Trump’s Mess of a Tax ‘Plan’

National Review Online

Monday, May 09, 2016

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.