Former President Donald Trump hit back at critics of his tariffs proposal during an interview with a Las Vegas-based local outlet on Monday, explaining why they are necessary and how they will help grow the U.S. economy.
“Under Biden-Harris or Harris-Biden, however you wanna figure it, we’re losing $2 trillion a year. With the tariffs, we can get that number down to a very manageable number, even, ultimately, we can break it even,” Trump told KTNV-TV.
“And it’s gonna generate tremendous growth because, rather than paying the tariffs, there is no tariff if you build your plant in the United States, like the autoworkers. The autoworkers are gonna be out of business. We‘re not gonna have any autoworkers anymore, it’s gonna all go through China and other countries, including Mexico, by the way,” he continued.
He noted further:
And we charge tariffs, we put tariffs on those cars, they’re not gonna be able to sell them and therefore they’re wasting their time in building the plant. But we will say, ‘Build the plant over here. If you build that plant over here, there’s no tariff.’ And they’re gonna end up building the plants over here. We’re gonna bring back the autoworkers, were gonna bring back business, we’re gonna bring back manufacturing. And we were doing it, and then when we got hit with the COVID, we had to focus on the COVID. But we were just starting to do it. We had everything fixed. We made the USMCA deal, which people love, one of the best trade deals we ever made. But we’re gonna be doing it and we’re gonna bring back manufacturing and a big part of that is gonna be the automobile manufacturing.
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Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris’ tax and economic plans are being panned by the left and right as unworkable, counterproductive, and ultimately bad for the country.
Harris plans to amplify the standard tax deduction for small business startup expenses by tenfold as a key component of her comprehensive economic strategy should she win the White House this November.
The plan involves increasing the standard tax deduction for small business startup costs from the current level of $5,000 to $50,000, which Harris touted in a recent speech as “essentially a tax cut for starting a small business.”
At first glance, the proposal appears reasonable. A recent Tax Foundation analysis projects that the change would decrease revenue by approximately $24.5 billion over the next ten years and has the potential to stimulate some economic growth, Fox Business noted.
However, Harris’ other proposals within her “Opportunity Agenda” are anticipated to negate any potential growth that might result from the increased small business tax deduction, the outlet said.
“On its own, the proposal would likely have a very small but positive effect on the economy overall,” Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, told Fox Business. “Unfortunately, it’s proposed in the context of a plan to impose significantly higher marginal tax rate on saving and investment, which would swamp any small improvements to the startup deduction.”
The Tax Foundation’s report indicates that Harris’s overall agenda, which includes raising top tax rates to some of the highest levels in the developed world, would likely cause more economic harm than benefit.
Harris has proposed increasing the corporate tax rate to 28% from the current 21%, a shift from her earlier position during her brief 2020 presidential campaign, when she advocated for a 35% corporate tax rate.
The Tax Foundation’s analysis estimates that Harris’s comprehensive plan would increase taxes by $4.1 trillion from 2025 to 2034. It predicts a 2% reduction in long-term GDP, a 1.2% decrease in wages, and the potential loss of 786,000 jobs over that period.
“The economic harm from Harris’s tax hikes would also greatly reduce the ability to address an emerging debt crisis,” the report reads.
