Perhaps I shouldn’t be making this a case of collective responsibility, but all of these people have their names on an article over at Bloomberg, “Trump Rethinks State-Local Tax Issue Over Middle-Class Concerns”. Guys (and gals): you have to think something before you rethink it.
Okay, maybe they didn’t write that headline, but they did write the first paragraph, to wit: “Months after the White House proposed ending a tax break for people in high-tax states, President Donald Trump grew angry when he learned that the change would hurt some middle-income taxpayers, according to two people familiar with his thinking.”
Yeah, sure, Donnie was filled with righteous wrath when he learned about this. Can’t we end the pretense of taking anything Donald Trump says seriously? And can’t we especially not take seriously what people say who claim to be familiar with his “thinking”?
Afterwords
Even though I was not “privy”, as we say in the biz, to any of Donald Trump’s “thinking” regarding tax reform, I can tell you what he “thought” of eliminating the deductibility of state and local taxes from federally taxable income: “Great! We’ll pay off the deficit and fuck the Democrats in the ass at the same time!” Because, of course, it’s high-income folks in Democratic states—New York and California in particular—who benefit most from the current law.
But, naturally, it’s impossible to write a law that only hurts Democrats. Some Republicans would get burned as well. Everybody knows this. It’s just that the Republicans pretended they didn’t know this, that they didn’t know that their new tax proposals would inevitably provoke a politically potent backlash, no matter what they were, because, unless you don’t care about the deficit at all—and even professional frauds like Paul Ryan weren’t willing to go that far—any tax cut has to be balanced with a tax increase, on someone, who will bitch, in a politically potent manner, regardless of any issue of “equity”, which is, in these cases, entirely in the eye of the beholder.
And so we see that Republican “plans” for tax reform are just as fraudulent as their “plans” for repealing and replacing ObamaCare. Any discussion of anything any Republican says about tax reform must be founded on the premise that nothing any Republican says about tax reform should be taken seriously. Especially if that Republican is named Donald Trump.
UPDATE
Bloomberg has now changed its headline to say “Trump Is Angry About a Proposal in His Own Tax Plan, Sources Say,” possibly rethinking the whole thinking thing.
