Four days filled with quite a bit to be critical of on the campaign trail... Trump's economic 'policy' speech, Clinton's economic 'policy' speech, Trump's "2nd Amendment people" quip, his "founder of ISIS" quip...
Have we just run out of things to be critical of?
Remember when mocking a POW was the worst thing Trump had done and we didn't think he could sink any lower?
yeah... I keep thinking "surely this is the last and the worst insane thing he'll say". I keep being proven wrong.
Also, I continue to be shocked at Trump's "populist appeal" when he keeps recommending things that seem so incredibly self serving. The latest example was his call to completely eliminate the estate tax, which currently has an exemption of $5.45MM. By some estimates this will only affect 0.3% of Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom are very, very wealthy.
Among those it will help...? Trump's children!
So we have a 70 year old man proposing some substantial changes to our tax code that will help him and his family a lot, and help his populist supporters not at all.
I particularly love his sop to the working people with tax deductible child care expenses.....when the majority of the working and middle class don't itemize. On the other hand, people seem so stupid about their own taxes that I think some of them THINK they are getting a mortgage deduction or whatever, even though they are taking the standard deduction.
Yeah, I'm a big supporter of completely purging the deductions and credits from our tax code, but I know there's no political will or support to actually accomplish this. There are too many sacred cows (like the mortgage interest deduction), even though most people don't benefit as much as they think they do, and most of the time it's baked into the market already.
I keenly read the transcript of Trump's economic policy speech and came away thoroughly disappointed on several fronts:
i) reducing the number of tax brackets won't make actually filing taxes any simpler, and makes our system less progressive
ii) the elimination of the estate tax only helps a very, very small and wealthy minority
iii) There was no mention at all of how we'd pay for all this red ink, save some vague promises that jobs and growth will come roaring back. I'm not sure how many more low/medium income jobs from Mexico/China our economy could realistically absorb.
no mention of how we'll deal with entitlement spending, and now we've got Trump saying we ought to borrow a lot more but he thinks "it'll be a lot less than $3T" in red ink when most economists are charting $9-12T.