Taxes

There’s No Plan for The Plan

Written by SK Ashby

Trump is expected to kick off a campaign to sell "tax reform" (read: tax cuts the rich) this week, but there's more than one problem.

We already know the White House is not going to release their own tax reform plan and will instead sell a plan cooked up by congressional Republicans, but congressional Republicans don't have a plan either.

To highlight this disparity and breakdown in communication, Trump's chief economic adviser claims the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee would produce a bill in the next few weeks, but that's obviously not going to happen. Furthermore, that timeline appears to be news to the Ways and Means Committee.

“They’re nowhere. They’re just nowhere,” said Henrietta Treyz, a tax analyst with Veda Partners and former Senate tax staffer. “I see them putting these ideas out as though they’re making progress, but they are the same regurgitated ideas we’ve been talking about for 20 years that have never gotten past the white-paper stage.” [...]

National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn told the Financial Times in an interview published Friday that the Ways and Means Committee would write the tax legislation "in the next three or four weeks." [Ways and Means Committee spokeswoman Emily Schillinger] declined to confirm that, saying only that the panel is working toward achieving a tax overhaul in 2017.

Two things are going to happen in the very near future.

Trump is going to sell a plan that doesn't exist and he's going to promise it much earlier than it could reasonably happen.

Trump is suppose to talk about reform during a rally in Missouri this week, but my gut says he'll spend about 10 seconds talking about taxes while the rest of his rambling speech will be dedicated to raw red meat.