President Trump is visiting the conservative Heritage Foundation on Tuesday evening to try to press the case that his tax plan would provide benefits to the kinds of middle-class voters that he credits for his election victory.
Trump planned to tout a new analysis, produced Monday by his new economic adviser Kevin Hassett, finding that lowering the corporate tax rate to 20 percent would generate major wage increases for workers.
And a White House official projected confidence that the message — providing tax cuts to corporations would benefit families — is one that will resonate.
“I think that maybe we don’t often give the American people enough credit for their understanding of basic economics, really, and common sense,” said a senior administration official, speaking to reporters ahead of Trump’s trip to the think tank.
“If you’re working in a factory in Wisconsin, or Ohio, or Pennsylvania, you understand that if your employer had money parked overseas that they could bring back home to invest in better equipment that’s going to increase your productivity on the job — you totally understand that that’s going to make you a more productive worker, which makes you a more valuable worker, which makes them able to pay you more,” the official added.
Democrats eager to stop the GOP push for tax legislation have highlighted that the plan contains detailed proposals for business tax cuts, which generally poll poorly, and only promises of breaks for middle-class families.
The senior administration official noted that the White House has “no concern that this is going to turn off the president’s base,” thanks to provisions such as a bigger standard deduction and bigger child tax credits meant to provide tax relief to middle-class families.
The exact parameters of those measures have not been announced.
Meanwhile, Hassett’s conclusion that a lower corporate tax rate would mean bigger paychecks was criticized by Democrats Tuesday.
Larry Summers, the Harvard professor and former Obama economic adviser, wrote Tuesday that the analysis published by the Hassett-led Council of Economic Advisers was “dishonest, incompetent and absurd.”
