Two of Mr. Trump’s top lieutenants — Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, both multimillionaires and former Goldman Sachs bankers — trotted out a plan<br />that would slash taxes for businesses and wealthy families, including Mr. Trump’s, in the vague hope of propelling economic growth.<br />Here again, the long-term consequences were hard to figure, because Mr. Cohn<br />and Mr. Mnuchin offered no estimates of the plan’s costs; guesswork by some analysts put the figure in the same ballpark as the tax plan Mr. Trump offered during the campaign, or about $7 trillion in additional debt over the first 10 years and nearly $21 trillion by 2036.<br />In addition to lowering the top individual income tax rate to 35 percent, Mr. Trump would do away with the alternative minimum tax, which accounted for a vast majority of the taxes he paid in 2005, according to his leaked tax return from<br />that year, and is one way of making sure that most well-off Americans pay a significant tax on ordinary income.<br />Mr. Trump would also apply that 15 percent tax rate to pass-through income<br />that business owners get from limited liability companies, a change that would directly benefit real estate developers like him.<br />As to the rationale offered up by Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Cohn, even many conservative economists believe<br />that the argument that tax cuts will pay for themselves, by increasing investment and creating jobs, is the same supply-side fantasy that has repeatedly been proved wrong.
