Getting harder to tell what party the Donald is trying to represent.
Tribune Content Agency — August 9, 2016
Is Donald Trump becoming what he, among many other conservatives, warns us against?
In his economic policy speech to the prestigious Detroit Economic Club on Monday the Republican presidential nominee sounded a lot like a tax-and-spend Democrat. Call him a “tax-and-deduct Republican.”
Aides billed his speech as a blueprint for stimulating growth and creating jobs. It also was aimed at resetting Trump’s campaign after his own runaway mouth — including his verbal attacks on a Muslim American family whose son died fighting in Iraq — helped to erase any bump he received in the polls from the Republican National Convention.
His mission in Detroit: Look and sound presidential. Use a Teleprompter. Offer something to every income bracket of voters. Don’t respond to protesters in the audience — who interrupted his speech more than a dozen times. Don’t insult anybody, except maybe Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. If so, don’t lay it on too thick. Show the kindlier, gentler Donald.
He also turned out to be a generous Donald. He sounded very generous with other people’s money, as conservatives like to say about liberals, but not with details as to how his new programs would be paid for.
Among other eyebrow-arching ideas, he proposed to allow parents to fully deduct the average cost of child care from their taxable income. That’s a proposal that echoes a more bipartisan era, back when liberals and conservatives worked together to help ease the burdens on working-class and middle-class families. That was a long time ago.
Yet it is the long-running resentments of white, working-class and middle-class Americans who feel displaced and disowned by Washington that Trump has tapped for his surprisingly successful campaign. As I often have said, his issues — particularly immigration reform, income inequality and “fair trade” agreements — are good, but I don’t think he’s the best advocate for them.
His child-care deduction, for example, sounds great. It offers positive incentives for parents to work, get good child care and quite possibly reduce abortion rates. But, problem one, it doesn’t apply to those who need help the most: the nearly half of American households who don’t earn enough to owe federal income taxes.
And, problem two, Trump doesn’t say how this deduction or his other ideas will be funded. Any new tax deduction means a loss of government revenue — and deeper deficits — unless it is made up somewhere else. Trump’s tax plan would have reduced federal revenue by $9.5 trillion over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Deficit hawks tend to be Republican, but this may be another case of Trump departing from his party and from mainstream conservative orthodoxy.
Other parts of Trump’s agenda sound great for corporations and upper-income workers but don’t offer much to his working-class base. The “death tax” he promises to scrap actually is the estate tax, which effects only 0.2 (zero-point-two) percent of all estates. It doesn’t kick in until the estate exceeds $5.4 million for an individual or $10.9 million for a married couple.
Call it what you want but it’s not a tax break for the poor, no matter how many upset waitresses or taxi drivers I run into who think it applies to them.
“I want to jumpstart America,” he said. “It can be done and it won’t even be that hard.”
Right. On other occasions he has said he can beat the Islamic State “quickly,” too. In neither case does he give even a hint as to why we should believe he can succeed — and “quickly” — after so many others have failed at any speed.
Trump simplistically blamed Detroit’s economic woes on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by President Bill Clinton, and other trade deals — which, by the way, received bipartisan support. Some workers win and others lose in such deals. Although on balance the nation’s economy has benefited, the fate of displaced workers has been largely overlooked as a mainstream political issue until Trumpism caught fire in this election cycle.
Those same issues fueled Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign on the Democratic side, too, effectively enough to move former Secretary of State Clinton to the left, even on the Trans-Pacific Partnership that President Barack Obama negotiated.
Trump’s slump in the polls may show a repudiation of his campaign manners. But the issues are still important, even when the candidates fall short.
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
