The Scary Truth Behind Donald Trump's Promises To Workers

This article is part of HuffPost’s biweekly politics newsletter. JD Vance, the Ohio senator Trump tapped to be his running mate, made this abundantly clear in a Wednesday acceptance speech that railed against “Wall Street barons” and “America’s ruling class in Washington,” in defense of “the working man.” This is not the sort of rhetoric you would have heard at previous GOP conventions. One particularly ominous idea is Trump’s suggestion that he could just junk the income tax altogether and rely on tariff revenue to replace it. Trump’s agenda, the report’s authors concluded, would “entail sharply regressive tax policy changes, shifting tax burdens away from the well-off and toward lower-income members of society while harming US workers and industries.” A Closer Look At Trump’s Record Economists can be wrong, of course, and distrust for academic experts is as much a part of Trumpism as contempt for corporate elites. But, as Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center noted recently, most “make so little income that they already pay little or no income tax.” Oh, and the proposal could be a boon for hedge fund managers and other members of the country club crowd, depending on proposal details, because of opportunities it’d create to game the tax system.