The grandkids will pay for Trump’s tax cuts

IF we get a tax cut, we should thank President Trump, of course, and Congress. But we should also thank our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, because they are the ones who are going to end up paying the price.

Trump announced his plans for taxes last week: three tax brackets instead of seven for households; doubling the standard deduction; and increasing the child tax credit while retaining the popular deduction on mortgages, which was really never in jeopardy.

Companies will get a tax rate of 20 percent, down from the current 35 percent, and cuts in the tax rate for business income reported on personal returns.

The proposal would also repeal the estate tax and do away with the alternative minimum tax, which for decades has been just another way for the government to pick people’s pockets.

Think of it this way: it’s as if Santa plopped down in your living room and left a bundle of presents, all colorfully wrapped to get your attention.

I’m all in favor of paying less tax. In fact, put my name first on the list for paying absolutely no tax at all.

But those gifts that the Trump administration says it will give us are no different from the presents left by Santa — they both come with a price. And just like at Christmas time, we can ignore that cost until the bills start arriving. The comparison here isn’t perfect. If you spend too much at Christmas, you can walk away from your bills — declare bankruptcy, tell your credit card company to stuff it or simply change your name and disappear into New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.

Some people think Washington can walk away from its obligations, too. But it can’t. And because Washington has been borrowing obsessively for decades — but especially during the Obama administration — there isn’t much room for error.

If you read my column, you’ve certainly heard that US debt went over the $20 trillion level a few weeks ago. Few others reported this milestone because, ya know, it’s just so yucky.

Even yuckier is the fact that much of that debt is owed to countries and organizations that don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. China, with which we may or may not be in a trade war, and which isn’t helping much with the North Korean menace, owns a lot of that debt.

So do Japan and the OPEC countries. And a lot of our debt is held by the Social Security system. With the baby boom generation now collecting from Social Security rather than paying into the system, the US debt situation will become more urgent.

There’s another problem. Interest rates will eventually climb, so Washington will have to pay more to borrow.

I have my doubts that any type of massive tax reform will ever get passed. There are too many lobbyists for special interests, too many politicians who can’t agree on anything and too many people who understand that piling trillions more in debt onto our country isn’t good for future generations. And no matter how much the Trump administration tries to explain it, the hope that tax cuts will spark enough additional economic activity to make up for the lost tax revenue is just too flimsy.

So, give me a tax cut if you’d like. Just don’t tell our kids or grandkids or great-grandkids what we are doing to them.

A year from now, when tax reform fails, I’ll call Trump with my Plan B: Change the tax laws so people can immediately use some of the trillions that are now captive in retirement plans.

That’ll help the economy grow faster, and will actually bring in additional revenue to the US Treasury.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has offered to prove that Russia didn’t leak the e-mails of the Democratic National Committee last year. But he wants a deal — a pardon — for spilling the beans.

There is absolutely no reason that Trump shouldn’t take him up on the offer.

WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of DNC e-mails, as well as ones from the computer of campaign head John Podesta and others. If the Russians didn’t hack the DNC computers and release the e-mails, then someone else did.

And the best candidate for the role of leaker is someone inside the DNC — perhaps a supporter of Bernie Sanders who felt his candidate wasn’t getting a fair shake. This would change history and render moot any investigation of the Trump administration, except where it pertains to the much less serious allegation of obstruction of justice. I say lesser allegation, because it would involve obstruction of justice for a crime (the Russian hacking) that didn’t happen. Here’s my best educated guess on the whole thing: A very good source of mine says the Russians stole Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, but never released them, while someone inside the DNC was responsible for making the e-mails of Podesta and other Democrats public. What’s the bigger effect of all this? Well, all else being equal — and it never is in the Trump administration — this would remove a cloud over the president and strengthen his hand in tax reform, ObamaCare repeal and lots of other things. The financial markets would like that. Trump should take Assange up on his offer.