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 a viable improvement 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.”Does this man understand that a flat tax means one that's not progressive? That a tax code can't be both at the same time? The most charitable construction I can put on this is that he'd like the code to be pretty flat until you get to the super-rich, then do a hockey-stick. Unfortunately, top-heavy tax structures are notoriously unstable, yielding high revenues in good times and dropping sharply in bad times, as California is discovering. Sometimes sticking it to rich people, no matter how satisfying, doesn't yield economic prosperity for the rest of us.
More discouraging political news: poll respondents' answers vary considerably depending on whether a question reads "Public Figure X supports policy ABC, do you agree?" or "Public Figure Y supports policy ABC, do you agree?" In particular, you can get quite different results on issues like affirmative action and the Iran deal depending on whether you insert "President Obama" or "Donald Trump." Sadly, you can get different results even if you insert a fictitious "policy ABC," such as "Should we repeal the Public Affairs Act of 1975?" You can get a good chunk of people to guess what's in such an Act, which doesn't exist.
Maybe I'm weird: I decide whether I can stomach someone like Donald Trump on the basis of what policies I think he'll support, not vice versa. His tax views aren't helping. He sure can get attention, though, which is something. He went on Twitter the other day to call Anthony Wiener a "purve sleazeball," which makes up in vivid accuracy what it lacks in propriety. Along those lines, I find a sneaking admiration for Sidney Blumenthal's powers of expression in calling John Boehner "louche, alcoholic, lazy, and without any commitment to any principle." Like RedState, I had to look up louche, a word I've been hearing all my life without attaching any very specific meaning to it: it means discreditable, disgraceful, dishonorable, ignominious, infamous, disreputable, notorious, opprobrious, shady, shameful, shoddy, shy, or unrespectable, though literally "cross-eyed" or "squinty."
H/t my morning's email from Jim Geraghty, which I don't know how to link.
I have lived to see a time when people who condemn "mainstream" Republicans for being too moderate, turn and shout the praises of Donald Trump, the most liberal candidate of the lot. I can only assume that reason has fled, the world has become a reality show, and everyone is voting for the player who can be rude in the most entertaining way.
ReplyDeleteI read a good piece some time ago about how we forget that people who are interested in politics and policy are a niche market. Everybody gets to vote, but in most years only people in that niche market bother. But there's a huge, lurking majority of voters out there for whom celebrity is a much bigger deal. If you can tap into that -- and Obama did, in 2008 -- you can easily overwhelm even pretty powerful political machines with the numbers who will turn out to vote for their favorite celebrity.
ReplyDeleteWe're not the first culture to choose our leaders on the basis of celebrity and charisma. It is really discouraging, I admit, to find that so many voters care more about these qualities than about the policies. Part of the problem is burnout: so many politicians have promised to support policies and then abandoned them that a lot of people are saying, "The heck with it. I just want someone who will stir things up. Maybe he's telling the truth about the policies he'd support, and maybe he's lying, but how would that make him different from anyone else?" It's a very dangerous political climate, like the collapse of the Weimar Republic. "I just want a strong man who arouses deep feeling!"
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'd rather see Trump act as a provocateur in public discussions than see him in actual political power. He does get people talking about taboo subjects, which I appreciate, but he is a crude and vulgar man. Although his crudeness and vulgarity have the advantage of allowing him to reject some sacred cows that need rejecting, they also make him unreliable about substituting anything of value in the sacred cows' place. We'll need someone else for that part.
I have lived to see a time when people who condemn "mainstream" Republicans for being too moderate, turn and shout the praises of Donald Trump, the most liberal candidate of the lot. I can only assume that reason has fled, the world has become a reality show, and everyone is voting for the player who can be rude in the most entertaining way.
ReplyDeleteAmen.
It's also quite amusing (or perhaps just depressing) to see the press report year after year that name recognition is one of the biggest influences in both polling and voting, only to mysteriously "forget" this when reporting on the baffling "popularity" of Donald Trump :p
ReplyDeleteYes, who would have thought that someone who's been on reality TV for ages would enjoy a huge name recognition bump? Especially if the pundits insist on talking about him every night on the news? And don't think Trump doesn't understand this perfectly.
