This is an interesting thread. Brian, those US Debt numbers you posted don’t match Fox Business numbers. According to Fox Business Biden’s total debt is around 4.3 trillion. In my opinion it’s better to look forward than looking back. A nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget suggests a Harris presidency could increase the national debt by 3.5 trillion. Trump’s ideas could heap as much as 15.2 trillion. I hate taxes! But getting rid of them is not the solution.
The planned tariffs by Trump are a tax on imports and they are going to lead to a global inflation explosion. We’ve been there and done that. It happened just a few years ago. Americans blame Biden for the inflation surge, but in reality, it was a combination of the pandemic and Trump’s tariffs. A study by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Zurich, Harvard and the World Bank concluded that Trump’s tariffs failed to restore jobs to the American heartland. The tariffs “neither raised nor lowered U.S. employment’’ where they were supposed to protect jobs, the study found.
Despite Trump’s 2018 taxes on imported steel, for example, the number of jobs at U.S. steel plants barely budged: They remained right around 140,000. By comparison, Walmart alone employs 1.6 million people in the United States.
Worse, the retaliatory taxes imposed by China and other nations on U.S. goods had “negative employment impacts,’’ especially for farmers, the study found. These retaliatory tariffs were only partly offset by billions in government aid that Trump doled out to farmers. The Trump tariffs also damaged companies that relied on targeted imports. Trump’s planned tariffs are going to ruin the US economy and cause global inflation. Stock markets around the world will crash. I’m not saying the Democrats have everything right, but what Mr. Trump is saying will be devastating for the US economy and the rest of the world.