Fortune: What Trump’s Brief Flirtation With a Payroll Tax Cut Says About the State of the Economy

“The administration based the big 2017 tax cut on the idea that it would spur economic growth,” says Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. “At a time when there’s little evidence that it’s doing so, they’re under pressure to find some other tax-based means of doing that.”

Gardner notes “widespread public skepticism” that the tax reform law was “designed to help middle-class families and create jobs,” rather than primarily benefiting “large corporations” through its cutting of the corporate tax rate and other provisions that have helped large companies. Likewise, capital gains tax reform would be “basically irrelevant to most lower-to-middle-income families,” he says. Read more