Wiretap: In a blast from the past, Trump insists his tax cut plan would pay for itself

Donald Trump says his new tax plan would do what Ronald Reagan’s never did, and what George W. Bush’s never did, which is to pay for itself. There is a long line of economists, including many conservative ones, who would beg to differ. As one said, “It would just be dropping cash out of helicopters on corporate headquarters for a couple of years.” Via The Washington Post.

Trump’s proposed tax “plan” is one whole page long, but in case you need the page further broken down, The New York Times explains the seven key elements of the “plan,” which is more like an outline of a plan that is not just short on numbers, but just plain short.

Now that the White House seems to have reached a deal on healthcare reform that should win the Freedom Caucus votes, the fate of the House bill rests with the so-called GOP moderates, including many of those seen as most vulnerable in the 2018 midterms. We’re talking about you, Mike Coffman, who supported the first Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill but now says he is undecided. Via The Atlantic.

Maybe you were confused by the stories citing administration sources saying that Trump was considering pulling out of NAFTA. I’m sure Mexico and Canada were confused. So in a conference call, Trump cleared up the matter: The United States is not pulling out. For now. Probably. Maybe. Via The Los Angeles Times.

How did the big North Korea confab with busloads of senators at the White House go? One Republican senator described it as “80 sets of invisible eyes rolling.” Via Vox.

Trump’s strange interview with the Associated Press proves at least one thing, says Amy Davidson in The New Yorker: There’s no point in trying to connect Trump’s actual words to reality. On the other hand, as Ross Douthat writes in The New York Times, however badly you might think Trump’s first 100 days are going, you have to consider how much worse they could be.

Katha Pollit: Demanding answers on Trump, Russia and the election is not McCarthyism, or anything like it. Donald Trump, she writes in The Nation, is not a high school teacher who once subscribed to The Daily Worker; he’s the president of the United States.

From The National Review: George Will believes that France is about to elect as president its own version of Barack Obama. In case you had any doubts, Will doesn’t mean that in a good way.

The Washington Post offers up four reasons why Obama shouldn’t take the money from Wall Street for a speech. No. 4: Because Obama himself has warned against the corrupting influence of money on politicians.

 

Official portrait of President Reagan, 1981, via Matthew Yglesias on Flickr:Creative Commons

He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow.