LETTER: The rich get richer under Trump

President Donald Trump’s claims that his “beautiful” tariffs will lower income taxes for working-class Americans reeks of the snake oil he’s been selling his whole life (“Trump says tariffs will cut income taxes,” April 28 Review-Journal). Tariffs are taxes that we will all pay. The big difference is that the wealthy have to spend a tiny fraction of their incomes to meet their cost of living while the rest of us spend most of ours. That means tariffs won’t bite the rich nearly as badly as they will the rest of us.

Tariffs have little to do with bringing manufacturing back to America, but are being put in place by Mr. Trump and his billionaire courtiers to further shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the rest of us. In 1981 we were told that, if the rich were given big tax breaks, the rest of us would benefit. It turns out that “trickle-down economics” should have been called “tinkle-on” economics. The rich got richer, the rest of us got … well, you can guess what the rest of us got.

The argument that the wealthy needed big tax breaks back then to help investors stimulate a flailing economy and compensate for the high interest rates the Federal Reserve was using to crack runaway inflation fit the conditions of the early 1980s better than it does now. Our economy recovered nicely following the COVID shock, and inflation has been dropping — until Mr. Trump got into office.

It is Mr. Trump’s policies, especially his tariffs, that threaten to bankrupt America’s workers. Trust, however, that none of his rich friends will be harmed in the making of those tariffs.