President Trump’s tax and tariff policies form the heart of an economic program that he’s promised will help average Americans. The hard data, however, show that he’s actually imposed substantial costs on about 70 percent of Americans.
That’s because of both the growing burdens imposed by both the tariffs and the tax changes that provided no relief to the nearly 43 percent of U.S. households that paid no income tax before, less than nothing to five percent whose taxes went up, and not much to an additional 22 percent of Americans whose small tax benefits are dwarfed by the negative income effects of Trump’s tariffs.
It may get even worse. If the president goes ahead in December with his plan to increase and expand tariffs on imports from China, 80 percent of the country—roughly 102 million households with 258 million people—will be worse off under his economic program.
The tariffs directly raise the prices for thousands of foreign and U.S.-made goods produced with Chinese or European parts. The U.S. companies that sell those goods lose some business; and as we pay more for some products, we have less left to pay for everything else. So, consumers cut back and businesses follow suit, forcing them and their suppliers to cut the hours their employees work or their jobs—setting off another round of cutbacks by households that squeezes more companies and workers. On top of all this, retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports by China and the European Union trigger similar cutbacks by American companies and workers. His trade program dampens our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), loses jobs, and lowers incomes and wages.
For most Americans, those costs exceed any savings they can incur from the president’s tax changes. It’s a reminder of just how dramatically his tax program favors the high-income bracket. To begin, 42.7 percent of “tax-paying units” (households and spouses filing separately), covering 154 million people in 2018, got little or nothing from Trump’s tax cuts, because their incomes were too small to trigger income tax liability before those changes. Trump’s decision to cap people’s deductions for their state and local taxes also turned his tax program into a tax increase for five percent of households, living mainly in high-tax blue states.
Additionally, the 2017 tax changes provide so little for the lower 40 percent of tax-paying households that Trump’s tariffs wind up swamping those meager tax benefits. Across the bottom quintile, or 20 percent of taxpayers, the tax benefits averaged just $60 per-household in 2018, and the benefits for the next 20 percent of taxpayers amounted to $380. Trump’s tariff program costs the average household an estimated $690 in foregone income.
That estimate is based on the Tax Foundation’s calculations that Trump’s current tariffs have shaved $62.5 billion per-year from our GDP, and that foreign tariffs imposed in retaliation cost our GDP another $25.6 billion. GDP may just be a particular way of measuring the value generated by the economy, but almost all of it ultimately translates into people’s incomes.