Before Donald Trump became president in 2017, Americans paid tariffs on just two percent of their imported goods. The average tariff rate was 1.7 percent.
In 2018, however, Trump launched his global trade wars. “[W]e have a Trade Deficit of $500 billion per year,” he tweeted in April 2018. “We cannot let this continue!” He slapped tariffs on two-thirds of Chinese exports and on metals sold by nearly every other country—friend and foe alike. By the end of that year, Americans were paying tariffs on 15 percent of their imports. By 2019, the average tariff rate had shot up to 13.8 percent. As the left-hand figure above illustrates, Trump expected his massive wall of tariffs to push the U.S. current account balance (of which trade is the biggest component) upwards, toward surplus. Yet the reality, as we now know, is that it fell deeper into deficit.
What about tax cuts
https://equitablegrowth.org/six-years-later-more-evidence-shows-the-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-benefits-u-s-business-owners-and-executives-not-average-workers/
Link: https://www.cfr.org/blog/tariffs-and-trade-balance-how-trump-validated-his-critics