Trump: Detroit Will Come ‘Roaring Back’

The audience at the Detroit Economic Club may have set the normally staid venue’s record for heckling a speaker during Donald Trump’s major speech on the economy Monday.

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The Republican nominee for president patiently waited out the protesters with each interruption, seemingly determined to not be goaded into an overreaction that would overshadow anything he had to say. At one point, he quipped, “I will say the Bernie Sanders people had far more energy and spirit.”

“All Hillary Clinton has to offer is more of the same — more taxes, more regulations, more bureaucrats, more restrictions on American energy and on American production.”

The audience response to Trump was a metaphor of the campaign at large — rather than engage Trump in a debate of ideas, some of his critics have attempted simply to shut him down. But that tactic did not work Monday. Decrying the high crime and economic malaise of the once-great city in which he was speaking, Trump called Detroit’s decline a “living, breathing example of my opponent’s failed economic agenda.” Trump promised that under his plan the Motor City would be “roaring back.”

That opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, will deliver her own economic vision for the future Thursday.

Trump’s speech hit a number of familiar themes — putting the interests of Americans first on trade and immigration, as well as restoring law and order — but also laid out a much broader and more specific set of ideas. He called for cutting the corporate income tax, currently the highest in the industrialized world at 35 percent, to 15 percent. He also promoted simplifying a tax code that he said forces taxpayers to waste 9 billion hours a year. He proposed collapsing the current seven tax brackets into just three — 12 percent, 25 percent, and 33 percent. He also proposed making average child care expenses fully deductible and eliminating the inheritance tax. Adding a populist touch, he called for eliminating a tax deduction enjoyed by Wall Street billionaires.

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Trump also promised to slash regulations that he said are strangling the U.S. economy. He said he would issue a “temporary moratorium” on new regulations and review existing rules that run 80,000 pages long. He said he would cancel “illegal and overreaching” executive orders.

“It is estimated that current overregulation is costing our economy as much as $2 trillion dollars a year,” he said. “That’s money taken straight out of cities like Detroit.”

Trump depicted Clinton as a status-quo politician beholden to her Wall Street donors whose tax plan would cost Americans $1.3 trillion.

“All Hillary Clinton has to offer is more of the same — more taxes, more regulations, more bureaucrats, more restrictions on American energy and on American production,” he said. “More of that.”

Trump supporters praises the speech as more comprehensive and more detailed than he has been before on economic reform.

“Today, we heard a bold vision from Donald Trump — an outsider and businessman — who is listening to the American people,” Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) said in a statement. “He understands what it means to take risks and deliver results through lower taxes, less regulation, and solving our debt crisis.”

Curtis Ellis, executive director of the American Jobs Alliance, said Trump sketched out a program that would address America’s economic problems in a comprehensive way and make it the best place in the world to do business.

“This is the type of economic reform that’s needed to get America back on track,” he said. “These are interlocking issues. You can’t do one with the other.”

There was much to like for experts who have concerns about some of Trump’s trade policies and favor a more traditionally Republican approach to the economy. Entrepreneur and investor Steve Beaman, chairman of the Society to Advance Financial Education, pointed to Trump’s call to cut taxes and regulations domestically while enticing money earned overseas to be returned to the United States.

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“It will, indeed, be a massive stimulus for the economy,” he said.

Trump offered other ideas, from a huge investment in new roads, bridges, tunnels, and other building projects, to tax changes designed to encourage large corporations to remain headquartered in the United States rather than relocate to foreign countries. Trump proposed a 10 percent tax on bringing money held in offshore accounts to the United States. He said it would encourage companies to bring trillions of dollars back into the American economy.

Trump also said he would end a “backwards” policy of taxing corporate profits at high rates for products produced and sold in the United States but offering low tariffs on goods shipped to America from abroad.

“In other words, we punish companies for making products in America — but let them ship products into the U.S. tax-free if they move overseas,” he said. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is backwards. All of our policies should be geared towards keeping jobs and wealth inside the United States.”

Trump reiterated a seven-part trade reform agenda he laid out earlier this summer, which includes withdrawing from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership and canceling the North American Free Trade Agreement if Canada and Mexico do not agree to renegotiate it. He also restated promises to reform veterans health and make Americans safe from crime.

The roadmap, Trump said, contrasts with Clinton.

“If you were a foreign power looking to weaken America, you couldn’t do better than Hillary Clinton’s economic agenda,” he said.