Top Trump adviser says the GOP tax bill is 'death to Democrats'
- Stephen Moore, a Trump campaign adviser and conservative economist, said the Republican tax bill represents "death to Democrats."
- Moore said that the repeal of the state and local tax deduction, new taxes on universities, and the repeal of the Obamacare mandate particularly target liberals.
Stephen Moore, one of the top economic advisers to President Donald Trump's campaign, on Tuesday said the new Republican tax bill will hit one groups of Americans especially hard.
"It's death to Democrats," Moore told Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur.
Moore, a conservative economist, pointed to provisions that would repeal the state and local tax deduction - which is used heavily in high-tax states New York and California - and new proposed taxes on large universities as examples of provisions that go after liberals.
"They go after university endowments, and universities have become play pens of the left," Moore told Bloomberg. "And getting rid of the mandate is to eventually dismantle Obamacare."
Moore also wrote an op-ed Tuesday saying that the increase in taxes for "blue states" in the bill - the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) - should be blamed on liberals in those states.
"But here again, blue state voters are the ones responsible for these inequities," Moore wrote. "Blue staters tend to send liberal politicians to office, who then vote for bigger federal spending - even though a greater share of the money goes to the red states. Maybe somebody needs to write a book called: 'What's the Matter With Massachusetts.'"
Moore also said tax cuts would come for everyone, even wealthier Americans. But he said they would not specifically help the wealthy more than the middle class, citing an analysis by Chris Edwards at the libertarian Cato Institute. He said every American should fight for the tax bill to be passed.
"You want to kill the economy - and Christmas? Follow Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi's advice and kill the tax cut," Moore wrote.
Other analyses by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the official government scorekeeper, have shown that over time more and more of the bill's benefits go toward wealthier Americans, while many middle-income Americans could face tax increases.