Based entirely on his profound illiteracy about trade balances (explained Tuesday and Wednesday), President Trump has unilaterally imposed one of the largest tax increases in American history.
Rather than engage in lengthy analysis, all of which would repeat what I’ve already written (and said), let’s simply look at six visuals.
We’ll start with the most important takeaway, which is that Trump’s tax increase is going to pummel families.
This is rather ironic since many households supported Trump because they were angry that their inflation-adjusted incomes dropped under Biden.
Now Trump is throwing them under the bus.
Next, financial markets also reacted very negatively, as reported by Bloomberg.
Trump claimed he would be imposing reciprocal tariffs.
But if that was the case, he would have lowered trade taxes on the nearly 70 nations that have better policy than the United States according to the Heritage Foundation.
By the way, it’s very sad that the Heritage Foundation has embraced Trump’s big tax increase. Makes me wonder if the organization will even bother issuing another edition of the Index of Economic Freedom?
Our fourth visual shows that Trump is being even worse than Herbert Hoover.
And if that isn’t bad enough, our next visual shows how bad Trump’s tax increase is compared to trade taxes in America’s major trading partners.
I’ll close with some good news.
Trump’s masochistic trade policy is overwhelming rejected by the American people.
But this chart is not good news for everyone.
It is very bad news for Congressional Republicans, who doubtlessly will suffer a big defeat in the 2026 mid-term elections (much as Democrats got spanked in 2010 after the big tax increases in Obamacare).
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Image credit: Gage Skidmore | CC BY-SA 2.0.
