The Trump Administration is Building a Fiscal House of Cards

President Donald Trump’s fixation on tariffs as a solution for just about everything, including the deficit, has led him to run roughshod over the law and norms of international trade.

It started off so well. In the early days of the Trump administration, Treasury Secretary Bessent laid out two important goals: to reduce the deficit by half while increasing the annual rate of GDP growth to 3 percent. Indeed, the two goals support each other—not something commonly understood among policymakers. But rather than getting our fiscal house in order, the actual policies put forward look like a fiscal house of cards.

Perhaps realizing how difficult it is to effectively boost the economy’s underlying growth rate by about 50 percent, the administration has leaned more heavily into raising taxes to reduce the deficit. Not traditional taxes on income, mind you—those have been cut as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA). Instead, the administration has floated or implemented a variety of odd and dangerous ideas for raising revenue that are doomed to fail.