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NRaleighLiberal

(60,015 posts) Mon May 15, 2017, 03:24 PM May 2017

Slate - "The Pathetic Story Behind Donald Trumps One-Page Tax Plan"

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/05/15/the_pathetic_story_behind_donald_trump_s_one_page_tax_plan.html

By Jordan Weissmann

The tax plan that Donald Trump's economic advisers unveiled last month was a bit of a mystery. After days of hype, the administration produced a single, generously spaced page of bullet points with about as much detail as your average grocery list. It was a lot like the barely sketched-out proposal Trump campaigned on, but somehow a little less thorough. The White House tried to frame it as a declaration of “core principles,” but even that would have been an overly generous description. If a couple of college Republicans split a bottle of Tito's and wrote a tax plan without access to the internet, their final product might have been almost as embarrassing. Almost.

Why would the White House even bother with such a half-assed effort? It was unclear. Yes, Trump was desperate to convey a sense of momentum before his first 100 days in office expired, but the one-pager mostly demonstrated his administration had nothing to show after months of supposed effort.

But Monday we have an answer. It comes toward the end of a deeply depressing Politico story about how President Trump's aides are apparently trying to stop each other from handing our moody adolescent in chief news stories that might convince him to do something stupid, since he tends to react rashly to whatever thing he has read last. It turns out that Trump basically ordered up his tax plan after seeing a New York Times op-ed by the four horsemen of intellectually impaired supply-side fanaticism:

snip - more at the link above