Republican candidate Donald Trump focused this weekend on his economic platform: Cut taxes and regulations across the board while also saving Social Security, Medicare, and other government safety-net programs.
Trump’s platform is nearly invincible in the general election if he stresses it enough, polling shows. Trump’s plan will also have a transformational effect on how people view his party. But he still needs to make the accounting work to ensure that his Third Way platform is feasible.

“We’re going to save your Social Security without killing it like so many people want to do. And your Medicare,” Trump said this weekend at a rally in Phoenix, which followed a rally in Las Vegas where he also highlighted Social Security. Trump is only starting to focus on the issue, but he’s been aware of its political potential at least since the Wisconsin primary, when he taunted conservative-movement candidate Ted Cruz and establishment rival John Kasich: “If we don’t make the country rich again, you’re going to have your Social Security cut by Cruz and Kasich.”

This is a major opportunity for Trump. Both parties have attacked Social Security and Medicare in recent years, causing panic among middle-aged Americans. 51 percent of people who have not yet retired — including 64 percent of people under 30 — doubt that they will ever get any Social Security benefits at all, even though they’re paying into the system. 66 percent of all Americans think Social Security is plagued by either “crisis” or “major problems.” 79 percent of Americans during the 2014 midterm elections wanted Social Security to be increased. 79 percent!

Recent Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran on an “entitlement reform” scheme that would have resulted in massive cuts and changes to Social Security. They based their plan on the fact that big government spending ran up a dangerous debt, leading us to an “entitlement crisis” that needed to be solved. But they had no idea how to actually increase revenue in the United States to offset their cuts. After they lost the election, Ryan signed off on President Obama’s trillion-dollar-plus “Cromnibus” budget bill that spiked the deficit up even higher.

Trump plans to bring back revenue by reversing trade deals, which he says can bring trillions of dollars back into U.S. government coffers practically overnight. He’s also looking for revenue from other sources: He wants to keep companies in the United States by fighting corporate inversion. He wants to dig up $300 billion by allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. He wants to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, and eliminate the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. And he wants to help small companies generate more taxable revenue by easing their federal regulatory burden.

“We’re going to get rid of a big, big percentage of the rules and regulations,” Trump said. “We’re going to get rid of Dodd-Frank to a large extent. So that the banks can loan you money because right now they don’t loan businesses money … Unless you have more money than you’re asking for, they don’t want to loan you money because the regulators are running the banks. And you need money to start businesses.”

With new revenue rolling in, Trump thinks he can save Social Security and cut taxes too. In other words, he thinks he can combine the two most popular fiscal policies in American politics.

“Hillary is going to raise your taxes like crazy. I think to 60 or 65 percent,” Trump said. “She doesn’t want to talk about it. And I’m giving the largest tax cut of anybody, of any candidate that’s run for office.”

“We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world, folks. Nobody pays more taxes. We’re the highest-taxed. Our businesses are the highest taxed in the world. We’re giving a massive tax cut. Especially for business and for small business and especially for the middle class,” Trump said.

Trump’s tax plan, which he rolled out during the primaries, is without question the most conservative tax reform plan since Woodrow Wilson and Congress gave us the federal income tax in 1913 — but it still rankles establishment Republicans because it goes after loopholes and tax havens for politically-connected corporations.

The Trump tax plan wipes out income taxes for poor people making less than $25,000 or married couples making less than $50,000, which exempts “nearly 75 million households,” according to the campaign, from losing a dime of wages to the federal government.

For everybody else, you get three tax brackets: 25 percent, 20 percent, or 10 percent. And for businesses, the ceiling is 15 percent for everyone.

Compare that to Ronald Reagan’s tax reform bill of 1986, which conservative hero Grover Norquist’s group Americans For Tax Reform was literally created to help push. Reagan kept the corporate tax rate at 34 percent and the top individual rate at 28 percent. Trump’s plan is much more conservative.

Trump’s plan is also markedly different than George W. Bush’s tax cuts, which gives Trump another advantage: it nullifies the biggest Obama-era criticism of Republican tax policy, that tax cuts favor the wealthy and drive up the deficit in ways that lead to disaster, like the 2008 financial collapse.

