Key Economic Takeaways From Trump’s Speech To Congress

Key Takeaways

President Donald Trump called for new tax cuts, defended his controversial tariff policy and blamed his predecessor for the country’s economic woes, during an address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night.

In his first major speech since his inauguration, Trump addressed several economic issues, seeking to reassure a public that has grown increasingly skeptical about the economy and his management of it in the past few weeks.

Trump said his policy of raising tariffs would “take in trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before,” repeating the pro-tariff line he and his top advisors have promoted in recent weeks.

Trump’s speech came the same day he imposed 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and a doubling of his new tariffs on China to 20%. The import taxes roiled financial markets and sent stock indexes sharply downwards. Economists predicted the taxes would raise prices for cars and other products, push up the cost of living, and risk reigniting inflation.

“Tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs, they’re about protecting the soul of our country,” Trump said. “Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it’s happening, and it will happen rather quickly. There will be a little disturbance, but we’re ok with that. It won’t be much.”

Trump also repeated his promise to expand the trade measures on April 2 by imposing “reciprocal” tariffs on other countries that have their own tariffs against American products.

“Whenever they tariff us, other countries, we will tariff them,” he said.

Trump, who had promised to bring prices for consumers down on day one of his presidency, blamed his predecessor for the fact that inflation is still running higher than pre-pandemic levels and continuing to squeeze household budgets. Inflation surged in 2021 as the economy reopened from the pandemic and has continued to linger above the 2% annual rate the Federal Reserve targets.

Prices for food, and especially eggs, have been particularly hard for consumers to swallow. Average prices for eggs have more than tripled since the onset of the pandemic, as a bird flu outbreak has killed millions of hens. Trump said he was going to bring “dramatic and immediate relief to American families.”

“Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control—The egg prices out of control. And we are working hard to get it back down,” Trump said.

The Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture announced a $1 billion campaign to stamp out bird flu last week in an effort to control egg prices, continuing Biden-era efforts to combat the disease.

Trump also said his energy policies would push down household costs. Trump has attempted to reverse former president Joe Biden’s policies promoting green energy, instead favoring oil and gas drilling. He said he was moving forward with a “gigantic natural gas pipeline in Alaska” in a partnership with Japan and South Korea.

Trump hailed the cost-cutting campaign of his influential billionaire advisor Elon Musk and his DOGE task force canceling contracts and firing federal workers across numerous federal agencies. He said DOGE had found “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program” and said there were numerous instances of improbably old people in Social Security’s database, including 4.7 million over 130 years old.

However, according to the Social Security Administration, only 73,815, or 1 in every 1,000 people receiving benefits, are over 100. Musk’s claims about extremely old Social Security recipients, which surfaced in February, were debunked by experts who said Musk was likely citing a database that included records of people who were not currently being paid benefits, and whose death dates were never recorded because they were born before 1920, before the SSA was established.

Trump said he would encourage the construction of military and civilian ships in the U.S. by establishing an office of shipbuilding and offering tax breaks to shipbuilders. The U.S. currently builds only a handful of ships every year, compared to thousands built by China.

Shipbuilding is one of the industries Trump administration officials say the hope to revive in a bid to generally “reindustrialize” the United States using tariffs and other economic policies.

By contrast, he called for the end of President Joe Biden’s $52 billion CHIPS subsidy program, which used incentives to promote semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. as part of his own efforts to support American manufacturing.

“Get rid of the CHIPS Act,” Trump said, addressing House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana.