Koch-backed group going to grassroots
AFP talks up idea of corporate cuts
» WORMLEYSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA The idea of cutting taxes for corporations is something Americans have long felt was a bad idea.
That’s what they’ve told pollsters, anyway. Yet President Donald Trump and his allies are betting that many voters just need someone to explain to them how a corporate tax cut would unleash an economic bonanza, with new jobs, faster growth and ample pay raises. And they’re taking that message right to some voters’ doorsteps in hopes of igniting a surge of support.
So on an unseasonably hot Saturday recently, a chipper Ashley Klingensmith canvassed a neighborhood of stately colonial homes outside Harrisburg, Pa. Using an ipad, she rang the doorbells of people presumed to be sympathetic to the notion of revamping the federal tax code. And indeed, all but one of the nine she and a colleague interviewed agreed that corporate taxes should be lowered as Trump and Republican leaders have proposed in hopes of further strengthening the job market.
Yet not everyone saw it as an urgent problem that a president who is facing tough problems involving North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, trade deals and natural disasters must solve this year.
“He has so much on his plate that it’s going to be hard to get the Congress to focus on that, what with how many thousands of pages of the IRS tax code that’s out there, that need to be redone,” said Leora Kirkpatrick, a retiree.
At some other homes, Klingensmith encountered people prepared to blame Republicans in Congress — rather than the president — if a tax overhaul failed, whether or not it included a corporate tax cut.
“We’ve got a Congress that doesn’t do anything,” said Harold Degarmo, who retired after working for the Army for 40 years. “I think (Trump) is doing good, trying to. The Republicans are fighting him.”
The canvassing was part of a 35state operation spearheaded by Americans for Prosperity, a group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers’ network and where Klingensmith, 31, works as Pennsylvania field director. There are also phone bank operations and TV ad campaigns run by outside groups that have met with White House officials as part of the push. The outreach is expected to continue in coming months in hopes of helping drive the plan through Congress.
The operation is meant to remedy a perceived flaw in Trump’s failed drive to repeal President Barack Obama’s 2010 health insurance law. That effort lacked a base of voters ready to push lawmakers to back the repeal. By contrast, the outreach on taxes is aimed at loyal conservative voters who are seen as open to applying pressure to lawmakers via phone calls and meetings.
It was impossible to gauge around Harrisburg just how in- tense the follow-through will be by targeted voters. But the state directors of Americans for Prosperity held more than 100 meetings with federal lawmakers and staff last month.
On paper, it isn’t an easy sell. Trump’s tax plan would slash business taxes by $2.65 trillion over a decade while increasing the tax burden on families and individuals by $471 billion, according to a preliminary analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
The sales job amounts to a test of whether Trump’s allies can galvanize ordinary people on an issue as complex and polarizing as taxes.
Among their talking points is that the tax code is a deplorable mess that favors special interests. U.S. companies, they argue, pay an inflated tax rate compared with those in other countries. So reducing the 35 percent corporate rate to 20 percent and eliminating unspecified loopholes, they say, would kick economic growth into a higher speed.
Vanessa Williamson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies public attitudes toward taxes, noted that cutting corporate taxes has remained consistently unpopular with voters despite the efforts of conservative groups.
“They’ve been trying for decades at the elite levels of the Republican Party to make pro-bigbusiness issues something that motivates their base — and I don’t think they’ve had much success,” Williamson said.