Trump’s tax plan could cost an estimated $5.5 trillion

The plan would also allow many wealthy individuals who own businesses to pay income tax not at the 35 percent individual rate but at the new 15 percent corporate rate.

Trump is the first president in modern US history not to release his tax returns, as Stephanopoulos noted during his interview.

A line in Trump’s 2005 tax return shows that Trump paid $31,261,179 that year for the AMT. “Maybe the biggest tax cut we’ve ever had!“.

“That’s the heavy lift”, said Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va.

A spokeswoman for Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said the administration would wait to see the legislation before offering reaction. He receives income from 564 business entities, according to his financial disclosure form, and could take advantage of the low rate on “pass-through” companies. This is supply-side nonsense.

While an argument could be made that the 35% top corporate rate puts the U.S. on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve, slashing the rate by more than half and recouping all that lost revenue through higher economic growth … well, seems a bridge too far.

Rather than eliminating corporations’ ability to defer paying taxes on profits earned overseas, as Trump proposed during the campaign, the administration echoes the House GOP’s call to move to a territorial tax system, under which companies would face no US tax at all on their foreign profits.

One provision left off the outline was a “border adjustment” tax on imports pushed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to help pay for tax cuts. There are 28 House Republicans from New York, New Jersey and California – more than GOP leaders can afford to lose on a tax bill without Democratic votes.

Meanwhile, Trump’s plan would cut the top corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent.

But the plan offers no details on how Trump would offset these massive tax cuts, potentially adding trillions of dollars to the national debt over the next decade. It simply says Trump wants to “eliminate targeted tax breaks that mainly benefit the wealthy” and “eliminate tax breaks for special interests”. But that’s not what Trump’s plan does. We will continue to monitor the progress of tax reform talks in Washington and provide updates on significant developments. “It puts us on the same page”.

Democrats and fiscal-hawk Republicans will be concerned about how much Trump’s proposals would cause the deficit to balloon.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of NY singled out the proposal to eliminate the state and local tax deduction on Thursday when he attacked Trump’s blueprint as “a direct assault on the middle class“. Despite all of the hoopla, the White House actually only released a one-page list of bullet points on Wednesday.

According to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, America’s corporate tax rate of 35% is now the highest rate levied by any of its 35 member countries.

“This will pay for itself with growth and with reduction of different deductions and closing loopholes”, Mnuchin said.

Most tax deductions are going away. Lowering the number of tax brackets and the associated top and lowest rates, along with increasing the standard deductions, keeping the home mortgage and philanthropy deductions while changing the maximum deductibility of state and local income taxes makes sense. But again, it’s impossible to know for sure without details about which income levels would be assigned to which tax bracket.

Trump’s tax plan would eliminate the alternative minimum tax, or AMT, which is a calculation that guarantees that certain higher-income taxpayers with large deductions pay at least a minimum amount of tax. Raising the standard deduction is smart and would simplify everything, reducing cheating and the need for record-keeping because millions of filers would no longer itemize deductions.