What’s in a Sign?

October 24, 2024

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As I drove into my polling place to perform my civic duty yesterday, I noticed an interesting series of campaign signs. Each sign made one of these comparisons:

  • Trump: Lower taxes/ Kamala: Higher taxes
  • Trump: Low prices/ Kamala: High prices
  • Trump: Secure borders/ Kamala: Open borders
  • Trump: Safety/ Kamala: Crime

I was struck by how succinctly these signs declared the superiority of candidate Trump over candidate Harris, but also how misleadingly they stated the issues.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like a sign that simply announces the name of the candidate one supports, and maybe a brief slogan to capture the spirit of a campaign: Something like “Reagan—Morning Again in America,” or “Obama—Change We Can Believe In.” Trying to compare two candidates with pithy one-liners is a challenging task, even if a campaign is trying to be fair. For a campaign with no concern for facts, it is a public disservice, a kind of democracy malpractice.

Why, by the way, is Donald Trump “Trump,” while Kamala Harris is “Kamala”? The only reason I know for Trump to call his opponent by her first name and deliberately mispronounce it when he says it, is to make Harris sound vaguely foreign, as if her ancestry was somehow disqualifying. Trump tried to do the same thing to Barack Obama by emphasizing his middle name—Hussein—and promoting the “birther” conspiracy that he was born in a foreign country. One more way of dividing the country into us and them.

For each of the above comparisons, a lot of facts come to mind that don’t fit neatly on a campaign sign. Here are a few of them.

“Trump: Lower taxes/ Kamala: Higher taxes”?

To the extent that this is true at all, it is true mainly for corporate taxes. Trump’s 2017 tax cut lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. He would lower it further, to 15%, for companies that make their products in the United States. Harris would increase the corporate rate to 28%, but give some tax breaks to small businesses.

Regarding individual taxes, Harris wants to shift the tax burden toward the rich, by raising taxes only on incomes over $400,000 a year. She would reduce taxes on others by increasing the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit. Trump wants to make permanent the 2017 tax cuts whose benefits went primarily to the rich. If he were to adopt the flatter tax rates recommended by Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a new administration, the tax burden would be shifted even further from the rich to the non-rich. (See my analysis here.)

Trump’s tariff proposal is a tax on imports, in effect a tax on corporations with global supply chains. Economists expect that it would raise costs by several thousand dollars for the average household when those costs are passed along to consumers.

Taken together, Trump’s tax proposals would result in another massive loss of revenue for the federal government and add trillions to the national debt. Economists say that Harris’s proposals would have a much smaller impact, but they would also give people more in tax reductions than they take back in tax increases. To summarize her plan as “higher taxes” is incorrect.

“Trump: Low prices/ Kamala: High prices”?

This makes sense only if we blame Harris for the spike in inflation that occurred shortly after Biden and Harris took office. The factors contributing to that spike were already developing, however. Both the Trump and Biden administrations stimulated economic demand to combat the Covid recession. Meanwhile, Covid was disrupting supply chains, and the war in Ukraine was interrupting the supply of oil. Higher demand + Lower supply = Inflation. Although businesses rarely lower prices once they have raised them, the overall rate of inflation has now dropped back to a more normal level.

The only proposal I have heard from Trump to control inflation is to increase the supply of energy, something the country is already doing. He only seems to care about more oil drilling, not the cleaner forms of energy Biden and Harris have been promoting. Trump’s tariff proposal would raise prices, as noted above.

Harris has proposals to increase the supply of housing and combat price gauging in the food industry. She also proposes to ease costs for first-time home buyers with a tax credit.

“Trump: Secure borders/ Kamala: Open borders”?

Trump’s plan for securing our borders is to close them to asylum seekers, U.S. and international law notwithstanding. He would also place millions of migrants already here in detention camps and then deport them. As far as I know, he makes no exception for those here legally, pending a hearing on their asylum cases.

Trump helped kill the bipartisan immigration reform law that Congress was close to passing earlier this year. It contained some tough provisions on border security: “close loopholes in the asylum process, give the president greater authority to shut down the border and limit parole of migrants” (The Washington Post). At that point, it was Trump who seemed to want the border kept open so he could run on the issue this year. Although President Biden would have preferred a legislated solution, he reduced border entries by executive action when the reform bill failed.

Contrary to the campaign sign, Harris does not support open borders. Like most Americans, she does support some path to citizenship for selected migrants. She also says she would sign the bipartisan reform bill that Trump killed.

“Trump: Safety/ Kamala: Crime”?

Both candidates supported—and Trump signed–the First Step Act, a federal criminal justice reform bill generally described as shifting the emphasis from punishment to rehabilitation.

Trump’s main proposal to reduce crime is to deport immigrants, whom he falsely accuses of committing more crimes than native-born Americans. (Actually, the immigrant crime rate is lower).

Given the rather obvious connection between this country’s exceptionally high rate of gun violence and its exceptionally permissive gun laws, any sensible discussion of crime should include some discussion of guns. Trump has sometimes expressed support for gun-safety measures such as universal background checks, but he refused to support them as president. Harris supports universal background checks and red flag laws.

Associating Harris with crime in general is rather silly. Crime rates have generally fallen during the Biden-Harris administration. Harris spent much of her career as a criminal prosecutor, while Donald Trump is a convicted felon. Harris has demonstrated far more regard for the law and the constitution than her opponent.

