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Donald Trump would not tell reporters whose advice he received in creating his recently unveiled tax plan, but I hear a familiar voice in its 3 1/2 pages. It sounds like Jeb Bush’s.
Bush released his own tax-reform plan a couple of weeks earlier in September than fellow Republican presidential candidate Trump. I’m not saying Trump plagiarized. All of the Republican candidates sound similar in their strong desire to cut taxes and spending — and in their vague notions about how to raise revenue.
But Trump, for all of his robust braggadocio, sounds more vague than most. Trump’s plan sounds similar to Bush’s, except it would cut taxes more, raise less revenue and end up, according to economic experts on the left and right, deeper in debt.
For example, anti-tax hawk Grover Norquist of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform applauded Trump’s big (“Huge! Huge!” as Trump would say) tax cuts, even if Trump so far has offered few spending cuts.
But Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, panned Trump’s plan in a Washington Post interview as “totally unserious” in its claims that it won’t add to the deficit.
“It is tax policy as emotional populism,” Strain said. “It uses words that some people will like, but those words are not connected to reality.”
Indeed, that’s a big reason Trump’s plan sounds remarkably similar to Jeb Bush’s plan, only more reckless.
For example, Bush would cut the income tax rate for the highest incomes to 28 percent. Trump would cut it to 25 percent. Bush would trim the corporate tax rate to 20 percent. Trump would whittle it to 15 percent. Bush would take 15 million Americans off the income tax rolls. Trump would take off 75 million — all of whom, according to Trump, “will be able to send the Internal Revenue Service a one-page form that declares, ‘I win.’”
That’s an echo of a promise Trump made at a Sept. 9 rally.
“We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with the winning,” he said.
Yes, like Santa Claus, Trump offers something to everybody except those who seriously worry about deficit reduction.
Analysts for the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice estimate Trump’s plan would reduce tax revenue by more than $10 trillion over 10 years. The more conservative Tax Foundation predicted that, without economic growth, the plan would add $11.98 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.
That “economic growth” qualifier is significant. Team Trump points out that, as long as the nation’s economic growth is 3 percent or more, its plan will be “deficit neutral” or even reduce the deficit.
In other words, you’ve got to have faith. If budgets are a moral document, as some activists have claimed, the Trump budget is a downright religious document. Welcome to the Rev. Trump’s Church of Emotional Economics, where faith matters more than facts.
That says a lot about why Trump seems so effortlessly to have turned his celebrity into front-runner status among Republican nominees. As Michael D’Antonio, author of “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” puts it, “Obscured by hype, the facts of his life didn’t matter as much as the idea of him.”
Yes, it is the idea of Trump that excites his supporters. Like other bombastic populist candidates, he offers a mirror and a megaphone to express grass-roots frustrations.
He has tapped into an angry segment of the population that admires the Trump brand, which stands for a willingness to fight, regardless of whether the goal is clear, a contempt for news media and political elites in both parties and, above all, “winning.”
It beats losing, which brings to mind one tax Trump specifically targeted for elimination: the “death tax,” which is the clever way Republicans have tried to rebrand estate taxes. Only the largest 0.2 percent of estates have to pay it. That would include Donald Trump’s heirs but few of the rest of us.
More significantly, to those who think Trump’s plan sounds so brilliant, consider this: Do you think Trump would accept a business plan that ends up with less money than it had when it began, unless all the stars line up for a robust economy over the next 10 years? That calls for a huge, huge amount of faith.
Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
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