Trump's Mess of a Tax "Plan"

[EasyAce]

Editorial, National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435189/trumps-tax-flip-flop

Donald Trump’s latest position on taxes is that he has no position.

On Sunday, Trump suggested — contradicting his own tax plan, which among other things proposes
reducing the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent — that he would be open to raising taxes
on the wealthiest Americans, that “the wealthy are willing to pay more,” and that no one should concern
themselves with the enormous cost of his tax plan because “by the time it gets negotiated, it’s going
to be a different plan.”

If this is the art of the deal, it doesn’t seem particularly artful. It’s one thing to be willing to give a little
on your opening bid. It’s another to announce from the get-go that your opening bid is a sham and
that you expect to lose. Congressional Democrats, who actually know what they want, will be more
than able to make that happen.

On Monday morning, Trump tried to backtrack, saying that he was basing his comments not on the
current tax code but on his own plan, so that by “hike” he meant simply a smaller tax cut — that is,
he’ll get his way, just less of it. In Trump’s defense, he made clear that he was using his own plan as
a baseline when he said that “businesses might pay a little bit more.” But during a lengthy exchange
on ABC’s This Week, he used language that suggested he thought there’d be an absolute increase in
the top rate. And that’s no surprise. Trump’s plan was always transparently an afterthought: It would
increase the federal debt more than any tax cut any presidential nominee has ever proposed, and yet he
rarely talked about it. It was, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said of Bill Clinton’s feint toward conservatives
who weren’t paying much attention, “boob bait for the bubbas.” With the nomination locked up, he need
not bother with the pretense.

This is only the latest of Trump’s flip-flops on key matters of economic policy. Despite declaring last fall
that wages were “too high,” he also confirmed on Sunday that he is “looking at” a minimum-wage increase,
and is deciding on the “numbers.” (He then, once again, tried to clean it up by adding that the minimum
wage should be up to the states.)

Republicans should expect much more of the above as the campaign season continues. Trump has already
made clear that he plans to attack Hillary from her left — for instance, on her Iraq War vote. But more to
the point, Trump clearly has no particular interest in advancing a coherent, conservative economic agenda.
Laying ever-higher taxes on the wealthy has been a staple of progressive economic policy for going on a
century. Tentative support from the presumptive nominee of the Republican party is a signal event.

But, then, as Trump declared this weekend, he is the standard-bearer of the “Republican” party, not the
“conservative” party. He apparently wants there to be no mistake about that.