There are many lessons to be learned from the failure of the GOP health-care effort. An important one is that being a businessman, even a successful one, does not prepare you for the complexities of governing, any more than being a successful software engineer means you could easily become a great carpenter.
But President Trump, who believes that his success in real estate shows he can do anything, hasn’t given up on the idea that when you want to accomplish something in government, what you need is people who know nothing about government. So before he gets to his next complicated and tricky legislative priority — tax reform — he’s doing this:
President Trump plans to unveil a new White House office on Monday with sweeping authority to overhaul the federal bureaucracy and fulfill key campaign promises — such as reforming care for veterans and fighting opioid addiction — by harvesting ideas from the business world and, potentially, privatizing some government functions.The White House Office of American Innovation, to be led by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, will operate as its own nimble power center within the West Wing and will report directly to Trump. Viewed internally as a SWAT team of strategic consultants, the office will be staffed by former business executives and is designed to infuse fresh thinking into Washington, float above the daily political grind and create a lasting legacy for a president still searching for signature achievements
My favorite line from the article is this: “Kushner proudly notes that most of the members of his team have little-to-no political experience, hailing instead from the world of business.” Proudly! I guess the reason government often doesn’t work as well as it should is that no previous president has thought to put his inexperienced son-in-law in charge of things.
Chances are that Kushner’s effort will meet the same fate as every other “reinventing government” initiative: It’ll find some processes that don’t work well and make some recommendations, which will be only sporadically adopted, before it peters out amid frustration and neglect, leaving government stubbornly unreinvented.
In a saner world, Trump might take the health-care defeat and ask himself whether neither knowing nor caring how government and politics actually work might be a hindrance in the future. Trump never grasped that doing a deal with another real estate developer to partner on a golf course isn’t anything like getting 218 ornery members of Congress to agree on a plan to upend one-sixth of the economy. You can’t threaten to walk away (as he did), because it isn’t like there’s another country around the corner you might do your deal with instead. You have to understand what all those members of Congress want and need, and you have to grasp the details that legislators care deeply about. You can’t tell them to “forget about the little s—,” i.e., the things the bill would actually do.
Indeed, much of the failure of Trump’s presidency so far comes from the fact that so few people around him have ever worked in government before, and so many of them hold it in so much contempt. In typical style, Trump has been lashing out since the GOP health-care plan died, both at Democrats and at the House Freedom Caucus — whose votes he’ll need in the future — without taking any of the blame himself.
So what does that portend for tax reform? Trump is going to find a slightly different set of challenges and complications, but there will still be intra-Republican conflicts, and solving them will require the same kind of political skills that he has shown no evidence of possessing.
It’s important to understand that what Republicans have in mind isn’t just tax cuts. If that’s all they wanted, it wouldn’t be particularly hard, because everyone in their party loves cutting taxes, so long as the noble job-creators at the top get nearly all the benefits. (One tax plan from House Republicans would give an average tax break of $100 to those in the lowest 20 percent of taxpayers, but those in the top 0.1 percent would get a sweet $1.4 million off their tax bills.)
But Republican ambitions go beyond just cutting some taxes, like Bush did. They want to overhaul the entire tax system, which is where things get complicated. They’d like to slash rates, and then make up for that by eliminating loopholes (which are usually unspecified). The trouble is that every loophole has a beneficiary, often a very well-connected one who is committed to its future. Once Congress starts writing a tax reform bill, every corporation and industry will descend on Capitol Hill, saying, “Sure, get rid of loopholes, just not mine.” Industries will be facing off against each other with armies of lobbyists, and they’ll all have their own advocates among members of Congress.
Then there’s the “border-adjustment tax” many Republicans are interested in; among others, it’s supported by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and Rep. Kevin Brady (Tex.), chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. It would levy a tax on imported goods, but exempt exports from taxation. That might provide a boost to domestic manufacturers, but it would also be a significant tax increase for consumers, since they’d be paying more for so much of what they buy. Trump himself has gone back and forth on the idea, but there are lots of Republicans who are against any tax increase, full stop. It’s even possible that the BAT could produce a conflict much like the one over health care, with the White House and Ryan lined up against House conservatives who refuse to move an inch on any tax increase.
There’s a reason major tax reform happens only once every few decades: Much like health care, it’s complicated and there are competing interests that are tough to reconcile. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump is saying to himself, “Okay, so I didn’t really understand that health care stuff, but I know taxes. I’m a businessman!” But tax reform isn’t just a policy challenge (and trust me, Trump knows a lot less about tax policy than he thinks), it’s a political challenge. It requires the same kinds of skills and knowledge — particularly about how to unite a fractious caucus around a far-reaching piece of legislation — that Trump and his team just demonstrated that they lack.
So what will happen? If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll try to do comprehensive reform, it’ll be a gigantic mess, and then faced with defeat they’ll just pass some tax cuts for the wealthy and declare victory. And it will be one more demonstration that knowing how to make money in brand licensing doesn’t mean you know how to run government.
