I suppose I should have seen this coming. Still, I’m genuinely disappointed. As I’ve mentioned before, Donald Trump had (up until now) been talking a different game on taxes than what one normally hears from Republicans these days. He had talked about cutting taxes for the middle class, while asking the wealthy to pay more. He had talked about closing the carried interest loophole so that hedge fund managers might actually have to pay their fair share. He had, in other words, talked about a plan that made some sense, and that was making orthodox Republicans nervous.
But he just released his tax plan, and it’s more of the same old same old. Cut rates across the board, including an enormous rate cut for the wealthiest, and eliminate the estate tax. As Josh Barro of the NY Times put it:
Donald Trump’s tax plan, released Monday, does not live up to the populist language he has offered on taxes all summer.
When talking about taxes in this campaign, Donald Trump has often sounded like a different kind of Republican. He says he will take on “the hedge fund guys” and their carried interest loophole. He thinks it’s “outrageous” how little tax some multimillionaires pay. But his plan calls for major tax cuts not just for the middle class but also for the richest Americans — even the hedge fund managers. And despite his campaign’s assurances that the plan is “fiscally responsible,” it would grow budget deficits by trillions of dollars over a decade.
You could call Mr. Trump’s plan a higher-energy version of the tax plan Jeb Bush announced earlier this month: similar in structure, but with lower rates and wider tax brackets, meaning individual taxpayers would pay even less than under Mr. Bush, and the government would lose even more tax revenue.
If Trump’s tax plan had lived up to his rhetoric, he would have continued to shake up the GOP race, and he would have had a shot at regaining some of the momentum he enjoyed earlier but has been losing recently. But it didn’t. It’s a dud. It does nothing to separate him from his primary opponents, and if he allows himself to get lumped in with the likes of Jeb!, Rubio, and Fiorina, he’ll fade quickly. His only path to the nomination, to the extent he ever realistically had one (and I do think he did), is the one he was charting over the summer. If he deviates from it, his inevitable failure will be his own fault.
The hopelessly stupid led by the willfully corrupt. The jackassing of society, pain is fun, stupidity is expected. Public ridicule is the norm. Money buys a lot of innocence.
Reminds me of “ALICE IN WONDERLAND” Tea Party description : There are the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee who bicker over insignificant issues; the Red Queen who orders the beheading of anyone who disagrees with her; and the imbecilic White Queen. And let’s not forget the Mad Hatter.
Will the madness never end ?
Fred Rich LaRiccia
That scene, like so many others in “Alice in Wonderland”, was an acerbic and biting satire of late 19th century English society (as well as a marvelously entertaining riff on mathematics, logic, and semantics).
Some things never change.
than any of his outrageous statements, which had bounced off him for so long.
People who were supporting him because they thought he’d be different — that he thought they’d be working for him — just found out they were wrong.
After this, I think a good chunk of his supporters will start to pick some other crazy, or take their ball and go home.
By refusing to enter the fray, he outlasted losers like Perry and Walker, while also not stumbling out of the gate like Jeb! He stands to pick up the pieces when Trump, Carson, and Fiorina fade. Now he has inched up to fourth place after the ‘unelectable 3’ and is primed to pick up establishment support as well as social and business conservatives who want to win the White House and not just make a point.
As for Trump, he just lost a wide chunk of his base on economics, assuming they voted for him based on his laudable anti-Wall Street populism rather than his lamentable racism towards Latinos and Muslims.
I’m struck by the cavalier embrace of deficit spending in Mr. Trump’s proposal. Granted, he does offer a hat-tip to the completely discredited economic theories of Arthur Laffer and “Supply Side Economics“. When Ronald Reagan attempted this, he followed it with an enormous tax increase after his much-vaunted “Reagonomics” caused the federal deficit to explode. George W. Bush was entirely correct when he characterized it as “Voodoo Economics”.
Remember the “Laffer Curve“?
Laffer curve: Theory
Laffer curve: Reality
I can only conclude that Mr. Trump truly is utterly clueless about what the last thirty years of such rubbish has meant for nearly every American. Mr. Trump, along with his wealthy associates, has done very well during that time. The rest of us have paid the price.
