Robert Reich
Sep 12
Friends,
At Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Trump was asked about his economic agenda. As we’ve come to expect, he produced an incoherent word salad — a rambling, nonsensical, maniacal aggregate of lies and diversions that offered more evidence of his declining acuity than of anything resembling sane economics.
He was only slightly more coherent at his appearance last Thursday at the Economic Club of New York.
On both occasions, Trump promised to raise tariffs on virtually all imports. He has said he’ll use the revenue to finance child care, combat inflation, pay for a U.S. sovereign wealth fund, and help reserve the dollar’s dominant role in the global economy.
It’s another enormous lie. Tariffs are in effect taxes on everyone who buys imported goods — that is, on most Americans. And they’re highly regressive, since poor and working-class Americans would pay a higher portion of their incomes than anyone else. They’d spur inflation by pushing prices upward.
Even if Trump were able to impose all of the tariffs he has floated, the amount of revenue they would bring in would fall far way short of the “trillions” he has described, since higher prices on imported goods would cause consumers to search for alternatives.
Trump has also promised to extend or even enlarge his tax cuts, which are supposed to end in 2025. They have disproportionately benefited America’s wealthy and big corporations. They are estimated to add at least $4 trillion to the national debt.
Finally, at the Economic Club of New York, he promised, if elected, to “eliminate a minimum of 10 existing government regulations for every new regulation added” under his administration.
Trump announced that billionaire Elon Musk will head a “government efficiency commission” to conduct a sweeping audit of the federal government and recommend “drastic reforms” for cutting waste. (Musk says he “can’t wait.”)
I’ve already shared with you why you need to be wary of Elon Musk, if you weren’t already. Putting Elon Musk in charge of “drastic reforms” to achieve more “efficiency” is like putting Willie Sutton in charge of making banks safer from robbers.
Most regulations are guardrails against corporations harming the public in pursuit of profits.
Instead of the word “regulation,” substitute the word “protection.” These guardrails protect us from unsafe products, dangerous workplaces, harmful foods, unsafe drugs, fraud, monopolization, unfair labor practices, and environmental hazards.
When Trump (and Musk) equate regulations with waste or inefficiency, what they’re really saying is that big corporations ought to be able to wreak as much harm on the public as they want, if doing so enlarges their profits.
Obviously, Trump’s corporate backers couldn’t be happier.
The Supreme Court, now dominated by Republican appointees, has already been doing the bidding of big corporations seeking to quash regulations. Its June 28 ruling Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which should have received far more attention that it did, ended the 40-year-old precedent of what’s called “Chevron deference.”
What this means is that from now on, rather than deferring to the expertise of expert agencies on how to interpret ambiguous language in laws, federal judges have the power to decide what a law means for themselves. Despite not being accountable to the people, judges will be able to expand their role into the realm of policymaking.
You can bet that big corporations will “forum shop” for judges that will minimize any and all public protections that prevent big corporations from maximizing their profits.
“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent from the ruling. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
Trump Republicans and their corporate backers use terms like the “deep state” or “administrative state” or “unelected bureaucrats” so Americans will come to view regulations as anti-democratic and anti-capitalist.
The truth is just the opposite. Big corporations and their executives are accountable only to their shareholders, not to the public. What’s really anti-democratic is allowing them freer rein to make more profit by harming the public.
Nor are regulations anti-capitalist. In fact, regulations save capitalism from its own excesses. Many of today’s regulatory agencies — the FDA, SEC, NLRB, and so on — are legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, when the Great Depression exposed the weaknesses of unfettered capitalism. Because of those regulations, America did not succumb to fascism or communism during the 1930s, as did other nations.
Trump has always wanted us to believe that “expertise” is bad — that facts, analysis, and science cannot be trusted.
You’ll remember that as president he launched direct attacks on scientists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, and other professionals in government who do the hard work of applying laws to specific instances through regulations. Whether the subject was climate change, environmental protection, worker safety, or the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump and his enablers rejected expertise.
Partly as a result, the proportion of Americans with a low level of trust in scientific expertise rose from 3 percent in 2016 to 13 percent in 2020.
Now, Trump promises to finish the job by getting rid of these public servants altogether and substituting people who are loyal to him.
To Trump and his lapdogs, agency expertise has become the reviled “deep state” — or as described in Project 2025’s transition playbook, “a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences — or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
In extending his tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations, putting Musk in charge of making government more “efficient,” and warring against regulations, Trump and his Supreme Court seek to make big American corporations even more powerful and profitable. The assumption is this will make everyone better off.
It’s all another variant on the failed doctrine of “trickle-down” economics, which has proven itself a cruel hoax.
For 40 years, big corporations and the ultra-wealthy have made off like bandits while almost nothing has trickled down to the rest of us.
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