A key plank of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign tirades against undocumented immigrants was that they drain vital social services that are facing insolvency threats. “Unlike the Democrats, who are KILLING SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE by allowing the INVASION OF THE MIGRANTS, I will NOT, under any circumstance, allow either of these two precious GEMS to be even touched under a Trump Administration,” he posted on Truth Social in one characteristic broadside last year.

The Social Security Administration receives billions in free money each year from an unexpected source: undocumented immigrants.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to conduct “the largest deportation effort in American history,” no matter the price tag—but the economic costs of such a campaign may be bigger than he has bargained for. 

Trump has, after all, already made full-throated declarations that his administration will conduct the largest deportation of undocumented residents in U.S. history. That should resonate in a place like California, with its estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrants — and it certainly would shake up a state agriculture industry in which nearly half of all workers are undocumented.

With President-elect Donald Trump poised to declare a national emergency to clear the way for the mass deportation of undocumented migrants, Florida may face wholesale disruption in the coming year. Immigration experts say about 5% of Florida’s population – 1.1 million residents – are living here without legal permission. How far Trump goes will be critical in gauging deportation’s impact on communities, families, workplaces and the Florida economy.

The proposals under discussion would likely increase inequality and hardship in America at a time when nearly 4 in 10 households are struggling to pay their bills. In this case, the cuts to America’s meager safety net would be used to finance an unusually direct transfer of wealth upward. A review of Trump’s 2024 campaign tax promises by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found his proposals, taken together, “would, on average, lead to a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups.”

Louisiana lawmakers on Thursday postponed a vote on a key bill in Gov. Jeff Landry’s sweeping and complex tax reform package.

“Most of the changes in the 2017 tax law were things that benefit the rich,” said Steve Wamhoff with the Institute on Tax and Economic Policy. “The cap on SALT deductions was one of the few things that limited tax breaks for the rich. That’s not to say that everyone affected by the SALT cap is rich, but the vast majority of impact is going to be with the richest 1%.”

Why didn’t the speeches register? Why did people persist in thinking that Harris was short on policy; that Trump’s programs would boost the American economy, despite a widely broadcast consensus from sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists to the contrary; or that he would lower taxes for working people, though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated that he would increase them? Even many of Trump’s critics think his first term marked a high point for border patrol, though more unauthorized migrants have been forced to leave under Biden. (Why was Biden’s Presidency widely dismissed as desultory, when, in fact, as my colleague Nicholas Lemann recently put it, “he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt”?) How did so many perceptions disprovable with ten seconds of Googling become fixed in the voting public’s mind? And why, even as misapprehensions were corrected, did those beliefs prevail?

With the confirmation that Republicans have won a majority in the House of Representatives, Donald Trump and his party will now have a governing trifecta in Washington come January, giving the new president a powerful perch to enact his rightwing agenda.

It’s election week, and Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are making their last-ditch efforts to recruit voters. At the top of many Americans’ minds, of course, is the economy.

The wealthiest man on the planet is pumping tens of millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s campaign. He owns an influential social media company where he embraces right-wing influencers and conspiracy theories now dominating the platform. He has business interests with China and Russia’s Vladimir Putin’s regime while his companies receive billions of dollars in US government contracts.

Former President Donald J. Trump, in the closing days of the 2024 election, continues to be a font of exaggerations, misleading claims and outright lies.

In the fourth installment of BI’s five-part series in the final stretch before the election, Business Insider is looking at the ways each candidate’s policies could affect how much you pay in taxes. (Read part one about investments, part two about costs, and part three about housing.)

Former President Donald J. Trump has spent much of the presidential campaign brainstorming new, and sometimes untested, ways to cut taxes. In the election’s final stretch, he raised the possibility of going even further: eliminating income taxes entirely.