Thursday, April 13, 2017

CHAOS AT THE WHITE HOUSE Trump Has a New Import Tax Plan and Larry Kudlow Just Slammed It Big Time

Larry Kudlow

Good for Larry and it looks as though he is upping his attack on the Goldman Sachs crony Gary Cohn.

The New York Times reports:
Mr. Trump took his plans to rewrite the tax code into uncharted territory when he threw cold water on the border adjustment tax that is the linchpin of the tax reform plan.

After months of waffling on that tax, he instead called for a new “reciprocal tax” that appears to be a different kind of levy on imports.

“I don’t like the word adjustment because our country gets taken advantage of, to use a nice term, by every other country in the world,” Mr. Trump said in the Fox Business interview. “So when I hear border adjustment, adjustment means we lose.”

He added: “I love the idea of reciprocal. You can call it a reciprocal or a matching tax or a mirror tax.”

The notion left tax experts scratching their heads. “I’m genuinely confused,” said Itai Grinberg, a tax expert at Georgetown University’s law school.

“If one imposes a tax that varies based on the country of origin of the good or service, then what one may in substance have is something akin to a country-specific tariff regime.”

What is clear is that all of the uncertainty surrounding the White House’s economic plans is causing frustration among some of Mr. Trump’s supporters, including those who helped get him elected.

Larry Kudlow, the economist who advised Mr. Trump when he was a candidate, panned Mr. Trump’s reciprocal tax idea as a nonsensical approach that would essentially raise taxes.

He suggested that the scattershot approach to economic policy coming from the White House was probably because of poor leadership at the National Economic Council, which is led by Gary Cohn, and the diminished role of the Treasury Department, which is steered by Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

“It’s complete chaos,” Mr. Kudlow said. “It sows confusion, and people lose confidence. The process is broken.”

 -RW 

1 comment:

  1. If the process in Washington really is "broken", then that is great! However, I think he means it is more screwed than normal.

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