Trump Says He’d Consider Eliminating Taxes on Cops, Military, Vets

Trump Says He’d Consider Eliminating Taxes on Cops, Military, Vets

Harris in Grand Rapids, Michigan
USA Today Network
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey
Friday, October 18, 2024

Happy Friday! On this date in 1977 Reggie Jackson earned himself the nickname “Mr. October” by swatting three home runs in Game 6 of the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, propelling the New York Yankees to a championship. Here’s what’s happening today.

Harris Questions Trump’s Fitness for Another Term, Says He Is ‘No Friend of Labor’

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump held dueling campaign events in battleground Michigan today, sharpening their attacks with just 18 days left until November 5.

In an afternoon speech in Grand Rapids, Harris criticized Trump’s record for the car industry, warning that he is making “empty promises” to workers in the Wolverine State. She touted the Biden administration’s work to preserve 650 union jobs at the Grand River Assembly plant in Lansing. The administration provided a $500 million grant to convert the plant to produce electric vehicles, money from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that was part of a larger $1.7 billion plan to boost E.V. production at 11 factories. Sen. JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, earlier this month called the Lansing grant “table scraps.”

Harris hit back in her speech. “We fought hard for those jobs. We believe you deserve a president who will protect them and not insult them. And make no mistake, Donald Trump is no friend of labor,” she said. “He is no friend of labor. Just look at the record instead of his rhetoric. Look at the record, and let’s not fall for the old okie-doke.”

Two days before her 60th birthday, Harris also raised questions about whether the 78-year-old former president is fit for a second term after he pulled out of several planned appearances and a Trump adviser reportedly said that the Republican nominee is “exhausted” — a claim the Trump campaign denies. Trump hasn’t released his medical records despite saying in August that he’d “gladly” do so.

“You know, look, being president of the United States is probably one of the hardest jobs in the world, and so we really do need to ask ourselves if he’s exhausted from being on the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job?” Harris told reporters before taking the stage in Grand Rapids.

Trump did hold a couple of his own events in Michigan, including a return to Detroit, which he recently compared to a “developing nation.” He denied being exhausted. “I’m not even tired. I’m really exhilarated. You know why? We’re killing her in the polls because the American people don’t want her,” Trump told reporters.

He also joined “Fox & Friends” in the morning, following a surly, insult-filled speech at the storied Al Smith dinner in New York on Thursday night. Harris bucked tradition and skipped that dinner, opting to send a prerecorded video and campaign in Wisconsin instead.

Trump Says He’d Consider No Tax on Firefighters, Police, Military, Veterans

Continuing in his quest to find taxes to eliminate for specific voting groups, former President Trump said Friday that he would consider eliminating federal income taxes for first responders, members of the military and veterans.

“It’s something I would think about,” Trump said in response to a question on the issue during an interview aired on OutKick, a sports news site.

According to Bloomberg’s Stephanie Lai, eliminating taxes on first responders and the military would be one of the largest exemptions yet for Trump, who has also proposed nixing taxes on Social Security benefits, overtime pay and tip income, among other things. Lai notes that there are roughly 18 million veterans, 1.3 million active duty personnel, 1 million police officers and 300,000 firefighters in the United States.

Trump Tariffs Would Hit Red States Hardest: Report

Former President Donald Trump is pitching tariffs as a simple solution to a bevy of complex problems, insisting that they would help revitalize domestic industries such as steel and auto manufacturing while simultaneously producing enough revenue to fund new childcare initiatives, create a sovereign wealth fund, eliminate the federal budget deficit and start reducing the national debt.

Most economists are deeply skeptical about Trump’s claims, and instead see tariffs as a potentially destructive policy tool that would likely cause more harm than good in the global system of production and trade.

According to a new analysis by Robert McClelland and Richard C. Auxier of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the economic damage from Trump’s proposed tariffs domestically would fall most heavily on states in the South and Midwest, since imports account for a higher proportion of the statewide economy in those areas. The states with the highest proportion of imports, exceeding 20% of the overall economy, are Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Michigan.

“The US has used tariffs since its creation, but for the past 70 years annual tariff revenue has never accounted for more than 3 percent of total federal revenue,” the researchers write. “Trump’s 60 percent [tariff on China] and 10 percent [tariff on all other foreign producers] proposal would dramatically change the policy equation. The Tax Policy Center estimates this proposal would raise roughly $3.7 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade, increasing what the US currently collects from tariffs by nearly 500 percent.”

Impressive as that tally may be, those revenues would be paid by American importers and consumers in those states — not, as Trump insists, by the exporting firms and nations. Accordingly, businesses and residents of the high-import states would find themselves paying what amounts to a tax equal to several points of GDP.

“Trump’s proposed tariff payments would total more than 3 percent (but not 4 percent) of state GDP in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin and total more than 4 percent of state GDP in Kentucky, Indiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee,” the researchers say. “Kentucky would see the largest total tariff payment under Trump’s proposal, with tariff payments totaling nearly 5 percent of its state GDP.”

The researchers did not model a dynamic response to the tariffs, but it seems likely that consumers would react to the levies by cutting back on their consumption of imports — which could reduce the tariff revenues sharply. While Trump promises that buyers would switch to domestically produced goods, a more likely scenario is that consumption falls in the absence of readily available alternatives, slowing the economy. At the same time, a more dramatic dynamic response may be seen in exporting nations, which could raise their own tariffs, reducing their imports of U.S. goods, dragging on global growth and threatening a global trade war.

Marc Chandler, managing director of Bannockburn Global Forex, told The Washington Post earlier this week that a trade war would have severe consequences. “We’d be facing higher interest rates, slower growth, higher inflation — that stagflation scenario that people talk about,” he said.

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Quote of the Day

“Then-President Trump turned the U.S. Secret Service into an ATM for his personal enrichment, frequently charging the agency room rates far above approved government per diem rates and far above the rates charged to hundreds of other private patrons when Secret Service agents were protecting members of the Trump family.”

– A press release from House Oversight Committee Democrats, who released a 58-page report Friday that says that Trump, as president, violated the Constitution and fleeced taxpayers through legally questionable and exorbitant charges by the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

“Not only did President Trump’s hotel often charge the Secret Service far more than authorized federal government rates, the hotel also charged the agency far more than hundreds of other patrons, including members of a foreign royal family and a Chinese business interest,” the report says. “By accepting the payments that he imposed on the Secret Service, former President Trump violated the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause—which provides that a president may not receive any payments from the federal government other than a salary.”

In a statement to The Washington Post, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization called the report a “desperate attempt by House Democrats to rehash an old unsubstantiated story just two weeks before the upcoming Presidential Election in a last-minute effort to gain ground in the polls.”


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