Former President Donald Trump spoke to a crowd in Tucson, Arizona, on Thursday, during the last leg of the campaign trail leading up to the 2024 general election. The subjects he focused on in the speech were more on the domestic front, bringing up topics that many voters have top of mind every day, like the burden of high inflation and the effect of the interest rates on mortgages, as many Americans hold off on purchasing a home in the debacle of a national economy created by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over the last nearly four years.
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As I wrote on Wednesday, we are expected to see some (minor) relief in the rates when the Federal Reserve meets next week.
Read related:
On Thursday afternoon local time, Trump promised rallygoers that if he’s reelected to the White House in November, he will sign an executive order on Day 1 to “immediate[ly] terminate….every single unnecessary rule that is impeding housing construction and driving up the cost of housing”:
He said:
Government regulations are responsible for more than 25 percent of the cost of a new single-family home — and 40 percent of the cost of multi-family homes. Think of it….And it takes you years to get it done. We’re going to end all of that.
The former president also spoke about the plan of using huge tracts of federal land to develop new home construction (something that exists in many Western states, including Nevada):
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He explained that this step is needed “to get housing on the market.” He slightly changed the name of the department that oversees all federal lands here, amusingly calling it the Bureau of Land Mismanagement.”
As he noted himself in one of the other clips, if anyone knows something about land and construction, it’s Donald Trump.
To help Americans keep more money in their pockets, Trump announced a new policy, to go with his other tax cuts, during the speech: All overtime pay could become tax-free:
Trump said that economists he talked to about the idea were bullish on it. He said: “It’s time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break.”
He also talked about “other pillars” of what an incoming Trump administration could do to help families be able to afford one major part of the American Dream–owning their own home:
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He said:
We will rapidly reduce inflation by slashing energy costs, taxes, and we are going to slash regulations. By quickly defeating inflation, we will in turn bring interest rates down very fast. When I was president, interest rates were hovering around 2 percent.
We will drive down the rates so you will be able to pay 2 percent again—and you will be able to finance or refinance to drastically…at much lower costs. This step alone will save Arizona families between $800 and $1,000 dollars per month on their mortgage for a typical home.
RedState will have more updates on the policies Trump outlines in this speech later on Thursday.