The New York Times profiles Justin Muzinich, a top aide to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a principal architect of the GOP tax plan. Trump is, as we all know, a great friend of the forgotten white working class and a foe of coastal elitists, so Muzinich has blue-collar bona fides -- right?
No -- he attended "the elite Groton School in Massachusetts," "holds an M.B.A. from Harvard and a law degree from Yale," and is a "former investment banker and hedge fund manager."
He fits the mold of Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers, Mr. Mnuchin and Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, both of whom made a career on Wall Street. While not a Goldman Sachs alumnus, as they are, he brings an extensive background from the world of finance, having been a banker at Morgan Stanley and the president of Muzinich & Co., an international investment firm founded by his father.
But he's steered clear of all those awful establishment Republicans -- right?
Again, no.
His most notable prior experience in the world of policy came while working on the campaign of one of Mr. Trump’s arch rivals: Jeb Bush.
Mr. Bush first learned of Mr. Muzinich because of his work as an informal adviser to the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, another nemesis of Mr. Trump.
In fact, Muzinich put together a tax plan for Jeb's campaign, and that plan bears a striking resemblance to the Trump/GOP plan:
One of the earliest iterations of the tax framework unveiled by Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans last month was the one that Mr. Muzinich drafted for Mr. Bush in 2015. Like the current plan, that one would have collapsed the personal income tax brackets from seven to three and lowered the rates. It would have doubled the standard deduction, reduced the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent, and switched the United States to a “territorial” tax system, as the current plan would also do.
So good job, deplorables -- you hated Jeb Bush so much that you nominated and then elected the rival who hated him the most -- then that rival borrowed Jeb's tax plan, because he's also a Republican corporatist hack, just like Jeb.
Crossposted at No More Mr. Nice Blog
