President Trump. (photo: AP)
31 August 17
n Wednesday, Donald Trump
will kick off his tax-reform campaign with a speech in Missouri, where
he is expected to sell his plan—or his idea for a plan, anyway—as a boon
for the middle class. The speech will be necessarily light on details:
amazingly, the White House still has no plan of its own after holding a
self-congratulatory press conference in April to unveil a one-page,
double-spaced, bullet-point list of tax-reform goals.The Trump administration has since passed the buck to Congress to come up with the actual details. Instead, the speech will be all about ideas: specifically, those populist themes and campaign-style phrases (“Make America Great Again!” ) that help disguise the fact that the Republican Party’s plans to reform the tax code are primarily centered around slashing corporate tax rates, not uplifting the “forgotten men and women” Trump waxed poetic about during his inauguration.
Administration officials have devised a series of
slogans to blur this distinction. “We’re going to end the rigged
system,” a White House official said
during a call with reporters. “We’re going to build a tax code that
really allows all Americans to have access to the American dream.”
Apparently, the “rigged system” line has polled well with swing voters.
It’s not clear how the G.O.P.’s tax proposals, like
eliminating the estate tax, will improve access to the American dream.
While the exact outlines of the plan have yet to be defined—it’s always
easier to sell the idea than the specifics—the broad strokes of the
Trump tax cuts appear aimed at rewarding the business class.
His past proposals have included a historic slashing of the corporate tax rate, bringing the top individual rate down to 35 percent, and introducing a loophole that would allow people like hedge-fund managers and lawyers to reorganize their businesses as pass-through entities and pay the corporate rate on their income, which Trump wants to be 15 percent. “Those are not exactly populist, keep-rich-people-from-rigging-the-tax-system provisions,” Roosevelt Institute fellow Michael Linden told the Wall Street Journal. “Those are the opposite of those things.” A July analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that the cuts proposed by the Trump administration in April would be 23,500 times better for the ultra-rich than the poor, giving the former an average tax cut of $937,700 to the latter’s $40.
His past proposals have included a historic slashing of the corporate tax rate, bringing the top individual rate down to 35 percent, and introducing a loophole that would allow people like hedge-fund managers and lawyers to reorganize their businesses as pass-through entities and pay the corporate rate on their income, which Trump wants to be 15 percent. “Those are not exactly populist, keep-rich-people-from-rigging-the-tax-system provisions,” Roosevelt Institute fellow Michael Linden told the Wall Street Journal. “Those are the opposite of those things.” A July analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that the cuts proposed by the Trump administration in April would be 23,500 times better for the ultra-rich than the poor, giving the former an average tax cut of $937,700 to the latter’s $40.
But one should never let the facts distract from a
good sales pitch! “A lot of this is going to be him cooking stuff up in
his head,” a White House aide told
Politico. “He’s a good marketer.” Or as another official said, “He’s
going to cast a vision for the kind of America he wants to create. More
opportunity for everyone. Making the American dream more accessible than
it’s ever been before.”
Accessibility appears to be the operative word:
according to the White House’s reasoning, letting corporations keep more
of their own money will redound to everyone’s benefit. “Every American
worker will get a pay raise by getting to keep more of their paychecks,”
the same official went on, promising that the money would trickle down
while conspicuously avoiding that toxic phrase. “We’re going to win
again by slashing the business tax rate and making our companies
competitive again. They’ll be able to hire more workers, boost wages,
and bring back trillions of dollars parked overseas. We’re going to make
taxes simple and easy so people don’t have to spend a bunch of time and
money on preparing their returns.”
Whether the Trump’s blue-collar base or anyone else
buys his pitch remains to be seen. Democrats aren’t waiting to hear the
details before deriding the salesman. “Donald Trump said he was going to
be an economic game-changer for middle-class Americans, but every step
of the way his administration has failed to live up to his promises,”
American Bridge’s Andrew Bates told Politico. “This tax
plan is just the latest example; it’s shaping up to be a wasteful
giveaway to the rich at the expense of everyone else, and no amount of
White House spin will fool the public.”
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