Wednesday, September 19, 2018

CONFIRMED Trump Wanted to Raise the Top Personal Tax Rate to Over 44%



Here's another serious problem for libertarian Trump fanboys.

Trump's former top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, confirms Bob Woodward reporting that
President Trump wanted to raise the top individual tax rate and had to be talked out of it.

During a Reuters event in New York City on Monday, Cohn expressed regret that the Republican tax law that was passed at the end of 2017 was not simply a cut in the corporate tax rate. Cohn said that during the debate over the plan, Trump similarly wanted to just focus the bill on the corporate side instead of also cutting taxes for individuals, Business Insider reports.

In fact, Cohn said, Trump actually wanted to raise the top marginal tax rate to 44%.

"I would have rather have just cut corporate taxes, not touch personal taxes at all, and by the way the president was there too, the president would've just done corporate taxes and not personal taxes," Cohn said. "In fact he was willing to raise the high end of personal taxes, there were times he was talking about 44.6% or 44.9% on the personal side."

Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive, said that the administration ultimately had to include individual tax cuts because many US companies are pass-through businesses in which the owner takes the profits and the money is taxed like personal income. Cutting just the corporate rate would have created too large a discrepancy for corporations and those pass-throughs, Cohn said.

Trump's desire to raise the rate to 44% was reported in Woodward's new book "Fear: Trump in the White House."

"Sir, you can't take the top rate up," Cohn reportedly told the president. "You just can't."

"What do you mean?" Trump replied per Woodward.

"You're a Republican," Cohn, who was a Democrat, told Trump, adding the president would "get absolutely destroyed" if he went through with the idea.

The top rate was eventually dropped to 37% from 39.5% in the version of the GOP tax bill that is now law.

Of course, what should be done is tax cuts and spending cuts without spending cuts, just tax cuts, the burden is only shifted by form, not substance.

-RW  

No comments:

Post a Comment