Donald Trump’s tariff plan won’t lower inflation, Kamala Harris’ answer was worse | Opinion

Ask Donald Trump a question and you get a weird answer. Sometimes it is about people eating cats. Sometimes he gives you a direct answer like he did the other day when he replied to a question about inflation with his plan to put a tariff on foreign food that would do the opposite of what Trump claimed. In reality, it would raise prices.

Ask Kamala Harris a question, as a Philadelphia reporter did recently and often what you get is completely irrelevant. The reporter asked her for a few “specific” ideas for what she’d do to bring down prices.

Here’s what she talked about for 90 seconds:

• Growing up a middle-class kid
• Having a sister
• Being raised by her mom who worked hard
• Getting a house when she was a teen
• Living in a community with construction workers
• Being proud of your lawn
• People deserving dignity
• Americans having a beautiful character
• People having ambitions, aspirations & dreams
• No all people have fuel for ambitions, aspirations & dreams
• Building an opportunity economy
• Needing to invest in ambitions, aspirations & dreams
• Having a strong work ethic

Phew … and then she gets to her plan to reverse a few years of high inflation – giving a tax break to people who start small businesses, which will affect inflation exactly bupkiss.

There’s a reason politicians – normal and abnormal alike – give lame or counterproductive answers when asked what they will do to reverse inflation. They don’t think you’ll like the truth.

The truth is they can’t reverse price hikes and if they did, it would be a generation-defining disaster like the Great Depression.

Here’s why: If prices went down, after a while people would notice prices going down just like they notice them going up. Then one after another will realize something simple: If I buy a bunch of bananas today, I will pay more than I will next week. So they buy fewer bananas. People around the country start delaying purchases big and small from haircuts to automobiles. Any purchase that can be delayed, will be delayed. Millions of small decisions will roll up into one great big drop in demand.

Businesses will notice too and delay their investments and hiring. Why hire someone today for $50,000 a year when you can wait a few months and pay them $45,000? Demand drops even further.

Investors notice what’s going on and pull back on investing in the stock market where returns are driven by growth. The stock market starts going down as the value of everything from lawn-mowing services to iPads.

Retailers and marketers notice that they have a glut of stuff to sell that no one is buying, so they cut prices to get people in the door. That starts the cycle over again. Until the whole economy comes to a screeching halt.

Lowering prices across the whole economy is more likely to herald a disaster than to usher in nirvana. In a healthy economy prices overall always go up because that signals to business and consumers alike to spend and invest today because prices will go up later.

You might be saying to yourself that you’ve seen prices go down all the time and they do for a few things that are commodities like gas and wheat, but never for most things you buy. Take computing power, which has been declining in price for decades.

Businesses have made heroic efforts to turn that decline into growth. As a result, there is now a computer in so many things that my mother-in-law can’t program her overcomplicated oven. Now we all carry a computer in our back pocket and when we buy a desktop, it has much more power for about the same price as one a few years old.

Politicians don’t want to tell you the truth. Inflation is never going to reverse itself or go away because the modern world needs it as much as the air we breathe.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com

This story was originally published September 20, 2024 at 8:21 AM with the headline "Donald Trump’s tariff plan won’t lower inflation, Kamala Harris’ answer was worse | Opinion."