Donald Trump asks Jewish Economist Larry Kudlow to Rewrite his Tax Plan
politico.com
The GOP front-runner asks influential Jewish conservatives to help cut the price of his proposal.
Donald Trump’s campaign has enlisted influential conservative economists to revise his tax package and make it more politically palatable by slashing the $10 trillion sticker price. Their main targets: Lifting the top tax rate from Trump’s original plan and expanding the number of people who would have to pay taxes under it.
Trump’s initial proposal, rolled out with fanfare at Trump Tower in Manhattan last September, has been in the spotlight since he became the presumptive Republican nominee last week and promptly declared that it was only a starting point for any negotiations with congressional Democrats, should he become president.
But it turns out Trump’s team is open to revamping it far sooner than that; the campaign last month contacted at least two prominent conservative economists — Larry Kudlow, the CNBC television host, and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation and a longtime Wall Street Journal writer — to spearhead an effort to update the package.
“What we’ve been trying to do is help advise him a little bit to try to reduce the cost of the plan” and still encourage economic growth, Moore said in an interview.
Trump’s initial plan has come under criticism from both the right and left for vastly expanding the deficit, with the nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimating it would add $10 trillion to the federal deficit in the next decade. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has moved quickly to tattoo the plan’s steep price tag onto Trump, with her team holding a call on Monday calling it a reckless expansion of debt.
"This is the most risky, restless and regressive tax proposal ever put forward by a major presidential candidate," one of President Obama’s former top economic advisers, Gene Sperling, said on the Clinton campaign call.
The Trump team’s quiet outreach to Moore and Kudlow, even before the New York billionaire had wrapped up the GOP nomination, is a sign the campaign was seeking to shore up a possible general-election vulnerability early.
Over the weekend, Trump spoke openly of changing his tax plan on the Sunday shows. “The thing I'm going to do is make sure the middle class gets good tax breaks,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Because they have been absolutely shunned. The other thing, I'm going to fight very hard for business. For the wealthy, I think, frankly, it's going to go up. And you know what, it really should go up.”
The next day, on CNN, Trump tried to clarify that he wasn’t actually talking about raising rates on the wealthy, just raising them from his original plan. “If I increase it on the wealthy, they're still going to pay less than they pay now,” he said.
While Kudlow cast the changes he and Moore are recommending as “tweaking,” what he described would have an enormous financial impact. Kudlow said they had already resubmitted their revisions to the Tax Foundation, which he said was now preliminarily estimating that the package would expand the deficit by $3.8 trillion — a roughly 60 percent cut.
“The full effect of all the things we talked about would have a very important reduction in the deficit,” Kudlow said, adding, “The economic growth would be increased, as would jobs and wages.”
Trump has not offered many policy specifics in his campaign so far but his tax package was among his most detailed. It included eliminating federal income taxes for individuals making less than $25,000 and for married couples earning below $50,000, slashing the highest income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent and cutting the business tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent.
Some of those numbers could now shift, according to Kudlow, who stressed that the proposed changes he and Moore are drafting are simply “suggestions” for Trump.
“Mr. Trump has not signed off on any of this,” Kudlow cautioned.
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