Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is urging his Republican colleagues to double down on tax cuts for the working-class Americans who make up President Donald Trump’s base.
Hawley told Fox News Digital in an interview that tax cuts are “what Republicans are good at,” calling specifically for changes to the payroll tax. He says Americans should be able to apply income tax credits like the child tax credit, the mortgage deduction and charitable deduction, to their payroll taxes.
Hawley, who first made the push in a Tuesday op-ed for the Washington Post, says he has spoken with Trump about the potential tax breaks and the president is “very supportive.”
“These are the people who put Trump in the White House,” Hawley told Fox, referring to Americans who earn less than $80,000 per year.
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Debate over tax policy is raging in Washington as Republicans weigh what to put in Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill. Many Republicans support re-upping the 2017 tax cuts, but there are calls for more changes.
Some Republicans, including the White House, have even flirted with raising taxes on the uppermost brackets in order to offset costs.
“We’ve got this incredible national debt, and so at some point you’ve got to address the elephant in the room,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told the New York Times on Tuesday. “Can’t tell you if it’s going to happen or not.”
Hawley has also said he would support raising some taxes to offset cuts in lower tax brackets if the president makes a push for it.
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He proposed to Fox that one path toward raising more revenue would be to start taxing the endowments of America’s largest universities.
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Trump’s administration is already engaged in a pitched battle to reform America’s top educational institutions, threatening to withhold federal funding if they do not adequately address anti-Semitism and other issues on their campuses.
Harvard, the university that has pushed back the hardest on Trump’s administration, has an endowment of roughly $53 billion.
The other seven Ivy League schools have endowments totaling over $139 billion.
Regardless of offsets, however, Hawley says the top priority should be securing tax breaks for the people who voted Trump into office.
Hawley emphasized this focus in his op-ed for the Post, quoting Reagan-era columnist Robert Novak.
“God put the Republican Party on Earth to cut taxes.”
