[ad_1]
With the stock market officially in correction territory and polls turning against Team Trump’s handling of the economy, it’s plainly time for President Donald Trump to take a breather on the daily tariff tit-for-tat.
Give the rest of your economic agenda a chance to start kicking in first, sir.
Get energy prices headed down, job-killing regulations into repeal and tax cuts moving along before handing out harder-to-absorb shocks.
Trump himself admits tariffs trigger short-term pain, even if they yield long-term benefits later.
But it’ll take a while for those benefits to show, and this is the wrong time for this pain.
The Biden crew left the economy in very dicey shape, with prices up a whopping 21% over four years and inflation still high when Trump took over.
Meanwhile, labor-force growth has weakened and the Federal Reserve now estimates the economy will shrink 2.8% (on an annualized basis) in this quarter.
And Trump’s 2017 tax cuts expire this year — meaning we all get slammed unless Congress acts, and the House and Senate are very publicly still getting their act together on this front.
Plus, all the tariff talk — Trump’s threats and reversals; the retaliations being slung back and forth between nations — fuel an air of chaos, the worst climate for boosting economic optimism no matter how pro-growth the president’s overall plans are.
Polls show American voters are nervous: Reuters/Ipsos found 57% (including nearly a third of Republicans) view Trump’s actions as “too erratic,” with just 32% disagreeing.
Quinnipiac has approval-disapproval of the president’s economic moves at 41%-54%, sharply worse than last month’s 44%-48%.
Nobody gets why he seems so mad at . . . Canada.
Yes, the tariffs are a valuable tool for coaxing nations on key issues and reshaping the US economy to better serve working people’s needs — down the road.
But average Americans want some payoff now.
And if Republican rule in Washington isn’t paying off in solid economic growth by the end of this year, the GOP’s an excellent bet to lose control of the House in the 2026 midterms.
Trump’s leadership is plainly needed to get Congress moving fast on renewing the 2017 cuts (plus scrapping at least some taxes on Social Security, overtime pay and tips, as he’s promised).
And voters will get it: They back the 2017 savings by 64% to 21%, McLaughlin & Associates found last month.
That includes even a majority of Democrats (53%) and Independents (55%).
Similar percentages want those cuts made permanent.
To be clear, we back some tariff changes to level the playing field.
But the recent whirlwind is out of season.
It’s time to slow it down.
[ad_2]
Source link
