Two of Mr. Trump’s top lieutenants — Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, both multimillionaires and former Goldman Sachs bankers — trotted out a plan
that would slash taxes for businesses and wealthy families, including Mr. Trump’s, in the vague hope of propelling economic growth.
Here again, the long-term consequences were hard to figure, because Mr. Cohn
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.
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
that year, and is one way of making sure that most well-off Americans pay a significant tax on ordinary income.
Mr. Trump would also apply that 15 percent tax rate to pass-through income
that business owners get from limited liability companies, a change that would directly benefit real estate developers like him.
As to the rationale offered up by Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Cohn, even many conservative economists believe
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.