Trump’s addled policies make everything more expensive, not more affordable

This week Trump continued his affordability tour, bragging about how his policies are bringing down prices. Not true. In fact prices in December were up 2.7 percent over last year, with food prices up 3.1 percent.

In his piece on Tuesday, Robert Reich points out the fallacies in Trump’s policies that doom them to failure.

1. Trump: Americans aren’t paying for his tariffs. - Of course they are! The cost increase is passed on to the consumer by the companies that import the goods.

2. Trump: Deregulation is good. - No it’s not. Trump’s overriding goal is to boost share prices, and deregulation does that. But that only benefits the richest 10 percent of Americans who hold 90 percent of the value of shares in the U.S. The rest of us get to pay more as the biggest corporations buy up their competitors and take control of entire industries. Then they can set any prices they want.

3. Trump: Unions are bad. - Nope. Collective action is the only tool workers have to bargain for better wages and benefits, so they can afford more products, including the ones they are making. Trump’s given free rein to corporate union-busting which increases share prices in the short term, but shrinks the purchasing power of ordinary Americans long term.

See Reich’s discussion of seven additional policies that are “ass-backward” (as he puts it) in making this country affordable.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trumps-ass-backwards-affordability