ANOTHER OPINION: Trump's promises of tax cuts and deregulation.

Even after all the alarming antics former president Donald Trump has engaged in over the past decade, it was jarring to learn what he said to about two dozen oil company executives at an April 11 dinner in his Palm Beach, Fla., mansion, Mar-a-Lago.

As The Post reported, Mr. Trump responded to one executive’s complaint about the burdensome regulations the industry faces under PresidentBiden, despite spending $400 million on lobbying against them. He told them they should instead donate $1 billion to his presidential election campaign, in return for which they would get lighter regulation and lower taxes — a much better “deal.”

TO BE SURE, it’s impossible to know whether this was a serious quid pro quo or just another case of the former president’s off-the-cuff bombast. Perhaps we’ll learn more if an inquiry by House Democrats gains traction. The troubling appearance, so consistent with Mr. Trump’s generally unprincipled approach to politics and government, is evident, though.

2024: Yellen says ‘tax cuts for those at the top’ and deregulation don’t deliver broad-based prosperity. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Thursday criticized some economic policies backed by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his allies, as she delivered a speech at an Economic Club of New York event. “Traditional supply-side economics wrongly assumes that policies such as tax cuts for those at the top and deregulation will fuel growth and prosperity for the nation at large,”

Mr. Trump’s placing of a “for sale” sign on his administration’s tax and regulatory policy — however seriously — raises the question of how U.S. business leaders generally view the upcoming election. The oil and gas industry is a special case, since it is unusually dependent on federal environmental policy and many industry leaders are known for ultraconservative politics. Still, the CEOs at Mar-a-Lago represented part of a broader private sector that will soon face the same choice that all voters do: Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden.

This, despite the fact that traditional Republican private sector leaders tried to promote alternatives to Mr. Trump, such as former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, in the GOP primaries. They face this choice at a time when the two parties are no longer so clearly distinguishable on some key economic policies, largely because Mr. Trump has injected a note of populist protectionism into what was once a free-market Republican ideology.

Meanwhile, the private sector itself is less coherent and its collective self-interest less clearly defined. Entrepreneurial billionaires such as Elon Musk, who recently hosted an “anti-Biden” dinner party for other executives and investors, set their own agendas.

Business advocates have understandable grievances with Mr. Biden. Not only has he kept the vast majority of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, but he has also added more. His regulatory and antitrust push has also gone too far at times, especially in his ban on liquefied natural gas exports. Still, the president has overseen strong macroeconomic performance.

Despite inflationary challenges, the United States has recovered from the pandemic much more robustly than other leading economies. The stock market is at record levels. Corporate profits hit an all-time high in 2022 under Mr. Biden and have remained elevated. Then there’s the fact Mr. Biden has shepherded bipartisan legislation that spends billions to resurrect U.S. manufacturing and repair the nation’s infrastructure.

And, yes, U.S. oil production also soared to a record, even if the industry doesn’t give him credit — and even if the president, deferring to environmentalists in his coalition, is reluctant to take any.

There is little guarantee a second Trump term would be a net benefit for the private sector in terms of policy. His first term resulted in the largest corporate tax cut in U.S. history and many regulatory rollbacks, to be sure.

But he’s openly talking about a 10 percent tariff on all imports — “a ring around the country,” as he puts it, which would be inflationary and chaotic. He is clear that he wants to not only restrict immigration but also deport millions of people, a recipe for social conflict and scarcer labor. Mr. Trump’s followers seem interested in trimming the Federal Reserve’s political independence.

MORE FUNDAMENTALLY, another four years of Mr. Trump would be hard to square with business’s usual preference for social and political stability, at home and abroad. His denigration of institutions such as NATO harmed U.S. standing in the world and sowed uncertainty about Asian and European security. His hostile words about Muslims and immigrants, along with occasional shots at iconic American brands, fueled culture wars. And all of that was before the violent disaster on Jan. 6, 2021. Like other Americans, many executives probably hoped Mr. Trump would give way to a more conventional Republican nominee in 2024.

That has not happened. He’s running neck and neck with Mr. Biden even as his language and behavior get more extreme. OF THE MANY differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, perhaps the easiest to quantify has to do with tax policy. Mr Biden has long pledged to raise taxes on both the wealthy and companies. Mr Trump’s main legislative achievement from his presidency was a tax-cut package in 2017.

The Trump government accumulated $7.8 trillion of gross federal debt while Trump was in office..

https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/taxes/unequal-burden/how-four-decades-of-tax-cuts-fueled-inequality/

Also in 2017: Trump’s Plan for 32,000 Nukes Would Bankrupt America..

