Stephen Moore insists he wouldn’t read too much into Republicans recently losing the race for governor in Virginia, but admits he’s convinced the GOP has to get major legislation passed soon to avoid a complete 2018 midterm wipeout.
“You go back the last 50 years, and 90 percent of time the party that is in power in the White House has lost the governorship,” Moore, a senior CNN economist and former senior economic adviser to the Trump campaign, said during a recent appearance on the "Chicago's Morning Answer" radio show.
Virginia has turned into a blue state, he added, and Ed Gillespie, who was the Republican candidate for governor, was "up against a powerful tide."
Moore’s advice to Republicans going forward is to get the tax plan the party is now proposing passed quickly or face the prospect of another wipeout similar to the one suffered by Gillespie, only this time on a much larger scale. The tax bill, he said, would bring the country in line with the rest of the world.
“The corporate rate is so out of line with rest of word, it makes America so uncompetitive,” he said. “We bleed jobs and bleed factories because of it. This would bring the United States corporate rate down from the highest in the world to below average and that would attract a lot of businesses, a lot of jobs and a lot of factories back to the United States.”
Moore said he expects the GOP tax plan to pass by Christmas and that he sees the average taxpayer saving up to $3,000 because of it.
“I give the Republican plan a grade of B,” he said.
He also discussed what the plan should include.
“They should have capped the deductions," Moore said. He added that Republicans should have eliminated deductions for people who earn more than $1 million and lower the rate on the people in the highest income brackets.
Moore said all the talk about the plan being a giant giveaway for the rich is just that.
“Here’s the irony: They didn’t do it because they would have been accused of giving tax breaks to the rich,” he said of the caps. “That’s what they’re still doing.”
Moore recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post where he suggested Republicans counter democratic arguments about the plan being for the rich and increasing the federal deficit by going back to the original Trump campaign plan that he helped to craft.
“In every meeting, Donald Trump told us he didn’t want a tax cut 'for rich people like me,'" he wrote, adding that they addressed the issue by putting a global cap of $150,000 on all deductions and credits.
Moore reasoned under such a plan, no deductions would be eliminated from the tax code, but families who previously made use of countless write-offs would now be forced to pick and choose which ones to use.
Moore said such a path forward offers something for everyone.
“How could liberals such as Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who argue the rich don’t pay their fair share, stand against this idea,” he wrote. "They would look extremely hypocritical if they did.”
Dan Proft, one of the hosts of "Chicago's Morning Answer," is a principal in Local Government Information Services, which owns this publication.
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