His proposals are a series of puzzle pieces that don’t fit together into a coherent whole, according to experts on both sides of the aisle.
Donald Trump’s bare-bones tax plan would cut rates — but add more than $10 trillion to the debt. His goal to trim the national debt to zero in eight years would require slashing all federal spending by two-thirds, even if he ditched the proposed tax cut. And he’s got no plans to trim Medicare or Social Security, the main drivers of spending
.. And like most Republicans, Trump has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act to save money, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said doing so would increase budget deficits by $137 billion over the next decade — and, according to a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study in June, would also cause 24 million people to lose their health insurance.
.. The main drivers of economic harm, Moody’s said, would be increased debt, higher interest rates, a contracting labor force — due to mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — and the impact of proposed tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports.
.. “Trump repeatedly, blatantly and knowingly makes up or gravely distorts facts to support his positions or create populist divisions,” Paulson wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post, in which he announced his intention to vote for Hillary Clinton. “Simply put, a Trump presidency is unthinkable.”
.. “The last super successful businessman elected to be president on that credential was Herbert Hoover,” said Holtz-Eakin. “Things didn’t go very well for him.”
Truth and Trumpism
A more important vice in political coverage, which we’ve seen all too often in previous elections — but will be far more damaging if it happens this time — is false equivalence.
.. You might think that this would be impossible on substantive policy issues, where the asymmetry between the candidates is almost ridiculously obvious. To take the most striking comparison, Mr. Trump has proposed huge tax cuts with no plausible offsetting spending cuts, yet has also promised to pay down U.S. debt; meanwhile, Mrs. Clinton has proposed modest spending increases paid for by specific tax hikes.
..I’ve seen claims that Tea Partiers were motivated by Wall Street bailouts, or even that the movement was largely about fiscal responsibility, driven by voters upset about budget deficits.
.. if you followed the actual progress of the movement, it was always about white voters angry at the thought that their taxes might be used to help Those People, whether via mortgage relief for distressed minority homeowners or health care for low-income families.
.. Trump support in the primaries was strongly correlated with racial resentment: We’re looking at a movement of white men angry that they no longer dominate American society the way they used to. And to pretend otherwise is to give both the movement and the man who leads it a free pass.
In the end, bad reporting probably won’t change the election’s outcome, because the truth is that those angry white men are right about their declining role. America is increasingly becoming a racially diverse, socially tolerant society, not at all like the Republican base, let alone the plurality of that base that chose Donald Trump.
The Republican Party Must Answer for What It Did to Kansas and Louisiana
Wouldn’t it be important for those candidates to explain why their program wouldn’t fail the country in the same way it had failed the Green Mountain State? If you think yes, then you should demand that Donald Trump, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz explain why their tax policies won’t fail America in the same way they’ve failed the people of Kansas.
.. In 2010, the tea-party wave put Sam Brownback into the Sunflower State’s governor’s mansion and Republican majorities in both houses of its legislature. Together, they implemented the conservative movement’s blueprint for Utopia: They passed massive tax breaks for the wealthy and repealed all income taxes on more than 100,000 businesses. They tightened welfare requirements, privatized the delivery of Medicaid, cut $200 million from the education budget, eliminated four state agencies and 2,000 government employees. In 2012, Brownback helped replace the few remaining moderate Republicans in the legislature with conservative true believers. The following January, after signing the largest tax cut in Kansas history, Brownback told the Wall Street Journal, “My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.’ ”
.. The Koch-backed Kansas Policy Institute predicted that Brownback’s 2013 tax plan would generate $323 million in new revenue. During its first full year in operation, the plan produced a $688 million loss. Meanwhile, Kansas’s job growth actually trailed that of its neighboring states. With that nearly $700 million deficit, the state had bought itself a 1.1 percent increase in jobs, just below Missouri’s 1.5 percent and Colorado’s 3.3.
.. This data is not lost on the people of Kansas — as of November, Brownback’s approval rating was 26 percent, the lowest of any governor in the United States.
.. Leaving aside the low bar the Texas senator sets for himself — my giveaway to the one percent will cost a bit less than the Iraq War! — Cruz only stays beneath $1 trillion when you employ the kind of “dynamic scoring” that has consistently underestimated the costs of tax cuts in Kansas. Under a conventional analysis, the bill runs well over $3 trillion, with 44 percent of that lost money accruing to the one percent. John Kasich’s tax plan includes cutting the top marginal rate by more than ten percent along with a similar cut to the rates on capital gains and business taxes.
An Analysis of Ted Cruz’s Tax Plan
The Tax Policy Center estimates that the proposal would reduce federal revenue by $8.6 trillion over its first decade and an additional $12.2 trillion over the subsequent 10 years, before accounting for added interest costs or considering macroeconomic feedback effects.1 Most of the revenue loss would stem from repealing payroll taxes ($12.2 trillion), cutting individual income taxes ($11.9 trillion), and eliminating the corporate income tax ($3.5 trillion). The VAT would raise $19.2 trillion over the decade, offsetting only 70 percent of the cost of the tax cuts
.. In 2017, the proposal would cut taxes at every income level, but high-income taxpayers would receive the biggest cuts, both in dollar terms and as a percentage of income. Overall, the plan would cut taxes by an average of about $6,100, or about 8.5 percent of after-tax income.
.. However, the highest-income 0.1 percent of taxpayers (those with incomes over $3.7 million in 2015 dollars) would experience an average tax cut of more than $2 million in 2017, nearly 29 percent of after-tax income. Households in the middle of the income distribution would receive an average tax cut of $1,800, or 3.2 percent of after-tax income, while taxpayers in the lowest quintile would receive an average tax cut of $46, or 0.4 percent of after-tax income.