President Joe Biden has long promised to roll back most of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, but just when he plans to do that may be key to the economic recovery.
Anthony Scaramucci, who is founder and CEO of the hedge fund Skybridge Capital, said he supports higher taxes, including Biden’s plan to raise the corporate tax rate — just not while the economy is in such a fragile state.
“Now is not the time to raise taxes any more than it was with the first part of the Obama administration,” Scaramucci, who was former President Trump’s White House Communications Director, told Yahoo Finance Live. “I would respect at some point that will be likely — whether people listening to us right now like it or not. But now's not the time to do that, any more than it was the time to do that in the 2009, '10, early part of '11 time period, while we were digging ourselves out of a global financial crisis.”
Scaramucci added that he would even “respect the idea of moving [the corporate tax rate] from 21% to 28% — or back up to 39.6%, given the massive amount of deficit spending that we're doing.”
Biden’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, told a Senate committee during her confirmation hearing last week that the president would hold off on reversing any parts of the tax law until later in the recovery, which most likely means as part of a large infrastructure package.
Scaramucci says when it comes to regulation, Biden would do well to take a page from former President Trump’s playbook.
“One thing that President Trump got right was a lighter touch on regulation,” said Scaramucci.
His advice to Biden? “Have more trust in the business community. That will help these companies grow. It will give them confidence to invest and deploy capital as we come out of the pandemic,” said Scaramucci. “Be cautious on raising taxes. Let's create more jobs. Let's get the wheel moving in the system. Don't over regulate.”
This article originally appeared on Yahoo! Finance.