After giving America's billionaires the largest tax cut in American history who's going to pay for another 30 000 nukes or pay for their ongoing maintenance decade after decade?

“We now know why Tillerson called Trump a moron.”

Donald Trump told senior administration officials he wanted a nearly tenfold increase in the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, according to NBC News. Trump reportedly called for restoring America's atomic stockpile —currently numbering around 4,000 warheads—to its Cold War peak of 32,000 warheads.

The comments appear more grounded in Trump’s almost childlike fascination with military hardware — he has repeatedly requested a military parade in his honor in Washington.

The White House has denied Trump said any such thing and Trump in a tweet insisted that NBC’s report was “pure fiction.” In any event, for the United States to grow its nuclear arsenal by nearly 30,000 warheads would be illegal, risky, complicated and, ultimately, an unprecedented waste of money.

“It would cost approximately eleventy bazillion dollars,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told The Daily Beast.

Successive presidential administrations since the late 1960s have worked hard to shrink the nuclear arsenal. A series of international treaties starting with the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty have required the United States, Russia and other atomic powers to halt the spread of nuclear weaponry while also limiting live tests of nuclear warheads and, perhaps most importantly, steadily reducing the numbers of nukes from the early 1960s peak.

Experts agree that constraining and cutting nukes makes the world safer and more stable by preventing a runaway arms race. Conversely, adding nukes introduces uncertainty and risk. “Essentially, global stability would be completely overturned” under Trump’s build-up, Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., told The Daily Beast.

Adding 30,000 nukes “would violate major international treaties, including our [Non-Proliferation Treaty] commitments, almost certainly force us to resume nuclear testing again and signal to the rest of the world that nuclear weapons are important,” Geoffrey Wilson, a nuclear expert with Ploughshares Fund, a peace-advocacy group in San Francisco, told The Daily Beast.

Countries could decide that if they wanted to deter the United States, “they better build or seriously revitalize their own nuclear weapons programs,” Wilson added.

Even if a huge nuclear expansion weren’t geopolitically “crazy” —to borrow Wilson’s succinct assessment—it would certainly be prohibitively expensive, ultimately costing perhaps tens of trillions of dollars.

“Obama committed to replacing the existing nuclear force on an almost one-to-one basis,” Lewis pointed out. “We estimate that will cost a trillion dollars over 30 years to keep what we have and build replacements. To increase it tenfold would require massive infrastructure investments sustained over many decades.”

It’s obvious Trump didn't think through the cost and complexity of a major atomic expansion. There’s more to an effective nuclear deterrent than just piles of warheads. The Pentagon also builds and maintains rockets, bombers and submarines to actually deliver the warheads to their targets during a potentially world-ending nuclear war.

“What [Trump] reacted to apparently was the number of warheads in the [Defense Department] stockpile,” Kristensen said. “But those warheads are linked to specific delivery platforms that only have so many spaces.” Add tens of thousands of nukes, and you have to add thousands of rockets, bombers and submarines. “If he wanted to significantly increase the stockpile size, he would either end up with a lot of nuclear warheads he couldn’t do anything with or he would have to pay for a lot of new missiles and bombers so the extra warheads would actually be used,” Kristensen pointed out.

A single new B-21 nuclear-capable stealth bomber costs around $600 million. The Air Force hopes to buy around 100 of them. Now imagine buying thousands of them, plus the subs and rockets and all the extra warheads themselves—and doing as major treaties collapse and countries rush to acquire hundreds or thousands more nukes of their own.

“That’s why his remark is so moronic,” Kristensen said. “It’s not related to the real world.”

The United States plans to spend up to $1.5 trillion over 30 years to overhaul its nuclear arsenal by rebuilding each leg of the nuclear triad and its accompanying infrastructure. The plans include, but are not limited to, a new class of ballistic missile submarines, a new set of silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, a new nuclear cruise missile, a modified gravity bomb, a new stealthy long-range strike bomber, and accompanying warheads (with modified or new warhead pits) for each delivery system.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to spend $16.5 billion to maintain and update the U.S. nuclear arsenal in fiscal year 2023. This money is specifically designated for weapons activities, including modifications and life extension programs for nuclear warheads.

The most recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects the cost of modernization to be $188 billion through 2030.

https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/U.S.-Nuclear-Weapons-Modernization-Costs-Constraints-Fact-Sheet-v-May-2023.pdf