Donald Trump’s immigration and labor reform policies would force down unemployment, pressure companies to raise Americans’ wages and salaries, and even make housing cheaper for young families, according to a supposedly critical report by Moody’s Analytics now being cited by Trump’s critics, including Hillary Clinton. “As the immigrants leave, the already-tight labor market will get tighter, pushing up labor costs as employers struggle to fill the open job positions,” the report acknowledged. “Mr. Trump’s immigration policies will thus result in … potentially severe labor shortages, and higher labor costs,” the critical report promises.

The formal unemployment rate would immediately drop by a third, from 5 percent in 2016 to 3.5 percent in 2017, the report predicts. Housing prices would drop by almost 4 percent in 2018 and 2019, says the Moody’s report.
The prediction complements Trump’s repeated populist argument on the campaign trail that large-scale immigration slashes Americans’ salaries.

Similarly, Trump’s immigration and labor reform plan repeated the charge;

Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first – not wealthy globetrotting donors. We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own. That must change. Here are the three core principles of real immigration reform

Despite Moody’s good news for working-class and middle-class Americans  — whose income and wages have been flat for decades — the report is actually being used by Democrats to slash at Trump.
For example, the New York Times reported Tuesday that “Hillary Clinton’s speech attacking Donald Trump’s economic proposals on Tuesday mentioned a new analysis that says his ideas — if enacted in full — would bring about a ‘lengthy recession’ by the end of his first term.”

The report likely gets the attention of top-level Democrats because it suggests Trump’s reforms would shift wealth from Clinton’s backers on Wall Street to Trump’s backers in Main street. For example, the report claims stock prices would tumble by almost 30 percent by the end of 2019, partly because the departure of the illegal migrants would force up salaries and also reduce the number of taxpayer-supported consumers.

If the market drops, the temporary loss of paper wealth among Clinton’s wall Street donors would be huge.  But the Moody’s report also shows the stock market rocketing upwards after 2018, by roughly 40 percent from 2019 to 2021.

Much of Moody’s predicted harm, however, seems to come from Moody’s assessment of Trump’s plans for a huge income-tax cut. That would likely boost the deficit and sharply interest rates from less than one percent up to 6.3 percent in 2018, the report says.

The report was prepared by Mark Zandi, a long-standing, self-declared Democrat and an advocate for Democratic policies. In June 2015, for example, he donated the legal maximum of $2,700 to Clinton’s campaign.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/06/21/moodys-trump-immigration-labo...

An interesting read thanks Bogie, not sure what to make of it!

Trump is all things to all men so to speak!

Following presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s Tuesday economic address in Monessen, PA, CNN’s Dana Bash said that congressional Republicans were pleased to hear their party’s standard bearer deliver such a “detailed” and “cogent” policy speech.

Bash told viewers that the media is  witnessing “a new Trump campaign,” which appears to be better organized and more efficient—providing reporters with detailed citations for the facts and figures Trump cited during his address.

During the panel, CNN contributor Pamela Brown pointed out that “it was interesting how Trump framed Hillary Clinton as running a campaign of fear.”

Reacting to Bash, Brown said, “That seems like a relatively new tactic.”

Bash responded, “It does. But I think broadly, Pamela, I’m in the Capitol right now and you can almost hear Republicans here exhaling as they listened to this speech. Not necessarily because all Republicans agree with him on trade– this is an issue that scrambles the Republican Party just like it does the Democratic Party. They’re really split on whether free trade is a good idea, as George W. Bush did, or whether the more populist wing should prevail, that now is obviously led by Donald Trump. But just the fact that he gave such a detailed, such a cogent policy—pure policy—speech on an issue that is his sweet spot—there is no doubt about it— is exactly the kind of thing that Republicans have been begging him to do.”

“The other just a little bit of behind the scenes color here I can give you is something that we have not seen—never mind getting prepared remarks, which we did as reporters—but also prepared remarks with detailed footnotes, citations from where he’s getting these facts and figures — a new Trump campaign,” Bash continued.

Also during the panel, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager and now a CNN contributor, said that Tuesday’s address was “the best speech of the campaign so far.”