Donald Trump can’t make up his mind about what to do about taxes.
Last year, as a candidate for the Republican presidential nominee, Trump released a detailed tax plan. As soon as all the other Republican candidates dropped out of the race, however, he started to distance himself from it, saying the plan is just a “concept” and the starting place for negotiations. The distancing went so far that he commissioned two well-known conservatives to draft a set of suggestions for changing it, lowering its price tag.
But on Thursday, a Trump spokesperson said that the proposal will stay the way it is. “There are no changes being made to the plan,” Hope Hicks told the New York Times in an email, adding that the two men brought in to suggest changes, Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore, don’t speak for the candidate.
The latest reversal in position may have come over disagreement over how exactly to change the plan. As he put space between himself and his own proposal, Trump argued that the rich should pay more in taxes and the middle class should pay less. While he later switched that stance to mean that the rich would eventually end up paying more than his original plan after negotiations with Congress, but less than they currently pay, he stuck to his position that the middle class needs more relief.
But the suggestions from Kudlow and Moore wouldn’t have followed that playbook. While the top marginal tax rate paid by the wealthy wouldn’t be quite as low as Trump’s original proposal, it would still have been lowered from its current rate, giving them a cut. Meanwhile, an analyst at the Tax Foundation, who crunched the new numbers to estimate its cost, revealed that “the benefits to the middle class basically go away” under the draft changes given that the top rates they pay would also be increased from Trump’s original plan and breaks under standard deductions would be wiped away. “You’re only giving [breaks] to the top,” he said of the draft.
That would have made Trump’s tax plan even more tilted toward the rich. But his current one is already very generous. According to the Tax Policy Center, the richest fifth of the country would get more than two-thirds of the benefits, with the top 1 percent netting nearly 40 percent. The middle would get just 11 percent, while the poorest Americans would be handed 0.8 percent of the tax relief.
Without any tweaks, the price tag will also stay eye-poppingly high. Both the Tax Policy Center and the Tax Foundation estimated that it would cost about $10 trillion over a decade, the most expensive plan offered up on the Republican side except for Ben Carson’s and far more than the cost of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush’s tax cuts.
Trump has not said how he would cover that cost. If he were to stick to his pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid from cuts — something he has been staunch about until a campaign spokesperson changed that position this week — that would require cutting all other government spending by more than three-quarters. On top of that, if he increased military spending or even kept it where it is, he would have to all but eliminate everything else the government does, including the programs that benefit the poor and middle class.