Former President Donald J. Trump has been offering up new tax cuts to nearly every group of voters that he meets in recent weeks, shaking the nerves of budget watchers and fiscal hawks who fear his expensive economic promises will explode the nation’s already bulging national debt.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made clear that he was unfazed by such concerns and offered a one-word solution: growth. Despite the doubts of economists from across the political spectrum, Mr. Trump said that he would just juice the economy by the force of his will and scoffed at suggestions that his pledges to abolish taxes on overtime, tips and Social Security benefits could cost as much as $15 trillion.
“I was always very good at mathematics,” Mr. Trump told John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, in an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago.
Faced with repeated questioning about how he could possibly grow the economy enough to pay for those tax cuts, Mr. Trump dismissed criticism of his ideas as misguided. He professed his love of tariffs and insisted that surging output would cover the cost of his plans.
“We’re all about growth,” Mr. Trump said, adding that his mix of tax cuts and tariffs would force companies to invest in manufacturing in the United States.
The national debt is approaching $36 trillion. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projected last week that Mr. Trump’s economic agenda could cost as much as $15 trillion over a decade. Economists from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated last month that if Mr. Trump’s plans were enacted, the gross domestic product could be 9.7 percent lower than current forecasts, shrinking output and dampening consumer demand.
During his presidency, Mr. Trump repeatedly relied on overly optimistic growth forecasts to make his budget proposals appear to be fiscally responsible. He claimed that his policies would drive more output and generate more investment than they ultimately did. In 2017, he predicted that economic growth would reach 6 percent, but it topped out around 3 percent.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump maintained that the threat of draconian tariffs would be the centerpiece of his economic agenda. He offered a rationale for imposing across-the-board tariffs of as much as 50 percent — far higher than the 10 percent duties that he previously proposed — and denied the possibility that the tariffs would hurt American businesses.
Mr. Trump said the tariff would have to be higher than 10 percent to do that: “They’re not going to do it for 10, but you make a 50 percent tariff, they’re going to come in.”
Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign products during his presidency, but his plans if he is re-elected would dwarf those moves. On previous occasions, Mr. Trump suggested imposing tariffs of 10 to 20 percent on most foreign items, as well as a tariff of 60 percent or more on goods from China, in addition to other levies.
This article was originally published in NY Times