Trump Teases Another Massive Tax Cut

By Yuval Rosenberg

Hospitalized but Hunting for Votes: Trump
Teases Another Massive Tax Cut

President Trump just left the Walter Reed Medical Center
to return to the White House — a decision that’s astonishing
outside experts and raising additional questions about his
condition, his care and the White House’s transparency about
both.

“Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life,” the
president tweeted in, depending on your perspective, a classic
display of Trumpian bravado or a mind-boggingly reckless and
insensitive exhortation in the face of a pandemic that has cost
more than 200,000 lives. He added that he feels better than he did
20 years ago.

Trump’s doctors said that while he wasn’t fully recovered he met
the requirements to be discharged and go back to the White House.
“Though he may not entirely be out of the woods yet, the team and I
agree that all our evaluations, and most importantly his clinical
status, support the president’s safe return home, where he’ll be
surrounded by world-class medical care 24-7,” Dr. Sean Conley,
Trump’s personal physician, told reporters at an afternoon
briefing.

Other doctors called the move ill-advised. “For someone sick
enough to have required remdesivir and dexamethasone, I can’t think
of a situation in which a patient would be okay to leave on day
three, even with the White House’s medical capacity,” Dr. Robert
Wachter, chairman of the University of California at San
Francisco’s department of medicine,
told The Washington Post before Trump announced
his return home.

Others also questioned the decision to discharge Trump, given
the risks he still faces, the mix of medications he’s being given
and the likelihood that he’s still contagious and will be heading
to a White House environment that may have already been host to a
superspreader event and where there will inevitably be many other
people close by.

Trump promises another tax cut: Even as Trump heads home,
it was clear during his hospital stay that the president was very
much in campaign mode. To wit: Trump on Monday morning issued a
frenzied series of all-caps tweets seeking to drum up votes. They
included:

  • STOCK MARKET HIGHS. VOTE!
  • LAW & ORDER. VOTE!
  • RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. VOTE!
  • BIGGEST TAX CUT EVER, AND ANOTHER ONE COMING.
    VOTE!
  • 401(K). VOTE!
  • SPACE FORCE. VOTE!
  • BETTER & CHEAPER HEALTHCARE. VOTE!
  • PROTECT PREEXISTING CONDITIONS. VOTE!

The reality: On health care, Trump is again promising

more than he has delivered. And on taxes, he is
again falsely describing his 2017 cuts as the largest ever.

While Trump has dangled the promise of additional cuts
repeatedly in recent years, congressional action would be necessary
to enact the sizable middle-class tax cut that Trump has teased.
It’s not likely Trump can reach a tax cut deal with Democrats if
they retain control of the House. “I can’t imagine them finding
agreement on any kind of major tax reform since their agendas are
close to diametrically opposed,” Seth Hanlon, a senior fellow at
the Democratic-aligned Center for American Progress, told
The Wall Street Journal recently.

Trump has previously considered cutting the capital gains rate
and pledged to forgive payroll taxes deferred this year by his
executive action. Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser to
Trump, told the
Washington Examiner that he met with the president
and his economic team 10 days ago and discussed a tax cut for
2021.

"He said he wants to lower the income tax percent to 15 from 22,
create a tax-free savings account for the middle class, and revive
the payroll tax cut idea. The goal is to get help for folks who
make less than $100,000 a year," Moore told the Examiner. He added
that there’s a "high likelihood" Trump will announce a specific tax
cut plan before the election.

Trump’s tweetstorm also included a claim that Democrats
would enact a “massive tax increase, the biggest in the history of
our country.” (Trump’s tweet was, again, in capital letters, but
we’re sparing you the eyesore.) Democratic presidential candidate
Joe Biden has said he would not raise taxes on people making less
than $400,000.

Pelosi Presses, but Still No Stimulus Deal

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) spoke with Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin for about an hour on Monday as negotiations over an
economic stimulus bill continued. “The two discussed the
justifications for various numbers and plan to exchange paper today
in preparation for another phone call tomorrow,” a Pelosi aide
said.