This lie of “supply side economics” joins climate change as another of the great lies that form of the foundation of today’s failed GOP dogma.
One hopes that all this will put a wooden stake through the heart of the undead GOP (the GOP really is an economic vampire — it is politically dead, yet walks the land sucking wealth from its victims), but given the appetite of our media for advertising revenue and the enormous economic advantages to our media of a close election, one never knows.
He has never had to balance a budget before. Daddy, the state of New Jersey and bankruptcy court was always there to bail him out when he lost money-why would running a country be any different?
….at the local YMCA, I get to watch all the political ads on the television screens above the treadmills and It’s always funny and sad that so many Republican governors run on the qualification that they “balanced the budget”. Yeah, it’s funny because with all but one exception, all states have a legal requirement to balance their budgets. It’s sad that Republican voters don’t know this and see it as an accomplishment.
…it still might be worth saying they know how to do it and therefore could do it to the federal budget.
How could you possibly have expected anything else? Whether Trump believes his BS or not is beside the point. Today’s GOPers live in a parallel universe where “reality” is something Fox News creates and facts are just some trivial annoyance. As Paul Krugman notes: “I do want to weigh in for a minute on Donald Trump’s tax plan — which would, surprise, lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit. That’s in contrast to Jeb Bush’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit, and Marco Rubio’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.” Nuff said.
was proclaiming that “Trump happens to be right” on economic issues. I imagine he’s as disappointed in Trump’s tax plan as I am.
Indeed, your cite offers some interesting nuggets.
For example (emphasis mine):
Here’s another:
As it turns out, while Mr. Trump may not need to genuflect to somebody else’s big money, he continues to do obeisance to his own.
I’m shocked, utterly shocked, that Donald Trump turns out to be just like the rest of the 0.01% when it comes to tax policy towards the wealthy.
Trump has nothing original to say, but an overwhelming desire to think he does. The people who like him are the same way.
Rubio is frighteningly articulate. I heard him on NPR this morning.
He’s trying to promote his real estate holdings, and having fun. The tax plan is irrelevant to this purpose. Tactically, your analysis of its impact may be correct. Personally, it likely makes little difference to him.
Now that you mention it, it does have the flavor of a school assignment — done just well enough to perhaps get a passing grade.
I suspect Mr. Trump is rather good at jockeying the balance sheets for his various corporate holdings. I think it’s probably inaccurate, therefore, to say that he’s never balanced a budget.
I think he just doesn’t really care one way or the other about the federal budget (except to issue whatever perfunctory missives are requested by his campaign staff).
who was running for president, but the character “Donald Trump, host of the Apprentice” who was running. It’s like we’ve been watching a campaign reality show, instead of a campaign to help determine the leader of the country. I guess we’ll see which it is.
But that just illustrates how staged the modern campaign is. This week: The Donald wows the crowd at the Iowa State Fair. Next week: will the Donald flame out at the televised debate? Coming soon: The Donald secures the Immunity Hairdo, leaving Scott Walker to be voted off the island. Then: can the remaining candidates overcome their differences to form an alliance and defeat the Donald?
I’m not sure this is on the Donald– presidential campaigns have been schlocky “reality TV” since before reality TV was a thing.
It really is just like the old WWF cable TV wrestling shows.
Trump turning on the Clintons IS a little like Andre the Giant turning on Hulk Hogan.
Its always been like that though. At least Trump is interesting. Otherwise, this entire period of the campaign is 100% soporific.
Seems like Rubio is well positioned now. Of course I once thought the same of Walker. So predictions come with a moneyback guarantee.
Namely: The Trump voters, and a daresay most of the red party, don’t mean what they say.
The party of red ink does not believe in balanced budgets, the party of radical change (economic, civil, ecological) does not believe in conservationism or caution or prudence, and the party of Donald Trump does not believe in the little guy, however loudly they proclaim these things.
If The Donald has talked the progressive talk in any way in this campaign, and not phased his base with it, that does not prove there is a Tea Party appetite for progress.
It shows that the Tea People don’t actually care about about anything but optics, or pheromones, or whatever it is they see in the man or the other flavors of the month.
