On the Lars Larson Radio Show, I discuss President-Elect Donald Trump’s tax plan and how it will make America competitive again! Show starts at 19:17 mark.
Transcript:
Lars Larson
Welcome back to The Lars Larson Show. Glad to be with you in the New Year 2017 and we have just 18 days left of the old administration when America begins to correct the error that we made eight years ago. I wasn’t involved in that error. I voted for the other guy, but Gayle Trotter joins me now, tax attorney and political analyst. Gayle, it’s good to have you back on the program.
Gayle Trotter
Great to be with you. I remember those bumper stickers about the “End of the Error” and now it’s switched to the other team, right?
LL
That’s right. The shoe is on the other foot and now we have to see how much damage President Obama can do on his way out the door and how much damage the protestors will do on Inauguration Day on January 20th. But we’re not there yet. I thought about you, Gayle, when we saw the news today that Ford Motor Company has cancelled plans for a $1.6 billion plant down in Mexico and instead will drop about three-quarters of a billion dollars into a Michigan plant to make the cars in this country. The head of the company says this is a vote of confidence in favor of Donald Trump. Do you think some of these big companies are making these big decisions in part because they anticipate that Trump’s plan for taxes in this country are going to make it a more friendly business environment?
GT
Yes, and if you listen to the rationale given by this company for why they were making this decision, they said it’s because they anticipate a favorable climate for their business in terms of regulations and taxation and they’re saying that’s why they issued this vote of confidence. So I had written this piece about Donald Trump’s tax plan and the promise that it holds for making America competitive again and here we have this company coming out and making my argument for me before Donald Trump has even taken the oath of office. So I couldn’t have been more excited about this news today.
LL
Oh, now, come on. You should have just claimed to be prescient and say, “I’m Gayle Trotter, tax lawyer and political analyst, I knew this.” A lot of us hope that this is going to happen a whole lot more and I love the fact that it’s happening now before Trump has even taken the oath.
GT
It is beautiful. It shows the power of optimism and the idea that if you’re out there using the bully pulpit of the presidency and even before you’re in the oval office, you can change things. We have seen so much of the American decline over the last eight years and now Donald Trump is out there with these policies that will be very helpful to workers and to consumers. The corporate tax itself hits all of us where we live. Corporations at the very back are people. They’re individuals. They are you and me. They’re people who have pension plans. They’re people who want to go on vacation. They want to be able to buy gas for their cars. For Donald Trump to look at the world from his business perspective and say, “If our country has the highest corporate tax rate of the 35 countries in the Organization for Economic and Cooperation and Development and the other countries have lower, much, much, like, half the rate that our country has or less, we’re obviously at a competitive disadvantage.” He is going to change that in the first 100 days and he’s got the majority of both Houses of Congress to help him achieve that.
LL
So what do you think, Gayle, is going to be the response from the other side? Because they’re effectively going to have to complain about his plan to cut corporate taxes at a time when it appears to be producing jobs and income or future jobs and income for American families and potentially lower prices and more economic activity for all of us. So how are they going to fight that one?
GT
That’s right. You’re going to hear anguished caterwauling. You’re going to hear rending of garments and you’re going to hear this endless assault that this tax relief that we are going to use to make America competitive again, that the benefits of the tax relief are only going accrue to the top people in the wealth of our country, to the rich people. They’re going to continue to make the argument that all we have to do to make America great again is to sock it to the rich and to make sure that we continue the redistributionist policies of President Obama. But the truth is that even if you tax the rich at 100 percent of all of their income, there is no way that you can make up for the $20 trillion debt that we all have pulling us down in our economy right now. Donald Trump knows the only way that we’re going to get out of our entitlement problem and out of our debt problem is if we unleash our economy. We allow it to grow so much that even as you bring down tax rates, we’re going to see increased federal revenue because so much American money is sitting offshore right now that the United States cannot touch. Lowering the corporate tax rate is going to bring a lot of that capital back for investment, innovation, development, and this is going to be something that the Left is going to go crazy about.
LL
Well, you know what I’d like to see, Gayle? I’d like to see some group, maybe it’d be Heritage, maybe it’d just be a smart tax attorney, like Gayle Trotter. If you add it up, we think of — Bill Gates is phenomenally wealthy. Richest guy around. If you took all of his wealth, not his income, his wealth took all of it. Then you took all of Warren Buffet’s wealth and all of Paul Allen’s wealth and all of Mark Cuban’s wealth, if you add it up to say the top 100 richest people in America, it probably wouldn’t add up to one trillion of that 20 trillion in debt. Even if we didn’t sock them for heavier income tax, just socked them and said, “We’re taking away you’re wealth.”
GT
Confiscation.
LL
Yeah, we’re going to be —
GT
Yes, confiscate it.
LL
— we’re going to confiscate all your wealth. What would it add up to, half a trillion dollars?
GT
Right. I don’t know the exact number, but that is a really good point. That even if you do this outrageous communist type idea that you just seize all of the property of the top 100 Americans, it’s not going to fix our problem. The really sad thing is if you dig into the numbers and this is a really important number that everyone should know. That if things don’t change, which we have the promise of change under Donald Trump, if things don’t change in ten years, we will not a dollar, not even a penny to pay anything besides entitlements and the interest on the national debt and the debt payments. We will not have a penny to put towards the military, to put towards education, to put towards anything else that our federal government does. To see Donald Trump come in with this very exciting policy agenda, especially in the tax area, we just see that this is going to have phenomenal results for our economy and will actually give us a chance to get out from under this huge debt that we have.
LL
Well, I look at it and I just think people need to keep remembering and I’m waiting to see on the day or two before the inauguration, usually there are at least a few pieces written by the big newspapers and by the big news organizations that kind of sum up the presidency. Do you think many of those are going to mention that this president, in eight short years, doubled the debt that had been accumulated by every other president before him?
GT
No, of course not. They’re going to play tricks with the numbers. They’re going to say, “Oh, he was able to trim the deficit. He was able to cut back a lot of government spending.” But they’re all using the baseline of when we had the financial crisis and we had the stimulus payment and we had TARP. So they’re going to be able to fudge the numbers to make this case that President Obama and his administration did phenomenal things for our economy to bring it out of what, you know, he said incessantly that he inherited from George W. Bush. Without acknowledging that our labor participation rate is the lowest that it’s been in decades or any other of the indicators that we’ve had around the country that people are really suffering and struggling. So on all the measures of optimism and positive energy that Americans are feeling right now, you’re not going to see that reflected in the mainstream media’s assessment of the legacy of Barack Obama. But I predict that over time, historians will have to admit as it becomes further and further away from his time in office. They’ll have to admit that he was not helpful to our economy and all of the ridiculous pages in the Code of Federal Regulations that his administration put through, only hampered our economy, and did not allow Americans to innovate and press forward.
LL
Gayle, it is always a pleasure to have you on the program. Thanks so much for taking the time.
GT
Great to be with you, Lars.
LL
And Happy New Year to you and yours. Gayle Trotter with us.
