President Trump called for new, major middle-class tax cuts on Monday, adding to comments made over the weekend, but backpedaled on the timing, saying they would come after midterm elections.
“We are giving a middle-income tax reduction of about 10 percent,” Trump told reporters, elaborating on his remarks from the weekend. “We’re doing it now for middle-income people. This is not for businesses. It’s for middle.”
The president added: “We will do the vote after the election.”
Later in the day, White House spokesperson Lindsay Walters elaborated on the president’s remarks, saying that Trump wants Congress to vote on the 10 percent tax cut as part of the ‘Tax Reform 2.0’ package that recently passed the House of Representatives.
“As part of Tax Reform 2.0, the first elements of which were passed the House in September, the President would like to see an additional tax cut of 10 percent for middle-income families,” Walters said in an email. “Given the success of these reforms so far, the President and Republicans in Congress support additional tax cuts for hard-working Americans.”
The package that passed the House in September would make permanent the individual tax cuts in last year’s tax code overhaul. But that package would need Democrats to support it, barring major procedural maneuvering. It’s unclear whether Republican leadership has the appetite for that.
Don Stewart, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell R-Kent., said that he had no new vote scheduling announcements. Trump has said he wants a vote on the new cuts after the midterm elections.
Trump’s call for a new tax cut generally caught allies on Capitol Hill and elsewhere off guard.
“There is continued interest in building on the success of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and constantly improving the tax code for hardworking families and America’s small businesses,” said Rob Damschen, a Republican spokesperson for the House Ways and Means Committee charged with drafting new tax policy legislation.
But Damschen referred further inquiry for details to the White House, as did a spokesperson for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
Several conservative groups also declined to comment on Trump’s new, seemingly off-the-cuff proposal.
Conservative tax activist Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, said he wasn’t sure what Trump was talking about, but supported a new tax cut when told that Trump mentioned the 10 percent figure to reporters. Still, he cautioned against over-promising and under-delivering, and recommended that the president highlight the tax cuts he’s already enacted rather than ones he’s promising in the future.
“What you’ve announced is that they’ve got a plan to cut taxes, but unless you have 60 votes in the Senate it’s not going to happen,” said Norquist.
The conservative activist noted that budget reconciliation could be used to circumvent Democratic opposition and pass a new tax cut along party lines, though it’s not clear congressional Republicans have the appetite to do that in a lame duck session of Congress.
Norquist and other conservative activists are also pushing the White House to give a de facto tax cut through indexing capital gains tax rates to inflation through an executive order. But mainly he said he’s glad Trump’s talking tax cuts in a campaign season.
“I’m curious as to whether this is the end of the story, or a piece of the puzzle,” he said. “But I am glad that people are talking about tax cuts two weeks before the election.”
