Democrats must admit their policy of higher taxes over the years has hurt the economy and tax rates must be brought down to help the United States be competitive on an international basis, but they most likely won't vote for tax change being proposed by Republicans and President Donald Trump, Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, said Thursday.
"Once we have 51 votes in the Senate, there may be three or four Democrats who are terrified of losing in the 2018 election," Norquist told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program. "They would throw a vote in but they would not be the fiftieth or fifty-first vote which means their vote doesn't matter because it's just pretending."
"There will be no meaningful Democrat votes for the bill," he added.
However, Norquist said Trump's call for tax reform is just the first phase of more action that is coming.
"We had a tax cut every year that we had a Republican president and a Republican congress under [President George W.] Bush," Norquist said. "Republican states like Florida and Texas and North Carolina you have a tax cut every year. With Trump, as long as there is a Republican House and Congress, there will be a tax cut every year. This is going to be a larger one. It's going to be dramatic."
But next year, and the year after that, "there will be things that we weren't able to fit into this tax bill that will get into the next one," Norquist continued.
While Trump said in his speech in Indiana that the tax reform plans are about bringing jobs back to the United States and would benefit people such as farmers whose families are hit hard by death taxes, Norquist said he believes the plan best helps people who did not have jobs in the past eight years.
"We were growing at two percent a year and we had lousy job numbers," said Norquist. "The winners of this are the millions of Americans who will get a job because we're bringing trillions of dollars overseas back to the United States. We're reducing taxes on businesses, so they can invest in people, and making people more productive rather than sending the money to Washington, D.C.
The biggest winner, he added, "is the guy who had no job and now makes $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 a year. It benefits every American because every single American will see a tax rate reduction."
However, Norquist said he does not believe a "single Democrat" in the House or Senate will vote for the bill.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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