Billionaire businessman Mark Cuban didn’t mince words about former President Donald Trump’s economic policies during a campaign call on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Calling them “ridiculous” and “lunacy” during a campaign press call, the “Shark Tank” star and Dallas Mavericks owner charged that Trump’s policies are made up in real time to please crowds and have to be justified by his team later.
“The vice president and her team thinks through her policies,” Cuban said, adding that Harris is better for business than her opponent. “She doesn’t just, off the top of her head, say what she thinks the crowd wants to hear, like the Republican nominee.”
Cuban pointed to Trump’s recently proposed idea to impose a 200% tariff on the American agricultural machinery company John Deere if it moves its manufacturing to Mexico. He said coupling a tariff on John Deere with the former president’s idea to impose a 10-20% across-the-board tariff on products from China would make it cheaper for Chinese manufacturers to compete with the 187-old American business.
“You literally face the destruction of one of the most historic companies in the United States of America,” Cuban said. “It just goes to show that he doesn’t think these things through.”
Economists that Spectrum News have spoken to have warned that Trump's proposed tariffs could serve as a kind of trade barrier and end up costing Americans more.
Calling Trump’s across-the-board tariffs on China “insanity,” Cuban said it would mean more inflation for Americans.
He also called out Trump’s proposed cut to the corporate tax rate. Coupling a 10-20% Chinese tariff with his proposed lowering of the corporate tax rate to 21% would actually be more of a burden for U.S. companies than the 28% corporate tax rate Harris has proposed, Cuban said.
“Harris’s tax rate ends up being cheaper for any company that imports anything, which ends ups being almost every company,” he said.
Cuban, who has a net worth of more than $5 billion, justified the Biden-Harris administration’s maintenance of carry-over tariffs on Chinese steel and electric vehicle imports from the Trump administration, saying “there’s nothing wrong with strategic tariffs. Where it turns into lunacy is when you do across-the-board tariffs,” he said. “That’s just inflationary, and that’s just a tax on the American people.”
He also said Trump’s proposal to cap credit card interest rates at 10% is more socialist than that of progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has proposed a cap of 15%.
Cuban’s comments were part of a press call arranged by the Harris-Walz campaign to contrast the economic policies of the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in advance of Trump’s economic speech in Georgia later in the day.
The Harris-Walz campaign on Tuesday said its candidates have been endorsed by more than 400 independent economists, including the former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder and Obama administration economic policy director Jason Furman.
“The choice in this election is clear: between failed trickle-down economic policies that benefit the few and economic policies that provide opportunity for all,” an endorsement letter from the economists read. “It is a choice between inequity, economic injustice and uncertainty with Donald Trump or prosperity, opportunity and stability with Kamala Harris.”