Trump vows to bring prosperity

GOP nominee tries to reset campaign with economy but faces new resistance

Seeking to put the most difficult stretch of his campaign behind him, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump used a major economic speech Monday to reach out to two voting blocs that remain critical to his faltering chances of winning in November: traditional fiscal conservatives and disaffected blue-collar workers.

But Trump faced a new round of resistance from within his party that threatened to stall his effort to move beyond the uproar he caused last week. Dozens of national security officials who served in GOP administrations signed a letter saying that he is “not qualified” to be president.

Reading from a teleprompter

at the Detroit Economic Club and pausing calmly when protesters interrupted him, Trump assailed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and cast himself as the only change candidate

on economic issues. He did so in part with tax-cutting, regulation-curbing plans that are squarely mainstream in his party and in part with his now-familiar attacks on the forces of globalization that have unnerved many workers. He took swipes at freetrade deals championed by GOP leaders and attacked immigrants and refugees.

The Republican nominee shared few new policy details and continued to offer no specifics for how he would pay for tax cuts or spending increases large enough to balloon the federal budget deficit. He promised more clarity in coming weeks.

Trump proposed a new set of individual income tax rates higher than he previously suggested, but he also promised to bring rates lower than they were even during the George W. Bush administration. He was vague in other areas, including a promise for major federal infrastructure spending and another, the only new policy proposal in the speech, that would allow working families to deduct child care-costs from their federal income taxes.

Throughout his address, Trump took sharp aim at Clinton. He held up Detroit, which has been devastated by manufacturing

job losses, as “the living, breathing example” of her “failed economic agenda.”

“I want to jump-start America. It can be done. And it won’t even be that hard,” he said.

At a rally in St. Petersburg, Fla., Clinton assailed Trump’s plan as an outdated replica of previous Republican pitches, saying it would “give super-big tax breaks to large corporations and the really wealthy” and “basically just repackage trickledown economics.”

She added: “You know that old saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’ ”

Clinton framed rejecting Trump as a national imperative.

“Just imagine Donald Trump in the Oval Office, facing a real crisis,” she said. “What happens when somebody gets under his skin? I don’t know if the United States can afford that kind of risk.”

Three tax brackets

On income taxes, the business mogul said he would work with House Republicans to implement the three brackets they have proposed: 12 percent, 25 percent and 33 percent. The move puts Trump in line with Speaker

Paul Ryan, with whom Trump has had a tense alliance.

Previously, Trump proposed tax brackets of 0 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent and 25 percent. He continued to call for a 15 percent corporate income tax rate for all businesses, which is lower than Ryan’s proposed 20 percent corporate rate.

Trump also promised to end some “special interest” tax breaks but named only one, the “carried interest” provision that many investment fund managers use to reduce their tax liability. Experts cautioned, though, that Trump’s plan would still deliver a windfall to such investors, because it would reduce income and corporate rates.

Lacking more details from the campaign, it is difficult to say how much Trump’s revisions to his tax rates would alter the cost of his economic plan, which analysts had previously estimated could reduce federal revenue by $10 trillion over the next decade. Equally difficult to measure are the benefits the plan would deliver to taxpayers across income levels.

“It seems very likely that this version of the plan will lose less revenue than the last version” because it will contain relatively smaller tax cuts for individuals, Scott Greenberg, an analyst at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, said in an interview. A key question, he added, is the level at which various marginal tax rates begin to take effect: “A tax plan where the 33 percent (rate) kicks in at $250,000 and one where it kicks in at $750,000 are two very different tax plans.”

Republican reaction mixed

The measured, pre-written remarks in Detroit on Monday were intended to steady a listing campaign, and conservatives received the calls for tax and regulation cuts positively. But most reaction to the speech, even among conservatives, was mixed. In the end, Monday served as a reminder that many Republicans remain highly skeptical of Trump.

Lanhee Chen, who was the policy director for GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, called the speech a “mixed bag.” He praised the details on taxes as a nod to more orthodox Republican views, but he said Trump’s main challenge now is to prove to voters that he is as serious about policymaking as he is about picking fights with critics.

In Detroit, Trump’s speech outlined a plan designed to accelerate economic growth, largely in classic conservative fashion: by reducing taxes and regulations on businesses and by opening vast new swaths of federal land and water to drilling. He said that as president, he would sign an executive order creating a temporary moratorium on new agency regulations.

“I am going to cut regulations massively,” he said. “Massively.”

Freezing all pending federal regulations would include many Wall Street regulations created by the Dodd-Frank legislation passed in the wake of the financial crisis. Trump’s energy agenda would open new sections of American coastal waters to offshore oil drilling and sweep away the Obama administration’s efforts to fight climate change. Both moves have frequently found widespread support among Republican lawmakers and in conservative policy circles.

In other areas, he skirted or defied Republican orthodoxy. Trump made no attempt to propose spending cuts or other measures to offset his proposed taxrate cuts or begin to reduce the national debt, as he has promised to do in the past. His child-care expense plan could increase the debt even further, unless it were offset by spending cuts or a rapid increase in economic growth. So could an infrastructure spending plan that he has said could cost more than $500 billion.