The Big Number: Former President Donald Trump’s proposal to put a 10% tariff on all imports to the U.S. would be a tax hike of more than $300 billion a year on American consumers, said the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, in an estimate out Friday.
The Washington, D.C., think tank, which generally has supported lower taxes, also warned that “Trump’s proposal of a 10 percent trade tax matched with in-kind retaliation would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.1 percent and threaten more than 825,000 U.S. jobs.”
What it means: Trump, the frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, made tariffs a pillar of his presidency, and his proposal suggests he’ll aim to ramp them up significantly if he gets back in the White House.
Betting markets tracked by RealClearPolitics give President Joe Biden a 35% chance of winning the 2024 presidential election, while Trump is at 27%.
What people are saying: A range of economists have criticized Trump’s suggestion of sweeping 10% tariffs, which came in Fox Business interview last week.
“A tariff of that scope and size would impose a massive tax on the folks who it intends to help,” Paul Winfree, an economist who served as deputy director of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, told the Washington Post.
Trump’s 2024 campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman earlier this week pushed back on criticisms in an interview with the Post, saying: “The globalists who push false claims of economic disaster have been proven wrong time and again.”
From MarketWatch’s archives (December 2019): Fed study finds Trump tariffs backfired
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