase any gains in
income made from the extension of his tax cuts
Source: Peterson Institute for International Economics
Note: Figures assume a tariff of 20% for most goods, 60% from China, and
reflect changes in after-tax income.
Since announcing his candidacy two years ago, Trump has masterfully avoided
any prominent discussion of the actual implications of these ideas.
Instead, he has tossed out an endless stream of chaff about migrants eating
pets and various low-content publicity stunts.
As Election Day approaches, however, Trumps supporters in the business
community seem to have realized that his proposals are unworkable and would
wreak havoc on the financial system. The only way to make the numbers add
up is to pair higher taxes on the bottom 80% with big cuts in programs such
as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, federal aid to
education, and so forth. The exact balance of such cuts is unclear, though
Johnson is clearly interested in cutting health programs.
In short, the Trump agenda involves higher taxes on the working class and
lower spending on the very programs they rely on, both in order to finance
huge tax cuts for the likes of Musk and Paulson.
Openly admitting this a week before Election Day would be a mistake. But
the political risk for Trumps business backers was that the campaign was
doing too good a job of hiding the ball. By making their comments at the
last minute, they can have it both ways: Ensure that the dire consequences
of Trumps proposals dont dominate the campaign, and then pretend to have
secured a mandate for drastic change if Trump wins.
This gambit has been the central bait-and-switch of Trumps campaign.
Throughout his third presidential run, Trump has promoted the idea that
putting him back in office would restore the economic conditions of 2019.
Those conditions had badly deteriorated, of course, by the time he left
office: Covid happened. But Trump has managed to convince many voters that
not only is he blameless for anything that happened in 2020, but that the
pandemic is irrelevant to the higher inflation and interest rates the US
has experienced since Covid.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-03/republicans-ignore-
trump-on-the-economy