The Opinions - Trump, Tariffs and the Truth About His Economic Plans

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

For voters whose top issue is the economy, the choice is clear, argues Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of the Times Editorial Board. Though Vice President Kamala Harris’s plans may be ill-defined, he says, Donald Trump’s plans — curbing immigration, raising tariffs and cutting taxes — would actually leave consumers worse off than they are today.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is Binya Applebaum, and I write for the editorial board of the New York Times about economic policy issues. Tonight, the high-stakes showdown here in Philadelphia between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. In this week's debate, the moderators kicked things off by asking both candidates to address their plans for the economy. Many Americans tell pollsters that the defining issue in this election is the high cost of living, the cost of groceries, the sense that buying a home is increasingly out of reach, the sense that their incomes are just not keeping pace with the cost for the things that they want and need.

Presidents have limited impact on the economy, but limited isn't zero. And we have quite a straightforward contrast in this race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. So you've got one candidate who may make things better and one who is pretty certain to make things worse. Trump's economic agenda is hard to characterize as sort of ideologically coherent. His biggest plans fall into three buckets. One is tariffs. He believes that tariffs are the cure for everything. Another is tax cuts. He wants to reduce the taxes that the wealthy and large businesses pay. And the third is immigration. Donald Trump loves tariffs.

We're doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we've done for the world. I mean, listening to Donald Trump is so hard because he's such a fluid liar. He's so good at it. He does it with so much conviction. But listen, the fact of the matter is that Donald Trump can say as many times as he'd like that tariffs are not paid by Americans, and it still won't be true. Tariffs are paid by Americans.

Everyone needs to know that. This is a plan to raise taxes on Americans. You may think that there are some benefits associated with that, but we should be clear about what a tariff plan is. It's a tax on American consumers. Everybody knows what I'm going to do, cut taxes very substantially, and create a great economy like I did before. Donald Trump, one of his clearest policy positions, is to repeat what he did during his first term as president and to pass a huge tax cut primarily for the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations.

This has been sort of a staple of Republican policy for the last half century. The idea, as they tell it, is that the benefits will trickle down. It will spur economic growth. It will lift all boats. Republicans have done this, and it does not work. It's rare in economics that we have such a body

of sort of real-world experience to tell us, whether a policy is going to have the projected effect. But in this case, we actually have run this experiment several times, and each time the result is clear. The benefits do not trickle down. The economy does not grow faster. The only thing that happens is that the rich get richer. So the third big bucket of Trump economic policy is immigration.

Just look at what they're doing to our country. They're criminals. Many of these people coming in are criminals. And that's bad for our economy, too. He insists that illegal immigration is responsible for low wages, that immigrants are taking jobs from Americans, and that immigrants are driving up housing prices. And if we, in his view, rounded up people who entered the country without proper documentation and kicked them out of the country, our economy would prosper. We'd all be better off. This is the reverse of the truth, to put it simply.

We are a society of immigrants. The expansion of our population has been the engine of our economic growth for centuries now. If you rounded up 11 million people tomorrow, just sort of stipulating that that was feasible and ignoring the expense of doing it, what you would actually accomplish is to blow a giant hole in the economy. You'd be taking away workers who, by the way, are not competing with American workers in most cases. They're holding jobs that might not exist if they weren't here. Those 11 million people are also consumers and their taxpayers. They contribute hugely to the government's coffers. And so if you took those people out of the country, you'd be damaging the

economy, not improving it. I think housing is a really good issue to look at. Donald Trump says that his big plan to make housing more affordable is to round up millions of illegal immigrants and kick them out of the country, which could actually probably make the housing situation worse because our homes are built to a large extent by immigrants, including many undocumented immigrants. And when you kick them out of a community, the result is that the price of new homes actually goes up. And there's a really striking contrast between the two candidates on this issue. It's a contrast that I think really embodies the broader difference between the two of them. Kamala Harris has articulated a goal of three million new housing units in the United States, and she's outlined a number of plans to achieve that goal.

She wants to provide tax breaks to home builders. She wants to provide incentives to some first-time home buyers. She wants to encourage state and local governments to make it easier for developers to build new homes. The debate earlier this week highlighted Harris's strength and her weakness. Her strength is that she's great at prosecuting Donald Trump. She makes really clear what his flaws and shortcomings are, what's wrong with his plans, what's wrong with him as a person. Her weakness is that she's still struggling to define herself.

She has this phrase, an opportunity, economy that she likes to throw around, but it's very ill-defined. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. I doubt you could find someone who could tell you what she means by it. Not totally clear to me that she knows what she means by it. There's no clear set of proposals standing there that are our,

Kamala Harris' economic vision. And that's important because Americans aren't just deciding who they're going to vote against. They're trying to decide who they're going to vote for. They want to believe that the candidate has a plan to make life more affordable, to increase their prosperity and their children's prosperity over time. And Harris has frankly struggled to explain how exactly she would go about doing that. But even if Harris offers no more information between now, election day, the fact of the matter is that you have on the one hand a candidate in Kamala Harris, who has broadly sketched the beginnings of some real ideas for improving our economy. And on the other hand, you have Donald Trump, a candidate who has laid out some very clear plans

from making life in America significantly worse than it is today. If Donald Trump is elected, and if he gets enough support in Congress to implement the full suite of his economic plan, but it's very likely that he could drive the country into a recession. And we'd all pay the consequences. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vichaka, Phoebe, Lett, Christina Samuelski, and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, Mixing, and Original Music by Isaac Jones,

Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabarrow, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samueluski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.