The best things in life—and presidential campaigns—are free

This year’s presidential campaign is bringing a whole new meaning to free-market economics. Republican nominee former President Donald Trump, in particular, layers tax giveaway on top of tax giveaway, promising voters everything but the kitchen sink. (So far, there’s no deduction for kitchen sinks, but the campaign isn’t over yet.)

Many of the ideas are more slogans than proposals—concepts of a plan, to borrow a Trump phrase. They are accompanied by no details, fact sheets, white papers or experts. Still, if Republicans sweep November’s election, some of them might be the law of the land in six months. Some might be forgotten except by beleaguered policy analysts who have spent the campaign season trying to figure out, again and again, what Trump is actually suggesting.

“We seem to be having an arms race," said Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “It’s emblematic of the complete breakdown of any kind of responsibility about the budget."

It wasn’t always this way. Weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign were consumed by a debate over whether Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s tax proposals added up. The 2020 Democratic primary featured campaigns topping each other with 14-point Medicare-for-All plans and multitrillion-dollar tax increases to pay for them. None of the ideas had any chance of making it through Congress but they were intended to at least suggest the awareness of trade-offs.

In 2024, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are piling on the promises, though with contrasting approaches. His pitch: You can pay less, and there aren’t really costs, but even if there are, you won’t pay them. Her pitch: You will get something, and someone else will pay.

Trump favors tax breaks, and he tends to announce them out based on where he is speaking—tax-free tips in Nevada, tax-deductible car-loan interest in Detroit, tax-free generators after a hurricane. He typically doesn’t pair the giveaways with any way to pay for them. Instead, he promises that economic growth, cutting government waste or collecting revenue from tariffs can make up the difference, while claiming that tariffs will be paid by foreign countries rather than the American consumers who would feel the burden.

“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff,’" Trump said Tuesday at an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago.

Harris, meanwhile, tends to pull proposals—largely spending programs and refundable tax credits—from the long established Democratic agenda. This week, she said she wanted to offer one million forgivable business loans for Black entrepreneurs.

Harris typically does identify a way to pay for her proposals, and those also come from Democrats’ wishlist of tax increases on corporations and high-earning households. She has offered enough tax increases to cover the cost of many of her proposals, though she might have trouble getting everything through Congress.

Trump’s policy plans would widen budget deficits by an estimated $7.5 trillion over the next decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that favors lower deficits. Meanwhile, Harris’s plans would increase deficits by $3.5 trillion, the group said.

Trump’s tax-cut promises get reliable applause, and voters don’t seem to be punishing candidates who offer free stuff.

“The reward for rigor—internal rigor, almost, a clear demonstration of a policy process, a grappling with trade-offs—like a dam, burst at some point," said Gordon Gray, who helped develop policy for Republican Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. “There’s just not an apparent reward for that."

Trump’s plan to end income taxes on Social Security benefits was his most popular idea tested in a recent Wall Street Journal survey. The plan had support from 83% of voters; that fell by 15 percentage points when voters were asked if they backed the plan even if it added to the national debt.

Trump, in particular, is drawing on his promise-heavy playbook from 2020. Unlike today, economists and lawmakers in both parties agreed then that higher budget deficits were worth the future costs because of the urgency of preventing the pandemic from wrecking the economy.

Heading into the 2020 election, the Trump-era stimulus checks were seen as helpful in winning over some swing voters. In border districts in Texas, voters still talked about the money from “Papa Trump" years later. At a recent stop at a grocery store in Pennsylvania, Trump handed $100 to a customer in the checkout line. “We’ll do that for you from the White House, all right?" he said.

The Journal reported earlier this year that Trump was aware of the political power of giving people money when he was president and told his advisers that he thought having his name on the checks would boost his chances, according to people who worked with him.

Sam DiObilda of Coatesville, Pa., a Republican who said he voted for President Biden in 2020 but plans to vote for Trump this year, is concerned about the budgetary implications of some of the Republican’s proposed tax cuts. Nonetheless, he hopes the policies will go hand-in-hand with ones designed to boost the economy and make up for the lost revenue.

“Donald Trump cuts regulations and, when you cut regulations, you stimulate business," said DiObilda, a 61-year-old retired teacher. “When you stimulate business, you stimulate the tax base."

Nathalie Morales of Comstock Park, Mich., has worked as a server for more than six years and says the no-tax-on-tips promise has caused a stir among her co-workers.

“It feels like a lot of empty promises," said Morales, 26, a Democrat who plans to back Harris. “I just think it’s a ploy to get the people to come to his side."

Republicans for years have charged Democrats with courting voters with handouts, with Romney accusing them in 2012 of buying off voters with “financial gifts." Republicans say there is a difference between government spending programs and tax cuts. The latter, many argue, just let people keep their own money and can encourage economic growth.

In addition, the line between tax cuts and spending programs can get blurry. For example, Congress could cut Social Security benefits using a formula that relied on recipients’ annual income and that would be exactly the same thing as the tax exemption for Social Security benefits.

Democrats, too, are increasingly arguing that the benefits of alleviating childhood poverty can make social-spending increases a good decision for the government, even if official scorekeepers don’t show it paying for itself.

Harris, when asked in August about how she would pay for some of her expansions of the child tax credit and earned-income tax credit, talked about the return on investment.“Strengthening communities, and in particular, the economy of those communities, and investing in a broad-based economy, everybody benefits, and it pays for itself in that way," she said. (Her campaign later pointed to tax increases as well.)

If anything, economists say, the U.S. fiscal situation should be driving candidates to grapple even more with trade-offs. The budget deficit hit $1.8 trillion, or more than 6% of gross domestic product, last fiscal year, and the country is approaching record public debt levels.

That raises the risk of economic problems, said Gray, who now runs the Pinpoint Policy Institute focused on maintaining prosperity. The clear doctor’s advice, he added, would be prudence. That might go unheeded.

“They’d rather eat junk food and not exercise," Gray said.

John McCormick, Elizabeth Findell and Andrew Restuccia contributed to this article.

Write to Richard Rubin at richard.rubin@wsj.com and Xavier Martinez at xavier.martinez@wsj.com