How could Trump devise a "revenue-neutral" way to cut taxes for the middle class by 10%?



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Donald Trump made another promise

President Donald Trump added a new promise to his new insistence that he was working with congressional leaders on a 10% cut in average income taxes, which would not increase the deficit.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal late Tuesday, Trump said his plan would be "revenue-neutral". But he would not divulge details of the exact way – or the vaguest way – of achieving that goal.

As MarketWatch pointed out, any average income tax reduction plan of the order of magnitude described would have cost more than $ 80 billion a year before the impact of economic growth. Even a generous estimate of the economic impact would reduce the cost to about $ 60 to $ 70 billion a year.

Lily: Here is an estimate of the cost of a 10% tax reduction idea from Trump.

Over a decade, such a tax cut would probably cost around $ 1 trillion.

So where do you get a trillion dollars?

The president's proposal to cut back on food stamps, transportation, foreign aid, and State Department budgets could perhaps save you half the time. Another idea rejected by the White House was to claim $ 554 billion over a decade in cuts in Medicare. All of these are outlined in Trump's budget application for fiscal year 2019. (To be clear, these are spending cuts and not revenue increases.)

Of course, it is worth repeating that these proposals have not been very successful, even in a Republican-controlled Congress. And reducing half a trillion dollars to Medicare, even under the heading of reducing waste and improving integrity, would be difficult to sell.

And in the past, Trump has simply abandoned unrealizable ideas. As president-elect, he explained that the Republican health care regime would expand insurance coverage; the bill that was passed in the House with its support was not.

And all this analysis assumes that the legislation will be created and that the lame Congress will want to address it.

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