|nytimes.com
Trump Disasterous Economic Views
By Peter Coy
Opinion Writer
One argument you sometimes hear for Donald Trump — that he may be a bad person, but good for the economy — fails in two ways.
First, because being good for the economy should not be sufficient to get a badly flawed candidate elected. And second, because the former president’s return to office would actually not be good for the economy.
That latter point has been argued from many persuasive angles in Times Opinion. We have been all over this topic in editorials, columns, guest essays and podcasts.
To offer just a few examples: Trump’s political agenda doesn’t stop at politics, I wrote in an edition of my economics-focused newsletter in September. His economic agenda, I wrote, “begins to approach what some scholars call authoritarian capitalism.” In such a system, state institutions are reduced to serving the governing elite’s interests.
A Times editorial in October made the same point: “Right-wing populists often win elections by promising pro-business policies that will unleash economic growth. Once in office, however, they don’t just fiddle with the knobs; they break the machinery.”
The columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote in August that Trump was openly expressing “sympathy with plutocrats over unions.” That hasn’t earned him widespread support from corporate America, though, the guest essayist Jeffrey Sonnenfeld wrote in June. He wrote that chief executive officers worry that Trump will jack up tariffs and interfere in the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy.
In a July guest essay, Rebecca Patterson added “unfunded tax cuts” to the list of Trumpian policies that she said “would probably raise borrowing costs for businesses, households and the government,” which in turn “would mean everyone would have less money to spend.”
Inflation inflamed many voters against the Democrats. But Trump’s policies — especially high tariffs, mass deportation and meddling in monetary policy — would probably make inflation higher, not lower. The headline on an edition of the Ezra Klein Show podcast in June said it all: “Trump’s Bold Vision for America: Higher Prices!”
