 "Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves as she arrives at a campaign stop at Jackie O's Production Brewery and Tap Room in Athens, Ohio, Tuesday, May 3, 2016 AP/PTI")
The economic policies of Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump are "reckless" and "most risky", Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton's campaign has said.
"This is the most risky, reckless and regressive tax proposal ever put forward by a major presidential candidate, and there is not even much disagreement on these basic numbers," former director of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling said.
"If you look at the Tax Policy Center's analysis, they find that the top 1% would get 40% of the tax cut," Sperling said yesterday as he was responding to questions on Trump's statements on his economic policies. The conference call was organised by the Clinton Campaign.
"The top 0.1% people making over 5.2 million dollars would get 18%. So let me give a sense for what this means on how Donald Trump prioritises the most extremely well-off: the top 0.1% would get more of a tax cut than the bottom 60% of workers combined," he said.
Clinton campaign's senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan alleged Trump's plan would cut millionaires' taxes to the lowest level in modern history.
"In fact, there's a technical term for Trump's tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires: Yuge. This is a tax plan by the billionaire, for the billionaires... Trump will keep trying to bob and weave. But the problem for him is that his proposal is right there in black and white. It has four full pages of detail," he said.
In fact, it's one of the only detailed policy proposals he's put forward in this campaign, he noted.
"To emphasise, it's not just that his tax policy would be an enormous boon for the most well-off people on Wall Street at the expense of the middle class - he is affirmatively signalling that he would unravel the Dodd-Frank protections that have been put in to ensure we would never have a financial crisis again," Sperling said.
"That is an extraordinary signal to send, that a Trump presidency would mean more capacity to go back to the type of reckless behaviour that most responsible people believe we can never allow again," he said.
In an interview to CNN earlier in the day, Trump claimed that his policies would reduce the taxes.
"I put in the biggest tax decrease of anybody running for office by far, and many people think it's great. If anything, I was criticised because it's too steep a cut, but that's OK, but I put in by far the biggest tax decrease," Trump said.
"Everybody across the board, businesses, everybody's getting a tax cut, especially the middle class. I said that I may have to increase it on the wealthy. I'm not going to allow it to be increased on the middle class," he said.
"Now, if I increase on the wealthy, that means they're still going to be paying less than they pay now. I'm not talking about increasing from this point, I'm talking about increasing from my tax proposal," Trump added.
