This post The Donald’s Seinfeld Tax Plan – A Big Show About Nothing appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
Someone should remind the Donald that he actually is President and that it’s high time he accomplished something. Anything.
Back on April 21st, for example, he promised that a core feature of his platform — a sweeping, pro-jobs tax reduction — would be soon unveiled.
Trump said the tax reform package will be introduced on “Wednesday or shortly thereafter,” just before his 100th day in office. While the president would not reveal details about the tax plan, he did say that the cuts will be “bigger I believe than any tax cut ever.”
Well, we’ve passed the eighteenth Wednesday since that promise. What was actually delivered back then, of course, was a one-page statement of vague principles, fond aspirations and apple pie.
So in Springfield, Missouri this week, the Donald is launched tax reform efforts again. And yet again the White House spin brigade has already made clear that it’s all about tone, not substance.
That is, he will orate about tax fairness and closing loopholes, but not name any. He will promise big rate reductions but not say how big and for whom. He will promise to liberate jobs by slashing the corporate tax rate without explaining exactly why that will result in more jobs rather than more stock buybacks. And there were no numbers about how the implied trillions of revenue lost over the next decade will be paid for.
Instead, Donald puckered himself up into a meld of Huey Long and Jack Kemp while preaching up a storm in favor of the “little guy”. A reference to the average worker who purportedly is being crushed by the Federal income tax and who gets tangled in the complexity of the IRS code without a high-priced tax lawyer alongside loophole-savvy financial advisors.
Accordingly, the Donald is going to “unrig” the tax code for these little guys, thereby keeping faith with the millions of dispossessed citizens of Flyover America who voted for him last November.
Except that narrative is essentially nonsense. This isn’t 1981. There is no raging inflation and bracket creep propelling the middle class into tax tyranny. In fact, owing to indexing and large increases in the standard deduction and personal exemption over the last 35 years, the income tax has essentially morphed into a Rich Man’s Levy.
The Donald’s song and dance about tax simplification and reduction comes right out of the well-thumbed GOP hymnal. It speaks little to the blue collar folks — in places like the western Pennsylvania steel country, industrial Ohio, the Michigan auto belt and the manufacturing towns of Wisconsin and Iowa — who on the margin accounted for his electoral college victory.
The Donald, Tax Plan Rhetoric and the Gong Show
Trump’s tax reform airball will promise to make filing with the IRS more palatable to tens of millions of citizens who, apparently, find it inconvenient to shell out $25 to file their Federal income tax return with TurboTax.
Among the 148 million …read more
Source:: Daily Reckoning feed
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