Donald Trump Wants to Give His Favorite Corporations Another Giant Tax Cut in a Second Term: Report

Remember when Donald Trump ran for office in 2016, claiming to be a champion of the working class and the worst nightmare of the global elite? And then passed a package of tax cuts that disproportionately benefited corporations and billionaires and was basically a middle finger to American workers? Well, today brings some exciting news for those who think the überwealthy could use another financial lifeline: Trump apparently wants to cut taxes even more for his very rich pals!

The Washington Post reports that the ex-president’s economic team is “plotting an aggressive new set of tax cuts to push on the campaign trail and from the Oval Office if he wins a second term.” According to the Post, some of the cuts would be to individual rates. However, the plan appears to focus on the overall corporate tax rate, which Team Trump reportedly thinks is just too damn high, and should potentially go to “as low as 15%.” (As a reminder, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act lowered the top corporate rate from 35% to 21%.) “The idea I’ve been talking about with Trump is: Why don’t we go to 15% corporate rate, get rid of the credits and deductions, and just make it 15%,” Stephen Moore—whose short-lived nomination by Trump to the Federal Reserve Board was dubbed “truly appalling”—told the Post. “That’s one of the ideas that’s being tossed around.”

Responding to the news that Trump and Co. think companies like, say, Amazon, need to pay even less in taxes, White House spokesman Andrew Bates told The Messenger that the reported plan would “turn back the clock to the trickle-down economics that hollowed out the American middle class and added trillions to the national debt.” Bates added that Trump’s 2017 tax law was a “tax giveaway to rich special interests” that fueled the national deficit and did nothing for working families. “It would be astonishing for Trump’s team to double down on the most unpopular parts of the tax cuts, which were the corporate tax cuts, by driving it down even further,” Steve Wamhoff, federal policy director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told the Post. “We have plenty of data showing most Americans want corporations to pay more in taxes, not less—this was true when Trump and his supporters in Congress enacted the 2017 law, and it’s still true today.”

The idea of an even lower tax rate for corporations comes just weeks after Trump announced that if he wins a second term, he would “automatically” slap a 10% tariff on virtually all foreign goods coming into the country—an that idea economists on both sides of the aisle criticized, with Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, calling the proposal “lunacy” and “horrifying.” Why don’t people like the plan? For one thing, experts say it would put millions out of work. For another, tariffs disproportionately hurt lower-income households, i.e. the group the ex-president is supposedly looking out for. “A tariff of that scope and size would impose a massive tax on the folks who it intends to help,” Paul Winfree—who served as Trump’s deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council and is currently the president of a center-right think tank—told the Post the last month. “It would be a disaster for the US economy,” added Michael Strain, an economist at the center-right think tank the American Enterprise Institute. “It would raise prices for consumers and be met with considerable retaliation from other nations, which would raise the costs facing US businesses. It would reduce employment among manufacturing workers. It would be very, very bad.”

Speaking of terrible economic ideas, the Post noted Monday that outside advisers to Trump have been “begun discussing some potential, if highly preliminary, names for possible treasury secretary nominees,” including Arthur Laffer, who still thinks trickle-down economics works; and Larry Kudlow, the cable news host best known for being always wrong and saying things like, “Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption.”