Taxes

[xoxoxoBruce]

From a 1999 CNN interview with Donald Trump.

Trump proposes massive one-time tax on the rich
By Phil Hirschkorn/CNN November 9, 1999

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Billionaire businessman Donald Trump has a plan to pay off the national debt, grant a middle class a tax cut, and keep Social Security afloat: tax rich people like himself. Trump, a prospective candidate for the Reform Party presidential nomination, is proposing a one-time "net worth tax" on individuals and trusts worth $10 million or more.

By Trump's calculations, his proposed 14.25 percent levy on such net worth would raise $5.7 trillion and wipe out the debt in one full swoop. "The plan I am proposing today does not involve smoke and mirrors, phony numbers, financial gimmicks, or the usual economic chicanery you usually find in Disneyland-on-the-Potomac," Trump said.

Trump would exempt the value of an individual's principal home from the net worth total. "By my calculations, 1 percent of Americans, who control 90 percent of the wealth in this country, would be affected by my plan," Trump said. "The other 99 percent of the people would get deep reductions in their federal income taxes," he said.

Eliminating the national debt would save the federal government $200 billion a year in interest payments, Trump said. He proposes to earmark half the savings for middle class tax cuts, and the other half for Social Security. Trump said depositing $100 billion annually in the Social Security trust fund would generate $3 trillion "over the next 30-years, when the trust fund is scheduled to go broke" and instead keep the fund "solvent through the next century."

The tax also would lead to the repeal the current federal inheritance tax "which really hurts farmers and small businessman and women more than anything else," Trump said.

Did he mean it, or as the Reform Party candidate it's a hail mary play, knowing if by some miracle he got elected, congress would shoot it down, so he wouldn't have to pay?