Welcome to Rev. Trump's Church of Emotional Economics
Donald Trump would not tell reporters whose advice he received in creating his recently unveiled tax plan, but I hear a familiar voice in its three-and-a-half pages. It sounds like Jeb Bush.
Bush released his own tax reform plan a couple of weeks earlier in September than his fellow Republican presidential candidate Trump. I'm not saying Trump plagiarized. All of the Republican candidates sound similar in their strong desire to cut taxes and spending -- and in their vague notions about how to raise revenue.
But Trump, for all of his robust braggadocio, sounds more vague than most. Trump's plan sounds similar to Bush's, except it cuts taxes more, raises less revenue and ends up, according to economic experts on the left and right, deeper in debt.
For example, anti-tax hawk Grover Norquist of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform applauded Trump's big ("Huge! Huge!" as Trump would say) tax cuts, even if Trump so far has offered few spending cuts.
But Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, panned Trump's plan in a Washington Post interview as "totally unserious" in its claims that it won't add to the deficit.
"It is tax policy as emotional populism," Strain said. "It uses words that some people will like, but those words are not connected to reality."
Indeed, that's a big reason why Trump's plan sounds remarkably similar to Jeb Bush's plan, only more reckless.
For example, Bush would cut the income tax rate for the highest incomes to 28 percent. Trump would cut it to 25 percent. Bush would trim the corporate tax rate to 20 percent. Trump would whittle it down to 15 percent. Bush would take 15 million Americans off the income tax rolls. Trump would take off 75 million -- all of whom, according to Trump, "will be able to send the Internal Revenue Service a one-page form that declares, 'I win.' "
That's an echo of a promise Trump made at a Sept. 9 rally. "We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with the winning."
Yes, like Santa Claus, Trump offers something to everybody except those who seriously worry about deficit reduction.
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