Trump’s tax plan is more of the same from Republicans

“Our tax dollars are a waste. We’re better off not paying them, or paying as little as possible.” 

That’s the gist of the argument from the Republican presidential nominee, and the orthodox testimony of many conservative politicians advocating for an evergreen policy of reducing taxes. It takes dynamic scoring and other mathematical gymnastics to show that this approach actually stimulates growth and tax receipts, but it sounds good and lots of Americans hate the government, believing all politicians are just wasting our cash. So for a little less than 50 percent of the population, it’s a winning argument depending on economic fundamentals and the national mood.

But we have been cutting taxes as a percentage of GDP, creating a litany of loopholes and adjusting the tax code to benefit top earners and corporations for the full 36 years of my adult life (federal tax receipts were 18.5 percent of GDP the year I was born, and 17.7 percent in 2015, going as low as 14.6 percent in 2009) in the name of supply side economics. And Trump’s tax plan is no different than the last 5 Republican nominees. It blows a huge hole in the deficit ($10 trillion on top of the projected $2.6 billion projected gap by 2026 under current law, depending on the scorekeeper) and promises magical 4 percent growth through an increase in equally magical manufacturing jobs (which currently account for 12 million jobs according to the BLS of the total employed population of 148 million) and negotiation of magical trade deals. The country hasn’t achieved 4 percent annual growth since the internet bubble of 2000.

Trump, in response to a critique from Hillary Clinton, says he’s “smart” for not paying federal taxes. The NY Times says that in 1995, Trump’s accountants leveraged loopholes in the tax code for developers to avoid paying federal income taxes for what could be 18 years by posting a loss of almost $1 billion. Since we don’t have Trump’s tax returns we can’t know for sure, but the idea is breathtaking.

The unassailable fact is that those taxes that Trump avoided paying means he’s like a guy who celebrates breast cancer awareness as an important and worthy cause, but when the Susan G. Komen folks come around asking for a donation for their fundraiser, he stiffs them (or in Trump’s case, takes money that other people donated and gives it away in his own name). Trump, who claims to be well entrenched in the top 1 percent of earners in the country, theoretically spent zero dollars on the Veterans Administration, on the paychecks of the United States’ ~1.2M active duty service members and on our interstate infrastructure.

Your taxes matter and Trump’s taxes matter. For every $1000 you pay in federal taxes, about $250 goes to healthcare spending like Medicaid and Medicare (due to the insane inflation of healthcare costs in our broken system that our next president will inevitably contendl with), $240 goes to Social Security (which Trump can’t escape), $160 to the national defense and $160 to all other discretionary spending in the budget. $60 goes to paying interest on the national debt and the remaining $130 goes to other mandatory spending. It appears no nominee in modern history has contributed less from his pocket to these foundations of American success than Donald Trump. And the sad truth is we’ve been electing politicians for four decades that have shaped the tax code to make this legal.

Supply side policies are based on the promise that if we remove the tax burden from top-earners, they’ll re-invest that money in the economy and boost overall receipts. But these benefits are elusive in historical data and have served to shelter failures like Trump, allowing him to pass the burden of his losses onto his lenders, to contractors he stiffed, and to escape his myriad failure unscathed. His tax plan will do nothing but expand the ways in which men like him can further avoid paying their fair share.

Patriotism means that you’re willing to put some skin in the game to make the communal endeavor that is the United States work. Paying taxes and electing politicians who will spend them prudently are both part of that. Donald Trump and his lawyers and accountants have found creative ways to exempt him from this endeavor. His tax plan won’t reform the problem —it is the problem. 

Hedrick is a Los Angeles based writer. Follow him on Twitter @brianhedrick

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