Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.(Photos: Seth Wenig-Pool/Getty Images; Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)
Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign on Friday released a report with findings from independent analysts that suggest former President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs would increase household costs for U.S. families, including in key swing states like Pennsylvania.
Trump, the GOP nominee for president, is running on a platform that includes across-the-board tariffs of up to 20% on imported goods, and at a rate of 60% on imports from China. On Thursday in Detroit, he said he would seek to slap tariffs as high as 200% on cars imported from Mexico if he wins another term.
According to five separate analyses of Trump’s tariff plans from organizations across the political spectrum, Trump’s tariff proposals, which the report refers to as a “Trump sales tax,” would increase the for U.S. households.
The average of the five studies’ figures —which were conducted separately by the Center for American Progress, the Tax Foundation, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, the American Action Forum and the Peterson Institute for International Economics — found they would add $3,954 to household costs.
In Pennsylvania, according to the Harris campaign’s report, the Trump economic plan to put tariffs on imported goods would affect 5.3 million households.
In contrast, the Harris campaign said, Harris’ economic proposals would provide $6,000 for a newborn child tax credit for an estimated 125,000 Pennsylvania families, and 697,000 Pennsylvania workers would receive an expanded earned income tax credit of up to $1,500.
An analysis by the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation found Harris’ proposals to expand the child tax credit would cost about $1.6 trillion over 10 years, during which time it estimated Harris’ proposals overall would reduce wages by 1.2% and employment by about 786,000 full-time equivalent jobs. But the Tax Foundation also found that Trump’s tariff plan and the anticipated retaliation from foreign governments would cost the U.S. 1.4 million jobs.
The Tax Foundation wrote in its analysis that Harris’ “tax policies would raise top tax rates on corporate and individual income to among the highest in the developed world,” which the report’s authors suggest would slow economic growth and “reduce competitiveness.”
But Harris’ plan to generate revenue via taxes on wealthy individuals — those making more than $400,000 a year — and corporations would bring in $4.3 trillion in revenue, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found.
The Trump campaign did not immediately reply to a request for comment Friday. On the campaign’s website, the RNC’s 2024 policy platform document explains the tariffs as an effort to “rebalance our trade deficit” which it says has grown to “over $1 trillion” a year.
“Republicans will support baseline Tariffs on Foreign-made goods, pass the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, and respond to unfair Trading practices. As Tariffs on Foreign Producers go up, Taxes on American Workers, Families, and Businesses can come down,” the section reads.
A description of the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act on the campaign’s website says “Matching the tariff practices of our foreign rivals will help protect American jobs, end our reliance on foreign competitors, and generate hundreds of billions of dollars in government revenue from foreign companies.”