Welcome to Rev. Trump's Church of Emotional Economics
Analysts for the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice estimate Trump's plan would reduce tax revenue by more than $10 trillion over 10 years. The more conservative Tax Foundation predicted that, without economic growth, the plan would add $11.98 trillion to the deficit over ten years.
That "economic growth" qualifier is significant. Team Trump points out that, as long as the nation's economic growth is 3 percent or more, their plan will be "deficit neutral" or even reduce the deficit.
In other words, you've got to have faith. If budgets are a moral document, as some activists have claimed, the Trump budget is a downright religious document. Welcome to Rev. Trump's Church of Emotional Economics, where faith matters more than facts.
Which says a lot about why Trump seems so effortlessly to have turned his celebrity into frontrunner status among Republican nominees. As Michael D'Antonio, author of "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success" puts it, "Obscured by hype, the facts of his life didn't matter as much as the idea of him."
Yes, it is the idea of Trump that excites his supporters. Like other bombastic populist candidates, he offers a mirror and a megaphone to express grass-roots frustrations.
He has tapped into an angry segment of the population that admires the Trump brand, which stands for a willingness to fight, regardless of whether the goal is clear, a contempt for media and political elites in both parties and, above all, "winning."
It beats losing, which brings to mind one tax that Trump specifically targeted for elimination: the "death tax," which is the clever way that Republicans have tried to rebrand estate taxes. Only the largest 0.2 percent of estates have to pay it. That would include Donald Trump's heirs but few of the rest of us.
More significantly, to those who think Trump's plan sounds so brilliant, consider this: Do you think Trump himself would accept a business plan that ends up with less money than it had when it began, unless all the stars line up for a robust economy over the next 10 years? That calls for a huge, huge amount of faith.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
