Daily Caller Panel Lays Out GOP Tax Revolution To Restore America

Analysts laid out how a tax policy revolution could jolt American growth during a Daily Caller Live panel Thursday.

Republican Texas Rep. Beth Van Duyne, Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, Unleash Prosperity Chairman and Co-Founder Stephen Moore, and Arnold Ventures Tax & Fiscal Policy Fellow Scott Hodge joined Daily Caller Editor-in-Chief Amber Duke at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C. to discuss the real-world affects of tax policy.

Norquist celebrated the Big Beautiful Bill, also known as the Working Families Tax Cuts Act. The law created “Trump Accounts,” intended to $1,000 U.S. treasury grants to children born between the years 2025 and 2028.

“When we change some tax laws, we elect a new people,” he said.

“We are going to have millions of people turning 18 — when you can vote — and they will have had 5, 6, 7 years of being conscious of, ‘I have this money in an account. It goes up when you have good policies, it goes down when you have bad policies,’” Norquist said. “It will change the electorate. The average 18-year-old will start voting and have more common sense than the average Democrat congressman.”

Moore echoed the sentiment, saying the bill “is a really good example of how good things happen when you cut tax rates.” The economist also underlined the division between red and blue states, explaining that tax policy is becoming “a real crisis” in Democrat strongholds.

“Washington state was the one blue state that worked,” Moore said. “[B]ecause it was one of the nine states that had no income tax.”

He called the policy a “humongous advantage” for the state, which houses major companies including Amazon and Microsoft.

“They went from the lowest income tax state in the country, zero, to 9.9% which makes them the fourth-highest income tax state,” the economist said.

Moore predicted that major companies would leave the state “in the next five years” in favor of red states “that treat them more nicely.”

Hodge said the problem with much of proposed tax policy is that many politicians “don’t understand the unintended consequences of the policies they present.”

While referring to Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s book, “The Two-Income Trap,” Hodge laid out how the most important financial problems for couples are the same industries most subsidized by the government.

“We have to be extremely careful about how we craft tax policy because of those unintended consequences,” he said.

[Photo by The Daily Caller News Foundation]

Norquist outlined how proving the success of a state single-rate taxes could pave the way for a similar federal policy.

“We’re moving really good tax ideas at the state level, which can then come to Washington with a track record that works as opposed to the stuff the Democrats want to sell us, which won’t work in their own states,” he said.

“These blue, high-tax states are being bled to death, and the only way they can survive is to try and federalize everything,” Moore added.

The economist added that his “vision” is to create a “freedom zone” in which southern states have no income tax, forcing the rest of the country to “change or die.”

“[The founding fathers] set up a system of states competing with each other, and that’s what we want.” Moore added. “We want states to compete for the best policy.”

Van Duyne explained that Texas is an attractive state for businesses because “policy actually matters.”

“When you actually understand that businesses just want to be able to hire people, invest, grow, understand what the rules are so you’re being consistent with your rules, not changing them all the time, this is what Texas tries to do,” the congresswoman said. “When you actually care and invest in your businesses and you let off the regulatory stranglehold, businesses can thrive.”

[Photo by The Daily Caller News Foundation]

Norquist said the Trump administration has “one thing on the to-do list,” calling for an end to “the taxation of inflation on capital gains.”

“We ought not to be inflating the currency, but we certainly ought not to be telling somebody that the capital gains tax on your stock, on your house, on your land, on your business, is going up. So if we eliminate that part of the gain, the fake gain — your house went up $100,000, [50,000] of it was inflation, you don’t tax the inflation part of that — that would tremendously increase the ability of people to buy and sell houses, not wait until you die and get the cost plus up, and be able to sell stocks early,” he said.

Norquist added that it would be “extremely helpful in people accumulating wealth in their lives.”