Kathleen Culliton
October 9, 2024
Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump makes a campaign stop at manufacturer FALK Production in Walker, Michigan, U.S. September 27, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Former President Donald Trump's latest campaign pledge is spurring calls of alarm from critics who say the Republican presidential nominee would send the nation back to the economic dark ages.
Trump told rally-goers Wednesday in Pennsylvania that he would implement tariffs that he claimed would bring the U.S. back to prosperity seen at the turn of the 20th Century.
"That was when our country was the richest it ever was," said Trump. "It was never rich like that...we had so much money we didn't know what to do with it."
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Trump promised "pretty stiff tariffs" that he said would flush hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy.
The former president drew a direct correlation to the Gilded Age when affluent businesses earned the name "robber barons" by monopolizing industries and receiving enormous profits.
While proponents argue this was a golden age of capitalism, critics say captains of industry were the pioneers of organized crime, according to Stephen Schneider, Britannica author and criminology professor at Saint Mary's University.
Trump's comments re-ignited an age-old debate Wednesday.
"I've been telling you this--Trump thought our nation was 'great' during the Gilded Age, the Robber Baron years--that's what he wants to bring back," rhetorician Jennifer Mercieca wrote on X.
"Massive wage slavery, factory towns, filthy water & air, no regulations on food or business. His policies only help the ultra rich."
"Tariffs are a tax on all of us," replied Andy Roddick, the former tennis player and major champion.
"Tariffs are a tax on Americans," added political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen. "Everyone in the country would pay more, all because this imbecile doesn’t know basic economics."
Zephyr Teachout, the law professor and Democrat who challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2014, decried Trump's rhetoric — but also the attacks in response.
"Just because Trump is full of tariff nonsense doesn't mean he should make everyone else nonsensical," Teachout wrote. "Tariffs can be good! Biden's new tariffs were more much more strategic than Trumps. They can also be bad! But the more Trump traps Dems into saying tariffs are bad, he wins."
A recent study from the Peterson Institute for International Economics projected Trump's proposed tariffs on foreign goods would damage the American economy by increasing inflation and lowering employment for decades.
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