Washington.- Former President Donald J. Trump told a group of the most powerful executives in the United States on Thursday that he intended to reduce the corporate tax rate to 20% from 21%, according to three people who attended the meeting. and that they spoke on condition of anonymity because ground rules stipulated that the meeting was off the record.
Trump made the remarks from a comfortable gray chair during a conversation with his former economic adviser Larry Kudlow before an audience of dozens of top chief executives, including Apple’s Tim Cook, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Walmart’s Doug McMillon and Charles W. Scharf of Wells Fargo.
They had gathered Thursday morning in Washington for a meeting of the Business Roundtable, an influential corporate group, and there was said to be palpable relief in the room when Trump, who has been trying to attract business leaders as potential donors, told executives much of what they expected to hear.
Many leaders in corporate America have become nervous that, in a second term, Mr. Trump would not be as friendly to them as he was in the first. Many ended up abandoning him and publicly criticizing him, especially after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Mr. Trump, whose public speeches are often characterized by conspiratorial promises to root out “communists” in the government and hardline policies such as overseeing the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, was described by one of people who attended the meeting as relatively more restrained than usual, modulating their messages for the elite audience. The most striking thing was that he softened his speech on immigration.
But it was his spiel about taxes that seemed to most visibly please the executives in the room, according to people who attended the meeting.
Mr. Kudlow’s first question to Mr. Trump dealt with the issue that worries executives most: the fact that significant parts of the tax cut package that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 will expire next year.
Specifically, Mr. Trump reportedly told them that he wanted to further reduce the corporate rate to 20 percent, which he said he liked because it is a “round number” and because he thought doing so would make American companies more competitive and create jobs, according to the people who attended.
He is said to have added that, in his view, a key reason why the economy performed so well in his first term until the pandemic was his tax cuts, and especially the permanent reduction of the corporate rate to 21% from 35% in its 2017 tax law.
(Mr. Trump inherited from former President Barack Obama a growing economy amid a long, steady recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-09; the economy continued to function more or less the same until the pandemic. At the end of the first year of under Mr. Trump, pressured Congress, then controlled by Republicans, to lower the corporate tax rate).
Trump has proposed extending all parts of the 2017 tax cut law that will automatically expire at the end of 2025 if Congress does not pass new legislation, including maintaining the 2017 law’s lower marginal tax rates at all levels. of income and its highest threshold for inheritances that are exempt from any estate tax.
President Biden has proposed maintaining the law’s reduced rates for modest and medium incomes, but allowing taxes to rise again on personal incomes over $400,000 and on larger inheritances. He has also proposed raising the corporate rate to 28%.
Mr. Biden has argued that because his plan would make the rich and corporations pay more, it would offset the loss of public revenue from expanding tax cuts on low- and middle-income levels, and therefore would not would increase the national debt. Full extension of the 2017 law, which Mr. Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress funded through government borrowing, would add trillions in additional public debt if not combined with new spending cuts.
Trump’s tax cuts have become something of a rallying cry for the business elite and their wealthy donors and potential donors, who are worried that the parts of the cuts that benefit them most will expire next year without Republican control in Washington.
A corporate tax rate near 20 percent was one of Mr. Trump’s demands during the fight over his tax cut bill in 2017, a law that Republicans rushed to pass later that year.
Mr. Trump said other things Thursday that seemed to reassure top executives, according to people in the room. After delivering his standard campaign lines about millions of immigrants pouring over the border under Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump spoke of the importance of highly skilled immigration, saying that he knew that companies need these workers, the three people said.
Mr. Trump said he thought it was “wrong” that people who made sacrifices to come to the United States and attend the best American schools had to return home to their countries, one of the people said. Another person in the room recalled that Mr. Trump noted that highly skilled immigrants who received an American education could be successful in the United States or in their home countries. He said the best and brightest were needed to help America.
Business leaders were among those who repeatedly urged Mr. Trump to change his restrictive immigration policies during his term; He often signaled to these leaders that he agreed with their push for high-skilled immigration, while enacting policies that would make it more difficult. The Trump administration moved to restrict visas for highly skilled workers when the pandemic dramatically disrupted the economy.
Trump, who was convicted last month of falsifying business records to cover up paying money to a porn actress during the 2016 election, offered other lines to please chief executives. Among them, he talked about his deregulation agenda and his desire to speed up the permitting process for companies.
In April, Trump dined with oil company executives and lobbyists at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, and told them they should donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign because, if elected, he would roll back regulations. environmental issues that he said hindered his industry, according to two people who attended that dinner.
For months, Mr. Trump has faced a huge campaign cash shortfall with Mr. Biden, and he has been courting big donors since long before he became the candidate. But the search for him has become more fruitful since he became the presumptive Republican nominee, and since some business leaders have more openly opposed Biden’s policies.
Now, several of those leaders are gradually coming to terms with the reality that Trump could win the White House again, and are much more receptive to his proposal, although several privately insist that they remain repulsed by him.
Still, Trump continues to call for another economic measure that is generally opposed by business interests, reiterating to a group of House Republicans early Thursday that he favors imposing much higher tariffs on most imported products.
These taxes would increase costs for companies that import raw materials and equipment, and could trigger a global trade war and retaliatory tariffs that would make it difficult for American companies to sell their products abroad.
At the Business Roundtable meeting, managers also heard from White House chief of staff Jeffrey D. Zients, who defended the Biden administration’s economic management and its ability to preserve domestic and global stability, according to two people familiar. with your comments. Zients referred to the strong US economic recovery after the pandemic and the Biden administration’s policies to compete with China. He also argued that trade wars and mass deportations would set the United States back, one of the people said.
Although many members of the business community have taken issue with Biden’s policies, the executive audience seemed receptive to Zients, a former CEO who is fluent in corporate language.
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