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  1. #1
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Republicans Wary of Donald Trump’s Populist Tone on Taxes

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/us...-on-taxes.html

    Republicans Wary of Donald Trump’s Populist Tone on Taxes

    By ALAN RAPPEPORT AUG. 31, 2015

    WASHINGTON — For years, Republicans have run for office on promises of cutting taxes and bolstering business to stimulate economic growth, pledging allegiance to a Reaganesque model of conservatism that has largely become the party’s orthodoxy.

    But this election cycle, the Republican presidential candidate who currently leads in the polls is taking a different approach, and it is jangling the nerves of some of the party’s most traditional supporters.

    The tendency of that candidate, the billionaire developer Donald J. Trump, to make provocative, headline-grabbing speeches has helped obscure an emerging set of beliefs: that he would raise taxes in certain areas, particularly on corporations that he believes do not act in the best interests of the United States.
    In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on American companies that put their factories in other countries. He has threatened to increase taxes on the compensation of hedge fund managers. And he has vowed to change laws that allow American companies to benefit from cheaper tax rates by using mergers to base their operations outside the United States.

    Alarmed that those ideas might catch on with some of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals — as his immigration policies have — the Club for Growth, an anti-tax think tank, is pulling together a team of economists to scrutinize his proposals and calculate the economic impact if he is elected.

    “All of those are anti-growth policies,” said David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, a group that Republican candidates routinely court. “Yes he’s a businessman, but if those are the policies he implements, they’ll drive the economy into the ground and we’ll see huge drops in G.D.P., and frankly I think it would lead to massive loss of jobs.”

    The issue of taxing the compensation of hedge fund managers — carried interest — as ordinary income played prominently during the 2012 presidential election. Financial disclosures revealed that Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, had paid a relatively low tax rate over the years because he was earning retirement income in such a way from Bain Capital, a private equity firm.

    Investment managers generally pay only a 15 percent capital gains tax on profits earned from their customers holdings, a treatment that Democrats often argue amplifies income inequality. Mr. Trump wants fund managers to “pay up.”

    Mr. Trump’s ideas are not new. The Obama Treasury Department has a detailed overhaul of the corporate tax code that involves taxing hedge fund and private equity compensation as ordinary income and sweeping changes to the way U.S. corporations are taxed overseas. Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is determined to produce his own corporate tax overhaul this fall that in part would finance a long-term highway and infrastructure bill. And he has the backing of some political odd bedfellows, President Obama, and Senators Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

    By inserting the issues into the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has turned an obscure but high-stakes effort on Capitol Hill into a potentially major fight in the national Republican Party.

    Mr. Trump’s business acumen has been one of his biggest selling points with voters. He promises that his boardroom experience would translate into favorable deals on the global stage and boasts that he cannot be bought by bankers or corporate lobbyists.

    “I don’t want any strings attached,” Mr. Trump often says in his speeches, pointing to the big donations he has declined to take from lobbyists.

    Mr. Trump has also threatened to make companies such as Ford “pay a price” for shifting their production to Mexico. And while he claims to be friendly with many of them, he has called hedge fund managers “paper pushers” who tend to get lucky on the road to riches. The populist tone is playing well with a subset of the Republican electorate that is frustrated with the status quo, but there are signs that Mr. Trump is beginning to alienate some in the party’s traditional base.

    “Those aren’t the types of things a typical Republican candidate would say,” said Michael R. Strain, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, referring to the candidate’s comments on hedge funds, support for entitlement spending and the imposing of trade tariffs. “A lot of these things are not things that businesses would be happy about.”

    Grover Norquist, the founder of Americans for Tax Reform, is holding out hope for Mr. Trump even though Mr. Trump and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida are the only leading Republican candidates who have not signed a pledge to not raise taxes. Mr. Trump said last month that he was still considering the pledge and that he had no plans for a net tax increase. His suggestion that he would increase the tax on carried interest, however, has raised eyebrows.

    “I would certainly be concerned about how that conversation would continue,” Mr. Norquist said. “Democrats will take that and say, ‘Now that you’ve conceded the principle, let’s go further.’”

    While Mr. Norquist said he had no problem with candidates making bold proposals for investing in infrastructure — such as border walls and roads — or the military, he thinks it is important that they detail where they would make requisite budget cuts.

    Mr. Trump declined to comment on his economic agenda, and a spokeswoman for his campaign said a tax plan would be rolled out in the next few weeks.

    As with many of Mr. Trump’s policy ideas, confusion seems to be keeping interested parties from knowing exactly how to respond. In an interview with Fox News last week, Mr. Trump said a flat tax would be viable improvements to America’s tax system. Moments later, he suggested that a flat tax would be unfair because the rich would be taxed at the same rate as the poor.

