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Why Trump's four-point tax reform agenda hits the right priorities



Whenever a Republican president offers a vision for policy reform, the media claims he is “short on specifics.” So it was last week when President Trump traveled to Missouri to begin his push for the reform of America’s tax code. Of course, I remember what happened when I unveiled my 9-9-9 plan. It was chock full of specifics, and people bashed (and usually misrepresented) the specifics. You can’t win.
But at this stage of the game, what we need are broad principles, and that’s what the president is giving us. It remains to be worked out with Congress what rates or income brackets we’ll end up with, and there’s plenty of time to debate all that. But for now we need to know what type of priorities the president will look for in reforming the tax code. And I believe the four he outlined in Missouri are the right ones:
  1. Simplifying the code, so most people don’t need professional help doing their taxes.
  2. Prioritizing the creation of good, high-wage jobs in designing the code.
  3. Giving tax relief to middle-class families so they can spend the money they would otherwise hand over to the government.
  4. Repatriating overseas capital U.S. firms have earned in other countries, but are not bringing home because of the high taxes they would have to pay on them.
That last one I’ve been talking about for well over a decade. There are billions of dollars being held by U.S. companies in overseas banks because, if they brought the money home, Chuck Schumer would grab as much as 40 percent of it. Eliminating the tax on repatriated profits would bring a windfall of capital into the United States that would act as rocket fuel for the economy.

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If politicians really want to collect taxes from all this, they can let the money come back tax-free and watch as it’s put to use in the productive economy. That will generate plenty of taxable activity, so politicians won’t be deprived their opportunity to confiscate other people’s money. But in the meantime, we’ll experience a massive boost in economic growth. President Trump is hitting all the right points here. The billions spent every years on professional assistance in preparing tax returns is wealth flushed straight down the toilet. Making something complicated when it could be simple, and then claiming you’re “creating jobs” for the people who understand the complications, is the epitome of backwards thinking when it comes to economic productivity. But this is what Democrats love to do. They’ll mandate something that’s worthless and pointless, and then say, “Hey, it’s market-based,” because you can choose from two or three different “experts” to help you do the thing no one needs done. Here’s the bottom line: Democrats think the more money you give to the government, the better. They think every dollar that stays in the private sector is just exploited by greedy robber barons, whereas every dollar confiscated by politicians is instead used to make life in America fair and equal.

I disagree, as do most people who have ever had to work for a living. If you have a dollar, there are many things you can do with that dollar. Almost all of them are more beneficial to society in general than handing it over to a politician. And that includes anything you might do with it strictly for your own self-interest. You make rational decisions with the money you earned, because no one values a dollar more than the person who earned it. Politicians, on the other hand, take money they didn’t earn but nevertheless think they’re entitled to – and use it to pursue their own agendas at the expense of everyone else. And when you don’t want to give them the money you earned, they call you greedy and even unpatriotic. Any reform of the tax code that gives us less of this is a good thing. The best place for capital is in the productive, private sector. The best people to make decisions about capital are the people who will use it most productively, and that’s always going to be the people seeking to profit from it, because they earned it in the first place. President Trump knows this because he earned his wealth by running his business enterprise effectively and wisely – not without some mistakes, but always with an eye toward the big picture. He knows that private sector is the best place for wealth. Now Republicans in Congress, who already claim to believe this, need to show us they mean it.


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