These kinds of campaign messages are traps for the unwary and uninformed, who make up a disturbing proportion of the electorate. I am sure that some Trump voters know exactly what to expect from him, whether they are corporate executives wanting lower taxes or struggling workers who see immigrants as standing in their way. But the many voters who expect him to create a stronger economy with lower inflation and less crime are likely to be disappointed. Most economists believe that Trump’s deportations and tariffs are more likely to lower GDP and bring on a recession.

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Posted by Ed Steffes

Trump’s Dilemma: Debate or Just Deceive?

September 12, 2024

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It matters who won or lost this week’s presidential debate, but it also matters how they won or lost. In their post-debate analysis, many commentators focused on issues of style or tactics. Kamala Harris looked more presidential, they say, and she managed to goad Donald Trump into making some silly assertions, like claiming that “people don’t go to her rallies; there’s no reason to go. And the people who do go she’s busing them in and paying them to be there.”

What about substance? Who was more effective in persuading voters to support their policy proposals? Here Trump has a big handicap, since he has trouble debating ideas on their merits. Doing so effectively requires some command of the facts. But Trump does not so much assimilate facts as try to ignore them. He can get away with this when he is ranting within his MAGA bubble in campaign rallies or on right-wing media. In a debate setting, he can only hope that his opponent—and the moderators—are either too timid or too unprepared to call out his distortions of reality. Vice President Harris was neither.

Here are a few examples of the deceptions Trump presented in lieu of reasoned, fact-based arguments. Here I draw on the excellent fact-checking provided by the Washington Post.

On the economy, both candidates expressed concern about high prices, but only Harris had specific policy proposals to control consumer costs, such as the high cost of housing. Trump preferred to devote his time to blowing the problem out of proportion and placing the blame for it entirely on his opponent. He claimed that the recent inflation is “probably the worst in our nation’s history,” that his administration had “the greatest economy” of all time, and that the Biden-Harris administration “destroyed the economy.” In fact, inflation was higher in 1946, 1979 and 1980; the Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton administrations had stronger economies than his; and the Biden-Harris economy is also doing well by most economic measures. The rate of growth and job creation has been high, unemployment has been low, and the rate of inflation has come back down.

Trump also refused to acknowledge that his own tariff proposal would increase costs for consumers. He claimed, contrary to what economics teaches, that his tariff will be paid for by the countries that export goods to the United States. In fact, tariffs are taxes on importers, who usually pass them on to consumers. Cost estimates vary, but generally indicate that the tariffs will cost the average family several thousand dollars a year. A tariff is also a regressive tax, hitting low-income households the hardest.

On immigration, Trump claimed that 21 million immigrants have entered the country in the past four years, while the true number is closer to 5 million. He said that “they’re at the highest level of criminality,” when immigrants actually have a lower rate of crime than the U.S.-born population. Undocumented immigrants have an especially low rate, because they know that if they are arrested they can be deported. Trump described “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” so many that “crime is down all over the world except here.” These are total fabrications, even before we get to the immigrant cat eaters of Springfield. He also asserted, without evidence, that Democrats are deliberately letting undocumented immigrants into the country and then trying to get them to vote illegally. That’s one of the assertions he makes to support the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. He repeated such claims over and over instead of debating the bipartisan immigration bill that Biden and Harris supported but he effectively killed.

On abortion, Trump tried to defend his successful effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Here he conveniently manufactured a consensus that doesnot exist: “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote.” He also falsely accused Democrats of supporting late-term abortion and even execution of newborns. Harris supports the Roe standard, which calls for unrestricted abortion rights only during the first trimester, when about 90% of abortions occur. Trump refused to say whether he would sign or veto a federal ban on abortion.

In response to a question on climate change, Trump had no proposals to do anything about it. Instead, he went on the attack, saying, “If she won the election, the day after that election, they’ll go back to destroying our country, and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead.” In fact, Biden and Harris promote both fossil fuels and cleaner energy in the short term, and production of both have increased under their administration.

On the war in Ukraine, Trump claimed that he could end it quickly, but refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine to win. He implied that the U.S. is already spending too much on the war, by stating that we have provided more aid to Ukraine than European countries have. That’s not true either.

Some may dismiss these falsehoods by claiming that all politicians lie, and that both sides are equally guilty. However, factchecking has turned up only a few problems with Harris’s debate positions. She did try to downplay her former opposition to fracking. She did take a couple of Trump’s quotations out of context, as when she said, “It is well known that he said of Putin that he can do whatever the hell he wants and go into Ukraine.” Trump was not talking specifically about Ukraine, but about a warning to a NATO country that we would not defend them if they did not increase their financial contribution to NATO.

Harris’s own positions and policy proposals deserve scrutiny and debate. But fruitful debate becomes impossible when the other candidate would rather rage against imaginary demons than engage with the real issues. Trump’s failure to propose an alternative to Obamacare after vilifying it for nine years shows that he prefers outrage to constructive governing.

Stretching the truth a little within a debate is one thing. Substituting outlandish claims for fact-based debate is something else. That defeats the whole purpose of debate, which is to inform the public of the candidates’ proposals and their arguments for them. Donald Trump displays such a flagrant disregard for truth that one must wonder if he really believes what he is saying. If he does, he is deluded. If he does not, then he is habitually dishonest. Neither trait is easy to change, so an improved performance by Trump in some future debate seems unlikely. Either should be disqualifying for the presidency.

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Posted by Ed Steffes