    “The one problem I have with the flat tax is that rich people are paying the same as people that are making very little money,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think there should be a graduation of some kind.”

    Ultimately, he has settled on simplifying the tax code as a sensible first step, saying taxpayers spend too much time and money on their returns. H&R Block, the tax preparation company, should be put out of business, according to Mr. Trump.

    “I think it’s tough to really know what he’s thinking about any of this stuff,” said Mr. Strain of the American Enterprise Institute.

    Corporate inversions are another issue on which Mr. Trump’s positions have been slippery. This practice — companies acquire smaller overseas firms and move their headquarters to countries with lower taxes — has become increasingly popular in the last few years, costing the United States billions of dollars in lost revenue and drawing the ire of Democrats in Congress. In an interview with Time magazine, Mr. Trump called for a crackdown on inversions, but his solution also seemed to suggest giving companies a tax holiday in exchange for repatriating.

    On Wall Street, Mr. Trump’s attacks on the rich so far have mostly led to eye rolls and a few winces.

    Anthony Scaramucci, a managing partner of SkyBridge Capital who supports Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin in the Republican presidential race, visited Mr. Trump last week to complain about the way he was talking about hedge fund managers. Still frustrated, Mr. Scaramucci took to Twitter over the weekend to say that Mr. Trump is “misinformed” about the industry and that he and most of his colleagues pay the highest marginal tax rate.

    Les Funtleyder, a portfolio manager at E Squared Asset Management in New York, said Mr. Trump was still widely considered to be a long-shot candidate in hedge fund and private equity circles. If his positions on raising taxes on their businesses gain traction, Mr. Funtleyder suggested, then some members of the financial industry will probably form a political action committee or donate to a candidate who would tell their side of the story.

    Until then, however, Mr. Trump’s tough talk on business remains relatively harmless to the one-percent set.

    “He’s just hitting all the populist high notes,” Mr. Funtleyder said, noting that hedge fund managers are easy targets for politicians. “It is unusual for a Republican to say it.”
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Donald, Donald, Donald

    The FairTax is the answer to the goals you have to simplify the tax code, put H&R Block out of business, abolish the IRS, eliminate tax returns, bring our domestic capital home from other countries, bring our manufacturing base back home from Japan, China and Mexico, penalize rather than rewards illegal aliens, and yes, even taxes the hedge funds through the FairTax on services including the service portion of interest rates.

    Buckle down and study the FairTax to see why you need to make this your immediate tax plan that you want to help push through Congress to help fix our economy if you're elected President.

    FairTax Act of 2015 - HR 25 in the US House of Representatives and S 155 in the US Senate
    Last edited by Judy; 08-31-2015 at 01:51 PM.
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  3. #3
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


    Sign in and post comments here.

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  4. #4
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Donald Trump needs to investigate the FairTax Act of 2015, HR 25 in the US House of Representatives and S 155 in the US Senate, and see for himself how well this tax plan does all the things he wants to do and achieve. Don't listen to Steve Forbes. Read the bill and decide for yourself.
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  5. #5
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    Without any doubt if America intends to relieve itself of interest payments and balance a budget, only tax money collected can relieve that. Boehner and friends have fought for years cutting this, naw, we have to cut this, too. What good has been accomplished in those years, now even with full control of Congress. I saw Trump's remarks about raising taxes on "hede fund managers." It seemed ds aimed right at the wealthy Nebraskan, IMO. No objection from him, he has told Congess for six years to raise his taxes. Now the others, throwing tens of millions into election manipulation, look dumb as hell doing that and fighting tax increases.

    From what little I understand about the fair tax, it to is revenue neutral, meaning it will do nothing to relieve debt load, but continue to increase it. Like families America has to pay its bills. Who will do that? Even I have that answer, it is Americans!

    I expect that Judy will have some remarks about mine, I expect that. Here we debate and feed off each other for info. We should! I will not support a tax proposal that is revenue neutral, we can't pay our bills that way, or we already would have.

    By not paying today, we kick the can down the road for other generations to pay. I cannot even understand the mind of the rich doing that. If they are trying to preserve their for their kids. aren't they assuring that they or their children will have to pay even enlarged debt? The only way that that makes any sense is that republicans know that America is intended to fail, hence the reason gold is high as well as debt. Then, possibly their children can profit from bankrupting the USA. Would republicans do that, in cahoots with democrats, better believe it. That is why our House of Representatives must be a hour of commons, as the framers of the constitution intended.

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