Kudlow
said he found Trump’s platform very agreeable to free-market growth: “He has a
very good corporate tax-cut plan, across the board, for large companies and small
companies.
He’s
got a 15 percent rate — we’re about 35 to 40 percent now.” “So let’s say that became law,” Kudlow
continued. “You’d see a movement, a tremendous movement, of capital
and labor back to the United States, that’s in China and overseas, because we’d
have a more hospitable business tax environment.
You
include immediate deductions for new business investment, and you include
repatriation, which is all in Trump’s plan, and you’ve got yourself a powerful
incentive to move back to the USA.” Kudlow thought such “incentive economics”
were better tools than the tariffs Trump has proposed for punishing businesses
that move overseas, preferring carrots to sticks.
However, he agreed that stern
measures were needed to deal with China, which Bannon described as a
“mercantilist society” — the government actively harming foreign competition to
give native industries an edge.
