Look out, there's going to be another "pivot" coming from Trump. This is supposed to be his "tax plan" week, including another one of his rallies in Missouri. By the way, did you know he won Missouri? He broke into his Hurricane Harvey response to make sure everyone know that. So that gives you a bit of a hint to how much he's going to be focusing on taxes in his upcoming rally. But the White House is insisting that he's going to be presidential and he's going to lead the party he's at war with to do tax reform.
Basic questions remain unanswered. Will the changes be permanent or temporary? How will individual tax brackets be set? What rate will corporations and small businesses pay?
Instead of providing details that could help build support for a bill, the president will largely rely on the same talking points he and his advisers have highlighted since January: The middle class deserves a tax cut and businesses need changes to help them compete with global rivals.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin -- who earlier predicted having a tax bill done by August -- revealed the enormity of the task ahead on Friday: He didn’t commit to completing it by year’s end.
“They’re nowhere. They’re just nowhere,” said Henrietta Treyz, a tax analyst with Veda Partners and former Senate tax staffer. “I see them putting these ideas out as though they’re making progress, but they are the same regurgitated ideas we’ve been talking about for 20 years that have never gotten past the white-paper stage.”
Does this sound familiar? It should. Because it's what we saw with health care. There's no Trump tax plan, just as there was—and is—no Trump healthcare plan. He has a set of talking points that he memorized during the campaign and just keeps repeating them, because that's as much effort as he's ever going to be willing to put into policy.
So when this effort fails, because it will, he will do the same thing to Republicans that he's done to them on Obamacare repeal and replacement. He will blame them, even though he's done nothing to assist the effort. Which is no more than they deserve. If another attempt to screw over the 99 percent to achieve the holy grail for Republicans—tax cuts for the very rich—fails, they did it to themselves. They got this monster elected.