http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/us/politics/donald-trump-wont-alter-tax-plan-spokeswoman-says-as-confusion-reigns.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=nytpolitics&smtyp=cur&_r=1Donald Trump Won’t Alter Tax Plan, Spokeswoman Says as Confusion ReignsBy JACKIE CALMESMAY 12, 2016
WASHINGTON — After days of confusion over Donald J. Trump’s hints that he would change his tax plan to reduce its budget-busting cost and make it less generous to the rich, his spokeswoman on Thursday sought to clear things up: He plans no changes, Hope Hicks said, and advisers who say otherwise do not speak for him.
One of those advisers, Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, had his own response: “I’m a little bummed out if his spokeswoman says they’re not going to make any changes to the plan.”
Mr. Trump set off the speculation a week ago, shortly after becoming the presumptive Republican nominee for president, when he told the business cable network CNBC that his months-old tax plan was just a starting point for a final deal. As for his plan’s tilt toward the rich and corporations, Mr. Trump said, “I am not necessarily a huge fan of that,” adding, “I am so much more into the middle class, who have just been absolutely forgotten in our country.”
Since then, he has vacillated on his intentions — repeatedly saying wealthy individuals and businesses would pay more taxes if he were president, and then clarifying that he means the richest taxpayers would pay more than under his original tax-cuts plan, but less than under current law.
Compounding the confusion, Politico reported on Wednesday that two informal advisers — Larry Kudlow, a CNBC host, and Mr. Moore, an economic commentator — said they were helping Mr. Trump at his request and had proposed changes to slash the plan’s cost from $10 trillion in its first decade to $3.8 trillion. They attributed the estimate to the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation.
Kyle E. Pomerleau, the Tax Foundation’s director of federal projects, confirmed the estimate. But he said Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Moore in their public comments “left out a lot of details about how Trump’s plan could get from the $10 trillion to the $3.8 trillion” — details that conflict with Mr. Trump’s professed favoritism toward the middle class.
Describing the tentative revisions of the plan provided to Tax Foundation analysts, Mr. Pomerleau said Mr. Trump’s original three tax brackets for individuals — with marginal tax rates of 10, 20 and 25 percent — would be raised to 15, 25 and 28 percent. The current tax code has seven brackets ranging from 10 to 39.6 percent.
Another change would shrink the standard deduction that benefits most taxpayers — to a proposed $10,000 for an individual filer from Mr. Trump’s original $25,000 deduction, which would have been nearly four times as generous as current law.
“Once you raise those marginal rates and drastically shrink the standard deduction, the benefits to the middle class basically go away,” Mr. Pomerleau said. “You’re only giving them to the top. So it’s unlikely that he would want to do that. It wouldn’t match up with the rhetoric he’s been using.”
Ms. Hicks succinctly dismissed any suggested discrepancy in an email: “There are no changes being made to the plan.”
That plan would give two-thirds of its tax cuts to the richest 20 percent of taxpayers, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
As for Mr. Kudlow and Mr. Moore, Ms. Hicks wrote, “They do not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign.”
In an interview, Mr. Moore said he and Mr. Kudlow met with Mr. Trump a few weeks ago at his Trump Tower office to talk about Mr. Trump’s tax plan, which he had outlined last winter.
“We just were asked to look at the plan and to try to make a few revisions to it so that it would be a little less costly,” Mr. Moore said.
At Mr. Trump’s direction, he said, he and Mr. Kudlow later passed along their proposed tweaks to Sam Clovis, the campaign policy director, who “said he likes a lot of the ideas.”
“One concern that I’ve had as a Trump supporter is that if the number is $10 trillion for the lost revenue, that’s going to be a hard thing to make up with spending cuts,” Mr. Moore said. Referring to the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, he added, “Hillary has already starting attacking him on it.”
