Trump Pushes Back on Harris Small Business Plan

By Matthew Medsger
Boston Herald
(TNS)

Just a day after Vice President Kamala Harris announced her plan for a tenfold increase to the start-up tax credit, former President Donald Trump said a second term would allow him to decrease regulations by just as much.

Trump, in an afternoon address to the Economic Club of New York, said that for every new regulation that comes across his desk, he’ll get rid of 10 others.

“We will eliminate a minimum of 10 old regulations for every new regulation. We’ll be able to do that quite easily, actually,” Trump said Thursday.

Trump addressed the group less than 24 hours after Harris announced that, under a Harris-Walz administration, the government would up the start-up tax credit from $5,000 to $50,000 and provide low or no-cost loans.

According to Harris, it is lack of access to capital that prevents many Americans from starting a small business, not lack of desire or talent. She said she hopes to see 25 million new small business applications in her first term.

Trump responded Thursday afternoon just hours before his address in New York, using his Truth Social media platform to declare that Harris’ plan would “destroy our small business economy.”

In a press call held ahead of Trump’s speech, campaign senior advisory Brian Hughes said Harris is trying to distract from her and President Joe Biden’s economic record.

Hughes said Harris “wants to hide from her four years of failure and misrepresent her record of skyrocketing inflation, driving up interest rates, recklessly spending and proposing tax hikes on middle-class families.”

It won’t work, he said.

“Voters know that she owns the economic disasters of the past four years. Not only does Harris co-own the failed Biden agenda as vice president, but her actions have led directly to higher costs for America’s families,” he said.

Harris was the tie breaking vote cast to authorize the Inflation Reduction Act, which “further spiked inflation,” Hughes said. She’s proposing tax hikes that would “take us back to levels not seen since 1978.”

“In my opinion, like bell-bottoms and the fashion of the 70s, we should reject these failed ideas,” he said.

According to Harris’ campaign, Trump’s idea of a good environment for business is one in which the very wealthy do well, not one that supports the middle class.

“While Vice President Harris’ proposal will make it easier to start and grow a business, Donald Trump’s plans will cut off federal programs that give support to small businesses, and he will give billionaires massive tax cuts and cut corporate taxes by over a trillion dollars, even as they pull in record profits,” they said in a release.

Trump told the Economic Club that, if elected, he will work to drive down the cost of interest rates and therefore lower the cost of homeownership. Trump also said he would open tracts of federal land to housing construction, which he said would be “ultra low tax, and ultra low regulation.”

“One of the great really small business job creation programs—it will be—of all time. We’re going to open up our country to building homes inexpensively so young people and other people can buy homes,” he said.

This plan, he said, would involve “millions of Americans” setting up “these safe and affordable communities, reviving the frontier spirit and really, as I said, reviving the American dream.”

Trump also suggested that if elected he will form a government commission tasked with auditing the federal government and finding efficiencies.

“At the suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement—that’s nice, he’s a smart guy, he knows what he’s doing. He knows what he’s doing! Very much appreciated—I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms. We need to do it,” he said.

According to the latest data, the U.S. economy is doing better than all other industrialized nations when it comes to recovering from the economic downturn seen during the pandemic, which reached its height at the end of Trump’s term.

Unemployment in the U.S. has been at or stayed near a record low for much of Biden’s presidency (though it has risen in recent months). Wage growth is up, and the economy has recovered more jobs than it lost to the pandemic, and inflation has cooled enough that the federal reserve is considering an interest rate cut.

None of that, however, has translated to the average-American wallet, Trump said Thursday. Many consumers have maxed their credit cards and can’t afford housing, he said.

“This election will decide if we reward Kamala Harris with four more years of crime, economic calamity, and international humiliation — or if we change that direction and build the greatest economy in the history of the world,” Trump said.

Trump and Harris are scheduled to meet for their first head-to-head debate next week, on Sept. 10, which will be hosted and moderated by ABC.

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