Manhattan
Per my suggestion yesterday, Trump is starting to get down to business and get his hands dirty on more substance.
Some time this week, we will get the tax manifesto.
The biggest hoopla seems to be over the carried interest loophole, which needs to be done. But, this gives us the opportunity to jump into the blogmeister hot tub time machine and dial it back sixteen years, to what Trump was saying when he was mulling a Presidential campaign on the Reform Party ticket (the party Ross Perot founded) in 2000:
Bush has already denounced Trump’s tax intentions. “I cut taxes every year; he’s proposed the largest tax increase in mankind’s history, not just our own country’s history,” Bush said at a recent appearance in Keene, N.H. Bush was apparently referring to a 1999 Trump proposal — Trump was toying with the idea of running for president back then — in which Trump advocated a one-time-only tax of 14.25 percent on the net worth of all Americans worth more than $10 million. Under Trump’s proposal, the money raised would have been used to pay off the national debt completely and use the resulting savings — all the interest the government no longer paid — to cut taxes and shore up Social Security.
Trump no longer supports the idea, which — to put it charitably — economists at the time thought was wildly impractical. But the question is whether Bush and other Republicans will get much traction using Trump’s 16 year-old notion against him now. Even if Bush characterizes it as a crackpot scheme, the core of the plan was Trump supporting taxing the super rich to solve an enormous public policy problem. That’s going to hurt him badly now?
Yes, Jeb! et al. would be, as Dilbert put it, thinking past the sale.
For quite a few reasons, the one-time 14.25% rate and the $10 million floor was a non-starter. I do think that Trump ought to consider the idea, but with a much lower rate, levied annually, on the highest of net worths. Perhaps 0.25% on marginal net worths over $1 billion.
