How a secretive conservative group influenced ‘populist’ Trump’s tax
Documents and recordings obtained by the Guardian shed new light on a powerful and secretive rightwing network and the influence it was able to exert on Trump administration policies favoring the super-rich.
The recordings include speeches given to the Council for National Policy (CNP) by conservative media stars including Dennis Prager, emerging Republican power players such as Charlie Kirk, and close economic advisers to Donald Trump.
Some of the previously published recordings appear to no longer be publicly available.
The Guardian’s independently sourced recordings offer an insight into how much influence conservative economic thinkers – from bodies representing the interests of some of the richest individuals in the country – were able to exert on the supposed populist Trump.
In particular, a panel discussion at CNP’s February 2019 meeting suggests that Trump decided one of his most far-reaching economic policies on very limited evidence – on the basis of a personal conversation.
The panel involved Bill Walton, president of CNP; the Washington Times columnist and former member of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority Richard Rahn; Jonathan Williams, chief economist at the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec); and Stephen Moore, a one-time Trump nominee for the Federal Reserve board, whose nomination was withdrawn following revelations in the Guardian that he had failed to pay his ex-wife hundreds of thousands of dollars in alimony.
The panelists offered a favorable assessment of the Trump administration’s economic performance, but also used the platform to claim credit for pushing the administration in the direction of radical free-market policies.
Moore claimed that he, together with Larry Kudlow, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council from 2018, had persuaded the thenpresident to offer unprecedented corporate tax cuts.
He described a meeting with Trump where they argued that the US’s corporate tax rate, relative to those among certain Asian and European competitors, was effectively a penalty on US companies, stating: “Look, you know, we’re at 40% – they are 20%. This is a big problem.”
Moore said that they explained these tax differences using charts, “because Donald Trump likes to look at pictures, he doesn’t like to read”.
According to Moore: “Trump looked at this and he said: ‘No, I don’t want to do that,’” instead proposing “not 20%. I want 15%,” with the number coming back to an effective 20% rate only after Senate negotiations.
Trump’s tax cuts slashed effective corporate tax rates in half, while providing other measures benefiting wealthy corporations.
The cuts have been blamed for widening inequality, and worsening deficits, with a large amount of the savings going to stock buybacks according to business reporters and economists. The Congressional Research Service pointed out that any positive effects, like wage or GDP growth, were transient, and had petered out by the end of…
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