Trump Says Economic Plan Would Create 25 Million Jobs

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump, nipping at Hillary Clinton’s heels in an increasingly close presidential race, plans on Thursday to tell the New York Economic Club his plan would create 25 million jobs in a decade and grow the economy by 3.5 percent per year.

His plan would remove millions of low-income Americans from tax rolls and cut no spending from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the campaign added in an outline distributed to reporters.

The cost of Trump’s tax plan, due to lost federal revenue, remained unclear, and it has been a moving target and a matter of contention. The conservative-leaning Tax Foundation said the plan would cost the U.S. Treasury roughly $10 trillion in revenue over a decade and this summer his aides took that relatively detailed tax plan off the campaign’s website while a group of economic advisers suggested ways to trim its cost.

Alan Cole, a Tax Foundation economist, confirmed that the nonprofit group had analyzed what he called potential, unpublished tweaks to Trump’s plan and concluded that its cost was around $3 trillion over a decade. But he said the changes that the Tax Foundation reviewed weren’t final.

Trump has proposed cutting the tax rates for individuals across the board, taking the top tax rate to 33 percent -- down from 39.6 percent currently. In addition to cutting the 35 percent tax rate for major corporations, he’d institute a 15 percent tax rate for income from partnerships and limited liability companies -- so-called pass-through businesses. Those businesses aren’t taxed on their earnings; instead, they pass the profit through to their owners, who pay at their individual income-tax rates.

Clinton, once seen as a presumptive winner, spent most of last month with a healthy edge over Trump only to see that lead dwindle throughout September. A Bloomberg Politics poll of swing state Ohio showed the New York real-estate developer with a 5 percentage point lead.

The poll was taken Friday through Monday, as Clinton faced backlash for saying half of Trump supporters were a “basket of deplorables” and amid renewed concerns about her health after a video showed her stumbling as she left a Sept. 11 ceremony with what her campaign later said was a bout of pneumonia.

To contact the reporters on this story: Terrence Dopp in Trenton at tdopp@bloomberg.net, Lynnley Browning in New York at lbrowning4@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net, Michael Nizza