At a recent private event, Donald Trump offered a bold proposal to clear out America’s national debt. “I’ll write on a little piece of paper: 35 trillion crypto—we have no debt!’” Trump said, standing at a podium that read COLLECT TRUMP CARDS. “That’s what I like.”
The statement had the cadence of a joke. Attendees laughed. But the notion of paying off $35 trillion in debt with a “little crypto check,” as he put it to Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo last month, is only a little more outlandish and half-baked than the proposals he outlined Tuesday in what was billed as a formal address on his economic vision. Indeed, the “new American industrialism” he pitched in the battleground state of Georgia was typical Trump: tough talk, grand but vague promises, and impromptu musings masquerading as policy. Or, as Mark Cuban summed it up in a video released by the Kamala Harris campaign Tuesday: “He says things off the top of his head that tend to often be ridiculous, if not insane.”
The broad strokes of Trump’s proposed economic program are essentially to reward businesses that make goods in the United States and punish those that ship jobs overseas—which sounds not all that dissimilar to the focus on American manufacturing that President Joe Biden made a cornerstone of his domestic agenda. But the specifics of the vision Trump described Tuesday were about as substantive as the “build the wall and make Mexico pay for it” immigration plan he ran on in 2016.
“Not only will we stop our businesses from leaving for foreign lands,” Trump said in Savannah. “Under my leadership, we’re going to take other countries’ jobs.”
And how might the ex-president do that? For starters, he says he’d cut corporate taxes and roll back regulations—the same old Republican economic approach that has been a windfall for the wealthy, but done little for everyday Americans. And then there are the tariffs, which he has come to regard as an economic cure-all, even declaring them the “greatest thing ever invented” during a campaign swing through Michigan last week: “If you don’t make your product here, then you will have to pay a tariff, a very substantial tariff, when you send your product into the United States,” Trump said Tuesday.
This approach to economic policy didn’t exactly work out in Trump’s first term; as the New York Times’ Alan Rappeport noted Tuesday, Trump’s record of attracting manufacturing to the US was mixed. His threats to force companies to stay often fell flat. But in his speech Tuesday, Trump insisted that his plan would actually “create millions and millions of jobs” this time: “We’re putting America first,” he told supporters. Trump’s comments are about a real problem: the off-shoring of jobs that has upended US manufacturing in recent decades, leaving behind what Trump describes as the “forgotten men and women” of America. But his proposals, at best, gesture at a solution and more likely would make the problem worse.
Take the tariffs, like the one he floated Tuesday on “every single car coming across the Mexican border” or the one he threatened against John Deere if the company moved production to Mexico earlier this week. Trump, showcasing all the economic understanding of a man who managed to bankrupt multiple casinos, has continued to cast tariffs as a kind of magic wand: “The word ‘tariff,’ when properly used, is a beautiful word,” Trump said in Georgia Tuesday. “One of the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard. It’s music to my ears.” But economists, and even some Republicans, note that those costs would almost certainly be passed along to consumers, putting further strain on the average American: “I’m not a fan of tariffs,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday. “They raise prices for American consumers.”
How would Americans cover those costs? Maybe Trump can write them a little crypto check.
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