Trump's Economic Reset Short-Changes His Base
Is Donald Trump becoming what he, among many other conservatives, warns us against?
In his economic policy speech to the prestigious Detroit Economic Club on Monday the Republican presidential nominee sounded a lot like a tax-and-spend Democrat. Call him a "tax-and-deduct Republican."
Aides billed his speech as a blueprint for stimulating growth and creating jobs. It also was aimed at resetting Trump's campaign after his own runaway mouth -- including his verbal attacks on a Muslim American family whose son died fighting in Iraq -- helped to erase any bump he received in the polls from the Republican National Convention.
His mission in Detroit: Look and sound presidential. Use a Teleprompter. Offer something to every income bracket of voters. Don't respond to protesters in the audience -- who interrupted his speech more than a dozen times. Don't insult anybody, except maybe Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. If so, don't lay it on too thick. Show the kindlier, gentler Donald.
He also turned out to be a generous Donald. He sounded very generous with other people's money, as conservatives like to say about liberals, but not with details as to how his new programs would be paid for.
Among other eyebrow-arching ideas, he proposed to allow parents to fully deduct the average cost of child care from their taxable income. That's a proposal that echoes a more bipartisan era, back when liberals and conservatives worked together to help ease the burdens on working-class and middle-class families. That was a long time ago.
Yet it is the long-running resentments of white, working-class and middle-class Americans who feel displaced and disowned by Washington that Trump has tapped for his surprisingly successful campaign. As I often have said, his issues -- particularly immigration reform, income inequality and "fair trade" agreements -- are good, but I don't think he's the best advocate for them.
His child-care deduction, for example, sounds great. It offers positive incentives for parents to work, get good child care and quite possibly reduce abortion rates. But, problem one, it doesn't apply to those who need help the most: the nearly half of American households who don't earn enough to owe federal income taxes.
And, problem two, Trump doesn't say how this deduction or his other ideas will be funded. Any new tax deduction means a loss of government revenue -- and deeper deficits -- unless it is made up somewhere else. Trump's tax plan would have reduced federal revenue by $9.5 trillion over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Deficit hawks tend to be Republican, but this may be another case of Trump departing from his party and from mainstream conservative orthodoxy.
...continued
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
