Why did Donald Trump Propose Huge Tax Cuts for the Rich ?
Trump is running as a bombastic billionaire progressive. His argument (to the extent that he has one) is that he is already rich so he doesn’t have to serve the rich. However, he also officially promised the yugest tax cut of all the candidates. I think this makes no political sense. Obviously he wants to cut his own taxes — he is rich selfish and greedy — but you aren’t supposed say your are out for yourself alone out loud.
Notably, Trump never mentions his campaign’s official proposal. He talks about raising taxes on some rich people. Jonathan Chait is puzzled
rump … barely differs from Ted Cruz in the specific proposals … . Trump has attracted the support of the majority of Republican voters who favor higher taxes on the rich, but Trump himself would reduce them.
Clicking the link to a Rand survey I found this figure
So why did he propose cutting his own taxes ? Other Republicans can’t attack him for this very unpopular proposal, but, if he is the nominee, the Democratic candidate surely will.
The only explanation I can think of goes as follows: Trump wanted a detailed serious looking policy proposal (one including numbers) and the only serious looking policy proposal his staff could generate was a huge tax cut for rich people. The usual Republican wonk shortage was exacerbated by the fact that no semi serious Republican was willing to have anything to do with them.
I think this shows that he really has no ideas except for 1) cut taxes 2) negotiate great deals 3) make Mexico pay for a wall 4) remove lines around the states and 5) Trump is Great.
I can’t see a reason other than one upsmanship. You don’t do a serious proposal as you only have people to lose from one, so you disarm them by promising the moon and more than anyone else knowing you will never have to deliver. It does place him alongside his opponents rather than separate himself from them which is probably why he disregards this mostly. It is like checking boxes off where few care about what they are filled with but just to be ignored and those that care won’t get anything from any other Republican either.
I don’t see the great mystery in Trump’s platform including tax cuts for the rich. That’s been the Republican platform for decades. Maybe forever. the only mystery is why working class voters continue to ignore this fact. Vote Republican and the taxes on the rich go down and taxes on the rest of U.S. workers go up. The revenue has to come from some place. Working class Republican voters are focused on social issues, not their own economic self interest. Many Democrat working class voters have a similar ideological perspective. Blinded by the light? Bigotry and fear trump economic understanding. That’s what Trump and his cohorts understand and that’s why Trump is out front at the moment. He’s being louder on the stump about the issues his admirers care most about. Surveys that find voters wanting the rich to pay more taxes are probably asking the questions in the wrong manner.
I think the explanation is that he assumes that he’ll get the nomination, but he wants the support of the party in November, and tax cuts for the rich are what the party wants.
Winning!
I wrote about this on Mar. 11, the day after the last Repub debate, in a post called “The Key to Defeating Trump in the General Election Is in a Single Sentence of His in Last Night’s Debate: Angry Americans want big tax cuts for the wealthy.” What happened is that while Trump had been campaigning all along not just on the xenophobia stuff and antitrade-treaty things but also on the general idea of raising taxes on the wealthy, including on top corporate executives, in September he ramped up the higher-taxes-on-the-wealthy language in two interviews and also talked about the need for major infrastructure spending and for a major role for the federal government in providing healthcare coverage. The second interview was on Sept. 13 and was quite aggressive about the tax increases on the wealthy. It also was the last time he talked about it.
Shortly after that, and presumably in response to it, the Koch brothers’ super PAC announced that it planned to unleash $1 million in TV and radio ads against Trump. Also at that time, Trump was coming under media pressure to release a comprehensive fiscal-policy plan, because Bush and Rubio had recently done so. And this was also at the height of the Ben Carson bubble; Carson was overtaking Trump in Iowa polls and closing in in national polls. Trump promised that he would soon release a comprehensive fiscal plan.
Which he did, on Oct. 2. Its main purpose was to ward off the Kochs and their super PAC, as well as similar attacks from other major-donor super PACs, so it had to be diametrically opposite of what he’d been saying his fiscal policies would be. Which it is. He had his then-newly hired Repub-honcho policy guy, who’d left the Rick Perry campaign to join Trump’s, throw something together that would reassure the Kochs. The plan was Jeb Bush’s then-recently-announced one, but with even deeper tax cuts for the wealthy. He published it on his website and announced this to the media, but never mentioned it at his rallies or in radio interviews or the like.
In fact, I think he just never mentioned it at all. Until in that last debate, when he listed the things he thinks voters don’t like, and included something like “they don’t want to see tax hikes.” Ah. He’d announced a couple of day before that he now would be trying to unite the party behind him, and at that debate (which I didn’t watch but read about) he asked that the party unite behind him since he’d just won several primaries and was way ahead in delegates. But of course uniting the Republican Party means sending dog whistles to the donors, party honchos and elites that you’ll give them what they want most—large tax cuts on the wealthy—while disguising this for the hoi polloi by failing to mention that what he really meant was that the donors and party elites don’t want to see tax hikes for the wealthy.
As I said in a post here last week, the Republican establishment thought it could defeat him by calling him a con man. It didn’t work, because the con they were referring to was that he is not in fact a rightwing purist. To which large swaths of Republicans and Republican-leaners said: Good. The more Trump tries to cozy up to the establishment, the less attractive he becomes to parts of his base. And now that the party’s establishment has made clear that it will try to use Cruz as their means to stop Trump, mainly because they trust Cruz but not Trump to actually do their fiscal and regulatory-policy bidding, it seems to me unlikely that Trump will think it’s a good idea for him to keep that yuge-tax-cuts-for-the-rich proposal much longer.