Taxes

Top Trump Adviser: The GOP Tax Bill Will ‘Hurt a Lot of People’

Written by SK Ashby

Trump's top outside economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who isn't a member of Trump's cabinet but did provide input on the structure of the tax cut bill, says it will "hurt a lot of different people."

Kublow is not someone I would consult for economic advice for reasons that Kudlow himself will add, but he says the GOP bill should have been a straight-up tax cut without the massive tax hikes on middle and working class people.

“The individual side of this is maybe not the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” said Larry Kudlow, a prominent economic commentator and former adviser to President Ronald Reagan, in the latest POLITICO Money podcast. “But when you end the state and local deduction, because rates are still relatively high, you are going to hurt a lot of different people. So the internal logic was not good and this is not a true tax reform bill.

He's right about this but, as you know, the GOP bill is what it is because they're jamming it through with a simple majority using the reconciliation process. But no one is forcing them to do that; it's what they've chosen.

Now, here's the problem with Kudlow:

[Kudlow] acknowledged that it’s a risk, adding that the Obama administration tried a spending approach to stimulating the economy and now it’s the GOP’s turn to try supply-side tax cuts.

Just give us a chance and in three or four years, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work; we all go back to the drawing board. I get that. But it’s our turn,” he said.

They've had their chance! They've had many chances. And it hasn't even been that long. They keep doing this over and over again, and it never works.

To say that we should all commit economic Seppuku yet again just because its "our turn" is certifiably insane. It's juvenile and selfish. It's borderline sociopathic. It's a deep madness.

It's not as if we're hurtling toward an economic and social disaster based on strong convictions and hard campaigning. And maybe that's what makes this so maddening. The GOP's push for tax cuts has been undertaken with a child-like level of naivety and whimsy.

Republican senators say they "hope" corporations will "do the right thing." Trump's top outside adviser says this is just another economic experiment that will probably "hurt a lot of different people."

There's a profound sense that almost none of them truly believe this is all going to work, but they're doing it anyway.

President Obama did stimulate the economy, by the way. There's no shortage of Republican lawmakers in office today who gladly posed alongside giant stimulus checks made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus) even though they voted against it. That includes Speaker Paul Ryan himself.