Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump named regulatory reform as one of four pillars to his prospective administration's economic platform in an address to the Detroit Economic Club.
"I am going to cut regulations massively," Trump said in a roughly hour-long speech, which was intermittently interrupted by protestors.
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Upon taking office, Trump said he would issue a temporary moratorium on all new agency regulations, which would presumably include the U.S. Department of Labor's fiduciary rule, finalized in April. Trump did not make specific reference to the Labor Department's rule in the speech.
The first phase of implementation for the Labor Department's rule, which requires all financial advisors to IRAs and 401(k) plans with less than $50 million in assets to provide a fiduciary level of care to clients, is scheduled for April 10, 2017. Full compliance with the rule's Best Interest Contract Exemption is scheduled for Jan.1, 2018.
In his speech, Trump said the Federal Register, which publishes federal agency rules and regulations, is now 80,000 pages long, evidence of what he said is a "massive led weight" that regulations have on the American economy.
"It's time to remove the anchor that is dragging us down," Trump said. "This will give our companies the certainty they need to reinvest, hire and expand their businesses.
Along with regulatory reform, Trump named tax, trade, and energy policy as the three other cornerstones of his economic plan.
Further details will be forthcoming, said Trump, but he did enumerate several key policy initiatives.
He vowed to make tax simplification a major feature of his administration by streamlining the existing seven personal income tax brackets to three: Trump proposed 12 percent, 25 percent, and 33 percent individual income tax rates.
Tax reductions and loopholes
That is a shift from Trump's previous tax proposals, which capped the top marginal tax rate at 25 percent — the other two tax rates were originally put at 10 percent and 20 percent.
In his speech in Detroit, Trump also vowed to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, a level consistent with his original proposal.
"We punish companies for making products in America but let them ship products here tax free if they move overseas. This is backwards," said Trump.
A Trump administration would also eliminate the carried interest rate deduction, and other "special interest loopholes that have been good for Wall Street but bad for workers."
In the wake of his first proposed re-haul of individual tax rates, nonpartisan economists said the lower tax revenue would significantly increase annual deficits.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank, said the original proposal would lose $9.25 trillion to $11.6 trillion in tax revenue over a decade.
In Detroit, Trump argued that his tax cuts at the corporate and individual level would "unleash years of economic growth and job creation."
But in scoring Trump's original proposal, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) notes that the Congressional Budget Office is projecting the economy to grow at about 2.1 percent annually over the next decade.
CBO's projection is significantly lower than the growth predicted by the Trump campaign, which has estimated annual growth as high as 7 percent at different points during the campaign.
In order to stabilize the nation's total debt, which CRFB puts at $14 trillion, annual growth would have to be 5.4 percent under the tax cuts first proposed by the Trump campaign, according to the group's score of the first round of proposed tax cuts.
And balancing the budget would require a growth rate of 10.3 percent. The average growth rate over a decade has not exceeded 4 percent since the early 1970s.
In a statement, Maya MacGuineas, president of CRFB, said, "It is encouraging that Donald Trump appears to be modifying his tax plan, which would push America toward an unprecedented level of debt unless it is significantly changed."
CFRB has of course not had time to score the Trump campaign's revised proposed tax cuts, but said it will update its score of both the Trump and Clinton campaigns' economic proposals in coming weeks.
But CFRB did say that while the new tax rates proposed during the Detroit speech are an improvement from earlier proposals, Trump's tax cuts are still likely to add "substantially" to the federal debt.
The cut to the corporate tax rate proposed by Trump would cost $2.55 trillion in revenue over the next decade, according to CFRB.
"We urge Donald Trump to put forward a tax framework that will cost as little as possible – or preferably generate net revenue – along with a serious suite of new spending cuts and entitlement reforms that would not only pay for any remaining tax cuts but also put the national debt on a downward path relative to the economy," said MacGuineas.
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