Asked if she expected to reach a deal this week, Pelosi said,
“One way or another — depends on if they really want to crush the
virus, honor our heroes and put money in the pockets of the
American people.”

Pelosi is pushing for the $2.2 trillion relief package passed in
the House last week, while Mnuchin has offered a package worth $1.6
trillion.

Pelosi said last week that President Trump’s diagnosis with
Covid-19 could make it easier to make a deal, since both sides
could now agree on the severity of the situation and the need for a
substantial response. While it’s not clear that fiscal
conservatives in Congress agree, Trump appears to still be
interested in reaching an agreement. “OUR GREAT USA WANTS & NEEDS
STIMULUS,” he
tweeted Saturday. “WORK TOGETHER AND GET IT DONE.”

‘Doomed to Fail’: Why a $4 Trillion Bailout May Not Be
Enough

The roughly $4 trillion spent in response to the coronavirus
pandemic has become the costliest economic rescue effort in U.S.
history, surpassing even the staggering cost of 18 years of war in
Afghanistan. But according to an analysis in The Washington Post
Monday, a substantial portion of the spending hasn’t gotten to the
institutions and individuals that need it most, leaving millions of
Americans exposed to an ongoing viral pandemic in an economy that
is still struggling to get back on its feet.

Here’s how the approximately $4 trillion spent on the
coronavirus bailout breaks down, according to the Post analysis,
which is based on data from the Committee for a Responsible Federal
Budget:

  • $2.3 trillion for businesses, including $651 billion in
    tax breaks, $454 billion for the Federal Reserve for market
    stabilization and $670 billion for small business assistance.
  • $884 billion for individuals, including $293 billion for
    stimulus checks and $286 billion in enhanced unemployment
    benefits.
  • $634 billion to directly fight the pandemic, including
    money for testing and tracing.
  • $253 billion for state governments and agencies, to help
    cover the cost of protective equipment and first responders, among
    other things.

Who gets help? One problem with the bailout is that a
good portion of the funds have been used to support businesses that
may not have needed much assistance, including companies that built
up cash cushions even as they laid off workers. “The legislation
bestowed billions in benefits on companies and wealthy individuals
largely unscathed by the pandemic,” the Post said, “while at the
same time allowing special aid for unemployed workers to expire
over the summer and leaving some local public health efforts
struggling for money to conduct testing and other prevention
efforts.”

The wrong timeframe: Another major problem is that while
lawmakers responded quickly in the early days of the pandemic,
pumping hundreds of billions into the economy to keep businesses
and individuals afloat, they failed to recognize that the
coronavirus required a long-term response.

“Too many people were fighting the last war and not recognizing
the new circumstances we were facing,” economist Paul Romer told
the Post. “They missed this point: For any other recession, this
may have been a very good response. But because of this virus, it
was doomed to fail.”

The only way to end the recession, Romer and many other experts
have said, is to get control of the virus. Failure to do so means
the recession cannot end.

“This is why the stimulus money was a waste: It got people back
out there, but it also increased the rate of spread of the virus,”
Romer said. “It was really totally ineffective to stimulate the
economy without implementing measures to restrain the spread of the
virus.”


Read the full analysis at The Washington
Post.

Op-Ed of the Day: Trump’s $6.6 Billion in
Debt

“President Trump has, to a remarkable degree, fulfilled his 2016
campaign promises — and the country’s fiscal health is worse for
it,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for Responsible
Federal Budget, writes at
The Washington Post.

MacGuineas says that, over his first three years in office,
Trump signed off on $3.9 trillion in borrowing for new tax cuts and
spending over the decade ending in 2026­­­­­­­­ — creating deficits
that were unprecedented during times of solid economic growth. Then
the pandemic struck.

“Adding in covid-19 relief measures, the president has enacted a
total of $6.6 trillion in new borrowing in his first term,”
MacGuineas writes. “Yes, we need to borrow to address the current
crisis. But we didn’t have to enter this crisis with
trillion-dollar deficits; and we don’t need to continue with
massive deficits afterward either.”


Read more at The Washington Post.

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