Trump’s economic team estimated that the complete tax plan, combined with rollbacks to some federal regulations and new initiatives to open up more public and private lands for oil and gas drilling, would deliver 3.5 percent growth per year for the next decade and produce 25 million new jobs.
Advertisement
Speaking to the Economic Club of NY on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee said that’s the estimate of his economic team, based on his policies of renegotiating trade deals; lowering the corporate tax rate to 15%; and an immediate halt to new regulations on industry, among other policies. That relatively new method is controversial among economists; it analyses the cost of a policy proposal by predicting how it will affect employment, investment and spending over time. “It’s a bold and ambitious and forward looking plan to massively increase jobs, wages, income, and opportunities for the people of our country”.
Trump’s plan could lead the USA economy to be $1 trillion smaller than projected in 2021 if the plan is put in place, the economics research firm Oxford Economics said on Tuesday.
Republicans, including Mr Trump, favour this model, but critics say it hides the cost of tax cuts.
Trump also proposed simplifying the US tax code for individuals, reducing the current seven tax brackets to three: 12 percent, 25 percent and 33 percent of income after deductions.
The new details include caps on the total amount of federal tax deductions that Americans may claim on their individual income taxes, a move targeted at limiting tax breaks for the highest income earners. He is also sticking to his guns on drastically lowering the tax on all business income to just 15 percent. It differs from “static” scoring, a traditional method that assumes the policies won’t change the economic behaviour of affected individuals and simply looks at their expected costs. And he says his under his plan the US would achieve a minimum of 3.5 percent annual growth over 10 years. The celebrity businessman said that “excessive regulation” costs Americans almost $2 trillion a year. And finally, the remaining $800 billion would be addressed through “simple, common sense reforms”.
On Monday, Vice News filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., requesting the IRS turn over all audits of Trump’s tax returns from 2002 onward.
However, he did pitch a “penny plan”, which would reduce non-defense, non-entitlement spending by 1 percent every year, arguing it could add up to over $1 trillion in savings over a decade.
Basically, Trump keeps changing his answer about why he won’t release his tax return and his son’s new excuse is that the people would read too much into them and have a lot of questions. “The only thing she can offer is a welfare check”, he said.
And he was bleak about the prospects of the country if he is not elected.
“We are going to turn this around”, he said of the economy.
Advertisement
During a question-and-answer session with a moderator, Trump cast the nation’s current economy in gloomy terms, and described the election as a “last chance” to prevent the United States from becoming a “large-scale version of Venezuela”.
