Monday, June 13, 2016

Trump Advisers Tell Trump to Kill the Middle Class Tax Cut Proposal

Imagine my surprise. 

Donald Trump has no clue and his advisers are Keynesian-lite, interventionist-lite.

Lynnley Browning at Bloomberg describes the latest horror:
Donald Trump has said his main tax-policy goal is a cut for the middle class, yet his guest list for a series of policy presentations at Trump Tower included a Reagan-era economist who has suggested revamping that plan. 
Lobbyists and business leaders, including oil billionaire and Trump ally Harold Hamm, gathered June 9 at the presumptive Republican nominee’s New York headquarters to present their policy wish lists. Among them: economist Stephen Moore, who has been offering Trump advice on tax policy -- particularly suggestions for cutting his plan’s estimated cost of $10 trillion over 10 years...
Moore and fellow conservative economist Lawrence Kudlow have recommended changes that would “all but erase” the middle-class benefits Trump favors, according to Kyle Pomerleau, a senior policy specialist at the right-leaning Tax Foundation in Washington. The foundation, a non-profit research group, reviewed the revisions at the request of Moore and Kudlow... 
First, they bumped up Trump’s proposed tax rates -- the top rate went from 25 to 28 percent, and the lowest from 10 to 15 percent. They also scaled back Trump’s proposal to quadruple the “standard deduction,” which tends to benefit middle- and low-income taxpayers. Trump proposed to raise it to $25,000 from $6,300; Moore and Kudlow suggest $10,000.
The smaller increase “would drastically shrink any benefits to the middle class,” Pomerleau said. Overall, the Moore and Kudlow changes “erase one of the big selling points Trump has had, which is cutting taxes for the middle class,” he said...
Regardless, advice on tax policy may not matter much to Trump, said Kenneth Kies, a tax lobbyist and managing director of Federal Policy Group, a Washington lobbying firm.
“It really doesn’t matter what these guys think, because Trump probably doesn’t care,” Kies said. “He doesn’t talk about his tax plans in his stump speeches, which should tell you how much a core issue it is for him in the election.
   -RW

4 comments:

  1. Gotta love how these elites just sit around in a conference room and decide how much of our own money they want to allow us to keep...

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  2. the few bright points in trump plan dim and are slowly snuffed out.

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  3. Trump would be crazy to make an issue of anything but terror and immigration right now. Shifting the focus to taxes would take the heat off Clinton in a major way. His Keynesian hangers-on will build their castles in the sky, but we cannot know what Emperor Trump will decide once he wears the purple. Indeed it's to his benefit to wear status-quo mufti on all the economic issues right now lest Clinton find a way to change the conversation.

    Fellow classical liberals, when did you start taking campaign poses at face value? Confirmation bias, is it?

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  4. Very disappointed in Moore, I knew Kudlow was a NEOCON but thought Moore was generally a small gov. guy. Shame.

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