By Michael Woyton
How many Nobel Prize-winning economists can dance on the letterhead of an endorsement? Turns out, the answer is 23.
In a joint letter released Wednesday, the prize-winning economists added their endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president over her rival, the former president and convicted felon Donald Trump.
The 23 economists, led by Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel Prize winner for market economics research, said the former president’s economic agenda would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality,” CNBC reported.
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Trump’s agenda includes hardline tariff proposals and aggressive tax cuts, the financial network explained.
On “Morning Joe” Thursday, economic analyst Steve Rattner discussed the economic plans of Harris and Trump, showing where the latter’s would have more dire effects.
Watch the video below:
Rattner found that a survey of economists preferred Harris’s plans for a $6,000 tax credit for newborns, raising the corporate tax rate, capping insulin prices and out-of-pocket prescription drugs costs and more over Trump’s 20 percent universal tariff, making his tax cuts permanent and eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits.
His survey showed, interestingly, that there was zero support for Trump’s 20 percent tariff scheme.
Rattner said the economists were asked in the survey how Trump’s plan would affect Americans as opposed to what Harris was proposing.
Trump’s policies, the economists said, would cut the GDP by 8.9 percent, mostly due to his threatened mass deportation of immigrants, which would decimate the workforce.
Rattner explained that the decrease was roughly twice the amount that the GDP went down during the financial crisis. He said the country would be looking at something between a recession and a depression as a result.
Harris’s policies had virtually no effect on either the GDP or inflation, he said.
There is much more that Rattner covered with his charts, and it is well worth your time watching it because he explains it so well.
Trump’s plan to eliminate taxes on Social Security would also have a devastating effect on the solvency of the safety net, leading the Social Security trust fund to run out of money in 2031 rather than 2034 as currently projected.
Rattner called Trump’s SS tax elimination one of the more cynical ideas the former president has come up with because there would be a huge cost to other taxpayers to make up for the losses.
All combined, the economists said Harris’s policies would add only about $500 billion to the nation’s debt, while Trump’s would add more than $3 trillion dollars to the debt.
“So the party that’s supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility turns out to be the party of fiscal irresponsibility,” Rattner said. “Again, perhaps voters are starting to figure that out.”
Lead art: Screen grab from Morning Joe/MSNBC
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