Former President Donald Trump was quick to mention the name of his predecessor Ronald Reagan in Presidential debate on Thursday against President Joe Biden.
Trump wasted no time in bringing up Reagan, whom almost all old-school Republicans and others love, to bolster his arguments on abortion. The more significant reference to “Morning in America” was the very brief and not-so-surprising presentation of the former president’s economic agenda.
The economy, and more importantly, inflationwas the first topic that CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash addressed at the debate. In the opening lines of the duel, Trump repeatedly hammered President Joe Biden’s Business and urged viewers to remember his years in office before the pandemic and bring him back into office.
Inflation and tax cuts
Trump repeatedly referred to his first term as “the best economy in the history of our country” and recalled low inflation, but that was before the pandemic. Trump said his administration spent the money necessary to keep the economy from sliding into another recession, recalling the Great Depression.
Biden urged the one-sided nature of the his tax cuts of 2017which provided huge savings for the wealthiest part of the population, Trump responded, after suggesting that this was the only thing Biden had said correctly so far: “I also gave you the biggest regulatory cuts in history, that’s why we have the jobs.”
Biden, on the other hand, stressed that Trump had left him an economy in “free fall” before he got it back on track – which Trump, of course, countered by saying that Biden had inherited almost no inflation. (Americans keep quoting inflation as the Top Edition in front of the country. Inflation concerns have also recently caused entrepreneurs’ optimism to skyrocket. Low point in a decade.)
Trump’s agenda for a second term is very similar to that of his first: further tax cuts, comprehensive deregulation and increased energy production. During his first term, the Trump formula, while over 8 trillion dollars The US debt ultimately led to low unemployment and decent wage growth, as well as the low inflation that the US had experienced since the 1990s. In the closing moments of the debate, Trump again appealed to Americans’ wallets and portrayed Biden as a tax-raising bureaucrat.
“He wants to raise your taxes fourfold. He wants to raise everyone’s taxes fourfold,” Trump said, adding: “When we cut taxes, all these companies brought money back into our country,” said another exaggeration.
Ronald Reagan: The original MAGA
Unlike Bidenomics, which relies on a series of levers to “build the economy from the bottom up,” Trump’s argument may benefit from its radical simplicity. The appeal for tax cuts taps into Americans’ general aversion to taxes and bureaucracy, all traits that Reagan, the original celebrity president, exploited brilliantly during his two terms in office. By mentioning Reagan by name, the man who coined “Make America Great Again” as a slogan, Trump not only softens the MAGA slogan but also joins one of America’s most popular presidents in the history.
Reagan, who came into office shortly after the crippling inflation, unleashed the Trickle-down economy Agenda that dominated Republicans for the next three decades and destroyed the New Deal framework that had shaped much of the 20th century. Regan continued the biggest tax cuts in U.S. history: It simultaneously boosted economic growth, accelerated the rise of inequality, and put the nation on a path to ever-larger peacetime deficits.
In her closing remarks, Biden stressed the need for a fair tax system and said he would continue to fight inflation. Trump returned to the wars, saying they would never have happened if he had been president, while again touting his tax cuts and regulatory measures – but if he is re-elected, he will fix everything, Trump said at the end of the debate.