The tough conservative talk is just a kind of costume and these kids are playing dress up. Don’t expect them to believe anything; that’s not the game.
I’m not so sure a populist tax plan would have had Republicans lined up to vote for him. I think the shtick is getting old for some.
I think you’re correct.
Now that Donald Trump has joined the GOP pack in economics (where the rubber meets the road in this election season), the ever-decreasing number of die-hard Republicans will vote for any of the GOP candidates still on the ballot.
The ever-increasing number of both Republicans and Democrats who realize that a populist tax plan that WORKS is the best way to begin the desperately needed healing of our economy will line up to vote for Bernie Sanders.
There was some marked overlap between the energy behind Trump and Sanders over the summer, driven by economic populism. Without Trump (or with Trump abdicating that space with a pablum tax plan), it will be interesting to see what happens to Republican economic populists.
“Republican populist” is an oxymoron, just as “moderate Republican” is now an oxymoron (I remember when there were “liberal Republicans”. Now we call them “moderate Democrats”).
I suppose some may join Mr. Trump in lying about what they propose (saying one thing on the stump and proposing the opposite in written plans), but there are no Republican populists.
Pat hasn’t really been influential in the party since he kneecapped HW Bush in 92′, and Huckabee is a flat taxer-but all three claim to be committed what I’ll call “white welfare” like social security and Medicare and fair trade. They oppose welfare for the “undeserving” and support fair trade due to nativism since it was primarily “white” jobs that were lost. It’s unfortunate since actual progressive arguments against free trade, interventionist foreign policies, the security state tend to be lumped in as ‘Buchannanite’ in the eyes of the beltway press. Vox indulged in this when they hit Bernie on immigration.
I thought Pat Buchanan had retired an eternity ago.
Mike Huckabee, like all the others, lies about what his “Fair Tax” plan means.
His proposal is even more crazy than Donald Trump’s — Mr. Huckabee would eliminate the IRS altogether, and impose a 6% national sales tax instead. Mr. Huckabee’s plan would eliminate capital gains taxes, eliminate the estate tax, eliminate corporate income taxes, etc.
While Mr. Huckabee’s plan does lip-service to the very poor (through a “prebate” up to the poverty level), it applies the new consumption tax to EVERYTHING — food, groceries, medical care — everything.
Abigail Johnson, the wealthiest resident of Massachusetts, consumes at most a few times our poorest residents. Let’s say she consumes ten times as much. Her net worth (in excess of $13.4 B) is more than a million times that of somebody with $10,000. It is inconceivable that the consumption tax she pays will be a million times more than those on the bottom.
There is nothing progressive about Mr. Huckabee’s economic plan — he’s just posturing.
Nothing progressive about any of these guys, which is why I think it will be interesting to see if support for Trump was from nativist racists or economically displaced white workers. Obviously if we draw a Venn diagram of those groups a lotta folks will be in the middle. I am wondering how many of them would find a real populist Democrat appealing, certainly the circle that’s exclusively displaced white workers, and certainly some in the ‘both’ camp, though we need to be carefully explicit about how pro-immigration reform our candidate is.
Buchananan, Huckabee in 2008, and Santorum in 2012 tried the same playbook-save social security, save Medicare, pro-fair trade mildly pro-union while staunchly conservative on immigration, racial and gender equality. It’s a very limited but potent constituency, Trump is the first person with that playbook with a realistic shot at the nomination.
Pat still runs a column over at The American Conservative, which despite the name, has a lot of interesting writers from a variety of political perspectives, I mostly read it for the foreign policy contributors like Daniel Larison and Andrew Bacevich.
A football team that started a season with a playbook that included plays for 1st and 45 with 2 minutes to go, 4th and forever when behind by more than three touchdowns, and similar rare situations — and failed to include plays for the most important and most common situations in every game — would not go very far.
The reason I somewhat facetiously call “populist Republican” an oxymoron is that ALL of them avoid the most important aspect of populism — increased support for the working class, paid for by increased taxes on the very wealthy.
I think the first step is to show voters just how much wealth can be returned to the rest of us by embracing progressive populism as articulated by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. I think that most of those other dichotomies fall by wayside if that happens.