THE MORNING PLUM:
This morning, President Trump admitted that the “globalist” Koch brothers “love” his economic agenda of “Tax & Regulation Cuts.” But, as useful an admission as that is, the two tweets he issued about Charles and David Koch actually go considerably further than that in revealing the depths of the scam Trump has perpetrated on his voters.
This is particularly true when you look at Trump’s tweets in light of his administration’s new effort to unilaterally cut taxes on capital gains.
The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade. I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas. They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them richer. … They want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed, I’m for America First & the American Worker — a puppet for no one.
The campaign story Trump told about self-enriching globalist elites was that they have employed permissive immigration and misguided or corrupt trade policies to subject U.S. workers to debilitating labor competition from border-crossing migrants and slave-wage workers in China. Trump supplemented this economic nationalism with vows to make wealthy investors pay more, secure huge job-creating infrastructure expenditures and protect social insurance — thus promising a broad, dramatic ideological break with the GOP.
All that’s left of this vision, of course, is Trump’s draconian immigration crackdown, which is spreading terror and misery in immigrant communities, and Trump’s trade war, which is threatening to upend complex global supply chains and is badly rattling our international alliances. On everything else, Trump threw in with traditional GOP plutocratic priorities: He has done all he can to gut consumer, financial and environmental regulations; his tax plan lavished huge, regressive benefits on the wealthy; his infrastructure plan vanished; and his vow to replace Obamacare with better coverage “for everybody” morphed into a failed effort to cut health insurance for millions (to facilitate tax cuts for the wealthy).
Now Trump is mulling yet another plan to cut taxes by $100 billion mainly on the rich: His administration is exploring whether he can unilaterally cut capital-gains taxes. Under this plan, the Treasury Department could supposedly allow (though this would be fought in court) Americans to calculate their capital gains by adjusting their original price to inflation, reducing the amount of gains subject to taxation. Studies have shown this would slash revenues by $100 billion over 10 years (potentially reducing public expenditures later) and that the vast majority of its benefits would go to the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent.
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