ReplyDeleteI've read some shocking stories about how close some real maniacs came to being elected in statewide races, just because their names resembled the name of some other guy people had heard of. There's a lot of primitive, instinctual behavior going on in voting booths, to say nothing of the amazing products of opinion polls.
It reminds me of how the most important factor to becoming a judge in Georgia is how high your last name falls in the alphabet. Nobody knows who these people are, so they either vote for the incumbent, or if there isn't one, for whichever name tops the list. The lists are alphabetical, so...
ReplyDeleteI'm no supporter of Trump, and I suppose that makes me stupid, but: the quote provided in OP is being touted (not entirely or exclusively here) as somehow internally contradictory.
ReplyDeleteI'm unable to see the contradiction; could someone enlighten me?
Eric Hines
A flat tax is, by definition, not graduated. If it's graduated, it's not flat. It's like saying you want Prohibition plus Sunday liquor sales.
ReplyDeleteHm, maybe we're being too harsh. Prohibition plus Sunday liquor sales would represent a substantial improvement over Prohibition alone. :)
ReplyDeleteGrim is on the right track. The NYT's summary of the Trump interview was reasonably accurate (I listened to the interview); he said a flat tax would be an improvement over the current system. Then he identified what he believed to be a weakness in that improvement and a fix for further improvement. Where, exactly, is the contradiction?
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
Along these lines, how would a flat tax be an improvement on the current system? Surely what one means by that is that he doesn't like the progressive (i.e. graduated) nature of the current system. But then if you don't like a flat tax because you want the rich to pay a higher rate, aren't you right back where you started? In theory you could fiddle with the shape of the curve, but if that's what he's proposing he hasn't given us any information about the change he wants.
ReplyDeleteWell, he could have meant that the bells and whistles added to the current system make it the worst of all possible worlds; worse even than flat. I didn't hear the interview; don't know what the non-verbal communication was.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with Trump for me is that, even if I clearly understand what he says, I don't know that I believe him. I'm kind of disinclined to chase him down too many rabbit holes trying to figure out what his sentences mean, since I think he is just a Clinton stalking horse.
ReplyDeleteI wondered that just now, too, whether he was referring to deductions and credits. I guess that's possible, though that's not the common meaning of "flat tax."
ReplyDeleteYou can certainly get rid of credits and policy-hammer style of deductions for solar panels and mortgage interest and so on, but I've never understood how you could get rid of all deductions. For someone with a wage, sure, but any business takes in revenue that's pretty meaningless if you don't know what it had to incur in costs. Some kind of system that outlawed all deductions that weren't clearly costs of production? I guess.
Has "flat tax" in common political speech moved from its old connotation of "not graduated" and into "scrape off all the special credits and deductions aimed at creating incentives and rewarding interest groups? I guess I could buy that interpretation.
I agree, I don't care that much what he really meant, I was just responding to the idea that the contradiction wasn't as clear as I thought it was, and not something that every reader would necessarily take away from the article.
ReplyDeleteI've never understood how you could get rid of all deductions. For someone with a wage, sure, but any business takes in revenue that's pretty meaningless if you don't know what it had to incur in costs.
ReplyDeleteTrump has said he wants to seriously reduce business taxes altogether, which greatly reduces the importance of business deductions of any sort, and some of the things he's said suggest to me he's leaning in the direction of eliminating business taxes altogether. Grim's not far wrong on Trump's believability, though.
Other Republicans, though, have suggested getting rid of business taxes altogether. That's a position I could get behind; the end buyer--us--pay a significant fraction of those taxes, anyway, in higher prices (and we pay for all of those deductions with our taxes).
Eric Hines
I suspect there are a fair number of people backing Trump who see am more as a mercenary of sorts- his heart may not be where yours is, but he's willing to strike a blow at those you wish to strike, and for only the cost (this far) of saying so to a pollster. I think he will collapse, but in the meantime, perhaps he can strike some fear into the establishment and stuff them to try to be at least minimally effective on our behalf, for a change.
ReplyDeleteYikes, autocorrect... Not "am more", " him more", and not "stuff", "stir".
ReplyDeleteI'll get used to swype on this tablet yet...