Donald Trump’s campaign picked a fight Tuesday with a Washington think tank, denouncing the organization in unusually direct terms after it released an unfavorable analysis of Trump’s tax plan.
Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s national policy director, said in a statement that the Tax Policy Center’s score of the Trump tax plan was “fraudulent,” calling the nonprofit “deeply biased” because it is headed by Len Burman, a former official in the Bill Clinton Treasury Department.
Miller was responding to the Tax Policy Center’s analysis that found that Trump’s tax plan would, taken in isolation from the Republican’s other plans, add more than $7.2 trillion to the federal debt in 10 years, delivering massive tax cuts mostly to high-income earners.
The think tank committed “gross malfeasance” with its analysis, Miller said.
While such a charge may be typical for campaigns, it’s unusually charged for Washington tax policy discussions.
The Trump campaign is not the first Republican campaign to have trouble with the Tax Policy Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that is a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two other think tanks generally perceived to be left-leaning.
When the think tank concluded during the 2012 election that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would raise taxes on the middle class or increase the deficit, the former Massachusetts governor said that “they made garbage assumptions and they reached a garbage conclusion.”
Trump’s campaign raised a few specific problems with the group’s analysis of its tax plan.
The first was that it didn’t take into account the added tax revenues that would come from the faster economic growth stoked by lower tax rates. The center said it was planning to do so, but that problems with the codes in its model had prevented it from releasing the “dynamic analysis” on Tuesday. The Trump campaign described that as an “embarrassing ‘bug.'”
The second was about an assumption the center made regarding the small business tax cut provision included in Trump’s plan. The campaign has not specified which partnerships, sole proprietorships and other businesses that file through the individual side of the tax code would be eligible for the 15 percent business tax rate. The center made assumptions about how the tax cut would work that the campaign objected to. “In other words, this article isn’t even about the Trump plan – but about the gross malfeasance of the deeply biased Tax Policy Center,” Miller said.
Lastly, the campaign took issue with the center modeling the tax cuts separately from trade, immigration and other agenda items that Trump believes will raise revenue, offsetting the revenue losses from the tax reform.
“The Trump plan is revenue neutral, massively cuts middle-class taxes and has huge childcare benefits for low and middle-income families. The Clinton plan, as released by WikiLeaks, is ‘open borders’, Medicare and Social Security cuts, and benefits only for Wall Street,” Miller said.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday morning, however, Burman had expressed skepticism that other parts of Trump’s economic plan would be able to negate the revenue losses from the tax changes.
Stuart Kantor, a spokesman for the group, defended it from Miller’s accusations Tuesday afternoon. “The Tax Policy Center gave the Trump campaign multiple opportunities to respond to the assumptions we made about the details of the Trump proposal, as we do for every campaign,” Kantor wrote in an email. “The campaign never provided substantive answers to any of our questions until we sent them our completed report this morning. As to dynamic scoring, our partners at the Penn-Wharton Budget Project are carefully completing their analysis of the Clinton and Trump plans and expect to publish their results shortly.”
