Boo!
One of the most interesting things about Donald Trump that's largely been obscured by his jarring anti-immigrant rhetoric is the fact that he would entertain raising taxes. While the GOP seems fine with him slandering Latino immigrants, tax policy is where party elites draw the line—I mean, that could really disproportionally affect rich people. Alan Rappeport
reports:
Alarmed that those ideas might catch on with some of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals — as his immigration policies have — the Club for Growth, an anti-tax think tank, is pulling together a team of economists to scrutinize his proposals and calculate the economic impact if he is elected.
“All of those are anti-growth policies,” said David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, a group that Republican candidates routinely court. "[...] if those are the policies he implements, they’ll drive the economy into the ground and we’ll see huge drops in G.D.P., and frankly I think it would lead to massive loss of jobs.”
Trump's idea of taxing the profits that hedge fund managers earn on their clients' holdings as ordinary income is basically in line with policies backed by the Obama administration (those profits are currently taxed at a lower rate of 15 to 20 percent). The administration also endorses changing the way American corporations are taxed overseas. All of this has made for a rather confounding twist:
Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is determined to produce his own corporate tax overhaul this fall, in part to finance a long-term highway and infrastructure bill. And he has the backing of President Obama and Senators Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York.
By inserting the issues into the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has turned an obscure effort on Capitol Hill into a potentially major fight in the national Republican Party.
What? Trump is vexing the GOP establishment again—this time on tax policy—and potentially turning them against each other. The Club for Growth is on its heels. Paul Ryan is supposedly trying to produce a corporate tax overhaul to raise revenue that could conceivably have the backing of Obama and Trump, while McConnell
already opposes the idea. Trump also hasn't signed Grover Norquist's "no new taxes" pledge yet. And he told Fox News:
“The one problem I have with the flat tax is that rich people are paying the same as people that are making very little money,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think there should be a graduation of some kind.”
Um ... time to do your part for America and buy that big screen TV/home theater you've been yearning for. Because YOLO.