http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-taxes-tax-reform-223041 Trump launches tax plan rewrite
The GOP front-runner asks influential conservatives to help cut the price of his proposal.
By Shane Goldmacher
05/11/16 05:18 AM EDT
Donald Trump’s campaign has enlisted influential conservative economists to revise his tax package and make it more politically palatable by slashing the $10 trillion sticker price. Their main targets: Lifting the top tax rate from Trump’s original plan and expanding the number of people who would have to pay taxes under it.
Trump’s initial proposal, rolled out with fanfare at Trump Tower in Manhattan last September, has been in the spotlight since he became the presumptive Republican nominee last week and promptly declared that it was only a starting point for any negotiations with congressional Democrats, should he become president.
But it turns out Trump’s team is open to revamping it far sooner than that; the campaign last month contacted at least two prominent conservative economists — Larry Kudlow, the CNBC television host, and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation and a longtime Wall Street Journal writer — to spearhead an effort to update the package.
“What we’ve been trying to do is help advise him a little bit to try to reduce the cost of the plan” and still encourage economic growth, Moore said in an interview.
Trump’s initial plan has come under criticism from both the right and left for vastly expanding the deficit, with the nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimating it would add $10 trillion to the federal deficit in the next decade. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has moved quickly to tattoo the plan’s steep price tag onto Trump, with her team holding a call on Monday calling it a reckless expansion of debt.
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