Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Trump's Taxing Problem

At least 100,000 citizens took to the streets last Saturday to demand that Trump release his taxes, including a crowd in Raleigh. A growing number of Republican lawmakers are beginning to agree with those citizens: Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Reps. David Young of Iowa, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, Ted Yoho of Florida, Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, and Justin Amash of Michigan — all have publicly agreed that Trump should release his returns.

It's become clear that his other big campaign promise to "reform the tax system" ain't going anywhere unless he does release his own returns ... not that Trump has a coherent plan for "reform." According to Alan Rappeport,
The president’s own vision for a new tax system is muddled at best. In the past few months, he has called for taxing companies that move operations abroad, waffled on the border tax and, last week, called for a “reciprocal” tax that would match the import taxes other countries impose on the United States.
Those tax protestors last Saturday, and everybody else for that matter, want to know how any tax code rewrite will benefit Trump and his family. He's certainly not been shy about which House Republican proposals he hates, like the Republican idea to get rid of a rule that lets companies write off the interest they pay on loans. Doing so would reportedly raise $1 trillion in revenue. But it would also reduce the appeal of one of Trump’s favorite business tools: debt.

Funny how that conflict of interest thingy works, ain't it?





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