No matter what former President Donald Trump says, almost all economists see tariffs — charges on imported goods that must be paid for them to enter the country — as a tax, usually paid by the consumer .
That hasn’t stopped Trump from saying it is instead paid by the countries producing the goods. “It’s a tax on a country that’s ripping us off and stealing our jobs,” Trump said Saturday at a campaign rally at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
A day later, his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, was asked how she would pay for a raft of proposals she had made only days before that one budget group estimated would cost about $1.7 trillion over 10 years.
Speaking about two of her proposals, more generous child and earned income tax credits and payments to make housing more affordable, she insisted that the return on investment would mean it ultimately paid for itself.
“When you are strengthening neighborhoods, strengthening communities and in particular the economies of those communities and investing in a broad-based economy, everybody benefits and it pays for itself in that way,” Harris told reporters .
Admittedly, questions about the long-run value of the tax credits and trying to stir the housing market with government-subsidized down payments have no clear-cut answer. But the kind of accounting talked about by Harris — in which the value of the investment is its own return — is not recognized on Capitol Hill as a legit way to offset costs.
The episodes highlighted what many economists and Washington wonks fear is a further slide toward the ascendance of vibes-based campaigns where nitty-gritty, number-laden policy debate is irrelevant, at least in terms of economics.
“I’m old enough to remember when candidates were actually on the campaign trail mostly talking about their policies and we would be having a substantive kind of debate about these policies. There’s none of that happening right now,” said Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center.
Harris’ speech Friday was her first big foray into economic policy since becoming the party nominee. Ordinarily, campaigns can spend months drawing up their sets of policies and internally weighing which to advocate for publicly, but Harris has had only weeks to pull together ideas, many of which echo existing Biden proposals.
Trump attempted twice to talk about the economy in mid-August, once at an Aug. 15 news conference at his New Jersey club and at a speech the day before. Both tries, though, were marred by Trump wandering off topic. Still, Trump has consistently said he wants to extend and expand the 2017 tax cuts, boost energy exploration and spend more on the military.
Marc Goldwein, senior vice president for the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the group that pegged Harris’ first bunch of policies as costing $1.7 trillion , was less dour than de Rugy but admitted the early stages of the campaigns have not been promising.
“My best answer right now is it’s late,” he said. “There is less overall substance, I think that’s true. But I’m not sure that by the end there will be less overall substance, because we’ve probably seen more substance in the last month than we did in the entirety of the campaign until that point.”
While it’s true there have been more policy proposals touting what candidates want to do, they have often been light on how they would do those things — notably including how they would be paid for, in an election where the economy is already a focal point. The Harris campaign, though, has provided more detail than Trump’s.
For example, Harris moved quickly Monday to provide a concrete pay-for for last week’s proposals by saying she supported raising the corporate income tax to 28% , and she has been reported to support the revenue-raising proposals in President Joe Biden’s latest budget .
But when candidates have not been light on details, they have been touting ideas many economists would say are at best minimally helpful and at worst simply pandering.
The idea of making tipped income exempt from income taxes has been pushed on both sides this election cycle, starting with Trump as he courted service industry workers in the swing state of Nevada. But he has provided no way to pay for it. The CRFB estimated his idea would cost between $150 billion to $200 billion over 10 years .
Harris then adopted the idea, though she would narrow it somewhat to hospitality workers only. Her changes would shave the cost of it by about $50 billion over 10 years , according to Goldwein’s group.
Neither the Trump or Harris campaigns returned requests for comment on their policy details across the board .
The problem, economists say, is “no tax on tips,” as Trump dubbed it, would probably not help many of the food servers that voters think of when they hear the idea.
“I don’t think it will change things in any meaningful way, in large part because many of the people who get tips don’t pay taxes . They don’t make enough money to pay [income] taxes,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s Analytics, an economic research and financial modeling organization.
Harris also proposed a $6,000 child tax credit for newborns younger than 1, after GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance floated a $5,000 credit .
Zandi, who was an economic adviser for the 2008 presidential campaign of GOP candidate John McCain, said those kinds of moves did not worry him.
“It’s more telling the voter where their intentions lie and how they’re thinking about the world and how they think about equity,” he said. “That’s just standard operating procedure.”
Trump’s idea to exempt Social Security payments from income taxes is also arguably a pander with potentially unexpected side effects: The CRFB estimated removing that income stream, estimated to be $1.6 trillion to $1.8 trillion , from the national budget would hasten the date by which Social Security could not pay out full benefits by more than one year. The failure of the part of Medicare that pays for hospital, nursing home and hospice care would also be moved up by six years.
Despite this, Trump has also said he will not cut benefits or raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare.
According to Dean Baker, senior economist with the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, the plan would not only speed up the insolvency of the two programs, it would also be a windfall for rich retirees, such as people who continue to work after taking Social Security.
A retiree with the maximum annual Social Security payout, in the top tax bracket, could save an extra $20,000 annually from the exemption, he said.
“This is like an incredibly regressive tax cut,” he said.
One thing that united the economists, no matter their ideological leanings, was the view that Trump was wrong when he said Americans would not be affected by his proposed tariff plan , which would include a 10% tariff on most imported goods and higher tariffs for some countries.
“Economists have done plenty of research on it and in most cases, not all cases obviously but most cases, the vast majority is paid in the importing country. The idea that China paid tariffs, that’s just nonsense,” Baker said.
De Rugy agreed, citing research on the tariffs Trump imposed on Chinese goods in his administration.
“There’s been study after study after the China tariffs and most of them — I shouldn’t say all but really most of them — have concluded that the vast majority of the burden of the tariffs was shouldered by domestic consumers [in the U.S.],” she said.
“The evidence is pretty clear that, by and large, the tariff is effectively borne by the buyer, not the seller,” Goldwein said.
The lesson, Goldwein said, is voters should be skeptical, especially if a candidate of either party says something will pay for itself. Very few policies, he said, actually do that.
Zandi and Baker said it was not right to compare Harris’ campaign with Trump’s in its approach to showing its policy “homework” to voters. Both felt Harris’ approach was more substantive, even if some details had not been filled in yet.
If Harris did indeed support all of the revenue raisers in Biden’s last budget, it would mean she had a few trillion dollars of deficit reduction to use for her own spending and tax ideas, Zandi said.
But Zandi also said the days of presidential campaigns keeping a detailed ledger of what they promised and how they might pay for it may have actually died some time ago.
“President Trump has changed the level of transparency around economic policy quite significantly,” he said. Going back to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, he said, candidates provided great detail about their plans.
“With President Trump, that all came to an end.”
De Rugy echoed Zandi’s view.
“The last maybe eight years or the last three [presidential] campaigns have not been about policy, it seems to me,” de Rugy said. Trump, by focusing on things like deporting undocumented immigrants and other hot-button issues, broke the system to some extent, she said.
“I think he broke a lot of norms,” she said.
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