Donald Trump delivers an economic policy speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Monday, Aug. 8, in Detroit. | AP Photo Trump mixes facts, falsehoods to rip Clinton on the economy The GOP nominee stuck to his script, calling for large tax cuts and a break with the current administration's economic policies.

DETROIT — Donald Trump, whose campaign has tapped into economic anxieties and a nostalgia for a bygone American greatness, promised to be the president with an economic vision for a better future in a speech here Monday.

In an address that was interrupted at least 14 times by protesters, the Republican nominee outlined a number of changes to his original tax plan, aligning the income brackets with the plan proposed by Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans, while also proposing excluding childcare expenses from taxation, ending the estate tax and carried interest deduction and cutting taxes across the board.


Trump offered no details on how he intended to fund the cuts, other than promising to eradicate the country's trade deficit.

As he tries to put the worst stretch of his campaign behind him and finds himself trailing Democrat Hillary Clinton by significant margins, the reality TV star and real estate mogul portrayed himself as a successful businessman and clear agent of change in November’s election in contrast to the Democratic nominee whose campaign has sought to cast her as a “change-maker” over her 30 years in politics.

“She’s the candidate of the past; ours is the campaign of the future,” Trump said, blasting President Bill Clinton for signing NAFTA. “Unless we change policies, we will never change results.”

Speaking to more than a thousand people at an event hosted by the Detroit Economic Club here Monday, Trump lamented this city’s economic collapse, which he attributed to the country’s abandonment of an “America First” economic approach.

“The city of Detroit is the living, breathing example of my opponent’s failed economic agenda,” he said. “Every policy that has failed Detroit has been fully supported by Hillary Clinton. The one common feature of every Hillary Clinton idea is that it punishes you from working and doing business in the United States.”

Trump, now trailing Clinton by 10 points in the most recent poll of Michigan voters, promised that Detroit “will come roaring back” under his leadership.

But Trump’s speech was full of falsehoods and misleading statements. He attacked Clinton for a “short circuit” moment in which she “accidentally told the truth” and said that she would raise taxes on the middle class, even though she has not. He stated, “No one will gain more from these proposals than low-and-middle income Americans”; the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, however, has concluded: “the largest benefits, in dollar and percentage terms, would go to the highest income households.” And Trump repeated a claim that the government employment figures are manipulated even though not a single serious economist has validated the claim.

Trump’s tax plan has been a work in progress. Last September, he proposed a 25 percent top rate for individuals, a 15 percent business tax rate and elimination of estate tax. That plan, which likely would have added $10 trillion to the deficit over a decade and was thus highly criticized, appeared to have been scrubbed from his campaign website Monday morning.

The new plan, tweaked with the help of CNBC’s Larry Kudlow and the Heritage Foundation’s Stephen Moore, proposes a 33 percent top individual tax rate — an attempt to bring down the price tag. It also aims to simplify the tax code and would eliminate the carried interest deduction.

“These reforms will offer the biggest tax revolution since the Reagan Tax Reform, which unleashed years of continued economic growth and job creation,” Trump said. “We will Make America Grow Again.”

But even with fewer than 100 days remaining until Election Day, Trump vowed to reveal more details “in the coming weeks,” which could make his complete economic package harder for budget analysts to put a price tag on.

Trump also focused on reducing regulations, boosting domestic energy production and reducing business income taxes to 15 percent. And he promised to "remove bureaucrats who only know how to kill jobs; replace them with experts who know how to create jobs."

Clinton is scheduled to expand on her own economic ideas in a speech in Michigan on Thursday that will naturally serve as a rebuttal to the GOP nominee.

Trump did not insult any fellow Republicans, crying babies or Gold Star families, eschewing the typical tangents that punctuate many of his public remarks and giving hope to those calling on Trump to adopt a more presidential bearing and a more consistent case for a Trump presidency and against Clinton.

But to many economists, Trump’s carefully crafted, teleprompter-delivered address is a thin veneer that doesn’t obscure the candidate’s crude approach to the economy and a political sales pitch that is not at all reality based.

“He has no coherent economic theory unless you repeal the rules of math,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. “He's put Social Security and Medicare in a lockbox, promised massive tax cuts—which he claims at his rallies are for the middle class but most goes to the rich—and he claims he's going to balance the budget. And these things are incompatible. The only way that can happen—it would have to be the greatest growth in the U.S. economy, in any economy, in the history of the world.”

According to many more liberal economists, exempting child care expenses, a proposal that would cost an estimated $20 billion, would disproportionately help families that need it the least, because most low income families already have little to no tax liability related to childcare.

Trump again emphasized the importance of re-writing trade agreements to generate more economic growth and called NAFTA “a strike at the heart of Michigan,” noting the decline in jobs for autoworkers since President Clinton signed the trade agreement.

“Detroit is still waiting for Hillary Clinton’s apology,” Trump said. “I expect Detroit will get that apology right around the same time Hillary Clinton turns over the 33,000 emails she deleted.”

In his hour-long speech, Trump did not offer specifics on how his trade deals would improve on current ones; and as he lamented the employment decline in Detroit’s auto industry, Trump also failed to recognize the role of automation in reducing the number of manufacturing jobs.

Peter Navarro, a professor of business at UC Irvine and a member of the all-male team of economic advisers Trump rolled out last week, argued that renegotiating trade deals that don’t increase the country’s GDP growth rate and decrease the deficit will keep him busy — and eventually generate “trillions in additional tax revenues over time” to fund investments in infrastructure and entitlements.

“From Day One, Trump will insist on renegotiating any trade deal that does not meet that standard,” Navarro said. “This includes three of the worst trade deals in American history—all courtesy of the Clinton empire,” he continued in reference to NAFTA, China’s joining the World Trade Organization and the free-trade agreement with South Korea. “The South Korean FTA is the poster child of how the Clintons have short-circuited the economy, butchered the truth, and short-changed American workers. She promised 70,000 new jobs and America wound up a loss of 75,000 jobs and a more than doubling of the US trade deficit with South Korea.”

Many economists, however, don’t believe eliminating the trade deficit will be enough to spur the economy out of the low growth mode the U.S. and the global economy more broadly have been stuck in for more than a decade.

“It's like his clock stopped in the 1980s when he worried about our trade deficits with Japan, and never restarted. He's just swapped out Japan for China,” said Jim Pethokoukis, a columnist and blogger at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

“It's doubtful that even working class voters actually believe he'll restore America's 1960s manufacturing heavy economy. Recall his economics speech near Pittsburgh where he made that back-to-the-future claim [promising to restore its steel production], and ignored how Pittsburgh is reinventing itself as a tech hub,” Pethokoukis continued.

“Overall, his economic plan to this point has been a hodgepodge of economic policies that may please certain groups of voters but does not hang together in any coherent way nor provides credible solutions to the economic problems facing 21st century America.”

Ben White contributed to this report.