Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers hates the Trump administrations tax plan.
“President Trump’s tax proposals were rolled out yesterday by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and NEC Director Cohn. For reasons of long run budget health, fairness and economic impact, I think they are extraordinarily ill-advised,” Summers wrote in a piece for the Washington Post’s Wonkblog.
Summers was President Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. He has also held the positions of President of Harvard University, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and chief economist of the World Bank.
In his Wonkblog piece, Summers also engaged in concern-trolling regarding Mnuchin. He argued that the president had put Mnuchin in an unfair position by asking him to publicly back the tax proposal before the details had been worked out.
“As I read about the proposals and thought back over the tax discussions of the last year, I found myself feeling sympathetic to Mnuchin,” Summers wrote. “The treasury secretary’s credibility is an important national asset that could be needed at any moment. I am very sorry to see it squandered on behalf of a set of tax reform proposals that are at best a bargaining position.”
Summers went on CNBC to continue his attack on the the Trump tax proposals and concern trolling Mnuchin
“If I had been asked by the White House to assert a proposition as demonstrably false as the claim that this plan would produce revenue, I would have resigned rather than put the credibility of the department behind a proposition that no one with real experience would believe was true,” Summer said.
The proposal, which was revealed this week, would involve reducing the number of tax brackets to three. The plan will also give businesses a significant break, providing cuts not only to regular business income but also on income earned for work conducted overseas.
“Most presidential campaigns during the primaries, when they put out a tax plan, they put out more than one page. They put out some analysis, some models, some careful articulation of the proposal and estimate its effects,” he said.
“There’s none of that coming from the administration, and yet there’s this confident statement that it will pay for itself,” Summers added. “I don’t know how they could possibly know without having done economic work.”
White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney said on Thursday that the administration intended for the initial tax proposal to be vague as advisors are working on figuring out the long-term effects of the new policies.
Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com
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