What we learned about Trump’s tax plans from Mnuchin

The treasury secretary nominee offered some details about plans for tax reform and border taxes, but in most cases they differ in some significant ways from what Trump has said.

On some of the larger questions pertaining to the GOP effort to pass tax reform, Mnuchin was not asked for his view. For instance, he was not quizzed on his support for the Republican plan to border adjust taxes, a major issue facing Congress that Trump himself has waffled on.

In one significant departure from what Trump proposed on the campaign trail, Mnuchin said tax reform should not add to the deficit, when the effects of economic growth are taken into account.

“With the appropriate growth, I think we want to make sure tax reform doesn’t increase the size of the deficit,” Mnuchin told Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md.

Trump’s revised campaign tax plan would have reduced revenue by up to $3.9 trillion over 10 years, according to one outside estimate based on a “dynamic” analysis, meaning that it included the effects of faster growth.

House Republicans, meanwhile, have said that tax reform should not significantly add to the debt, as judged by a dynamic analysis.

Mnuchin also said that Trump’s priority was providing a tax cut to middle-class families. Both Trump’s plan and the House Republican framework, however, would provide bigger tax cuts for high incomes.

As for the “border tax” that Trump has repeatedly called for, including in recent days, Mnuchin tried to minimize its size and scope.

Trump’s frequent calls for a border tax are not for an across-the-board 35 percent tariff, Mnuchin said. Instead, it would be a much more narrowly targeted levy on companies that were formerly based in the U.S. but moved operations out of the country and offshored jobs.

That more modest approach would likely find greater support on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have sought to increase penalties on companies that move their headquarters overseas through “inversions” or offshore jobs.