Trump vows to unveil tax-cut plan next week, surprising staff

President Trump promised on Friday that he would unveil a “massive” tax cut for Americans next week, vowing a “big announcement on Wednesday,” but he revealed no details about what is certain to be an enormously complicated effort to overhaul the nation’s tax code.

Trump offered his tax tease in an interview and again during remarks at the Treasury Department on Friday afternoon as he raced to stack up legislative accomplishments before his 100th day in office at the end of next week.

His announcement surprised Capitol Hill and left Trump’s own Treasury officials speechless as he arrived at the Treasury offices to sign directives to roll back Obama-era tax rules and financial regulations. Earlier in the day, when reporters asked Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, how far away a tax overhaul proposal was, he said he could not give an answer. “Tax reform is way too complicated,” he said.

Trump told The Associated Press in the interview that his tax reductions would be “bigger, I believe, than any tax cut ever”. But he faces an enormous fight among clashing vested interests as Congress tries to rewrite the tax code.

Starting that fight next week is further complicated by Trump’s hopes to revive the Republican health care plan that collapsed last month. And it would mean trying a tax overhaul as his White House faces the prospect of a government shutdown if lawmakers cannot agree on a funding bill by April 28.

The details of Trump’s tax plans remain the subject of intense speculation, with stock markets regularly gyrating when White House officials discuss the subject. Since taking office, the president has suggested that he wants to enact the deepest cuts to individual and corporate tax rates in history.

But despite Trump’s statement on Friday that his tax overhaul “really formally begins on Wednesday,” White House officials quickly cautioned against high expectations that Trump would provide the legislative text of a detailed tax plan next week.

Instead, a senior administration official said the president would release only the “parameters” that Trump expected a tax plan to follow in the long congressional debate that would surely follow. Another official said the information released next week would be more like a “broad” outline. Wall Street, which tends to celebrate tax cuts, barely reacted; the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 0.3 per cent Friday.

The administration has maintained that middle-income tax cuts, a simplification of personal income taxes, and making business taxes more competitive with other countries are the top priorities. Trump insisted that his plans were on track and that his strategy to remake the economy would change history.

“This is really the beginning of a whole new way of life that this country hasn’t seen in many, many years,” Trump said as he sat at the desk of Mnuchin, near a portrait of Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary. He said, “We’ve lifted one terrible regulation after another at a record clip from the energy sector to the auto sector.”

Despite Trump’s enthusiasm, the directives he signed at the Treasury Department on Friday to review measures put in place by the Obama administration were largely preliminary. As business groups cheered the moves, some sceptics were left questioning whether Trump was keeping his campaign promises to give working-class Americans a higher priority than Wall Street bankers.

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