Investors are hearing a lot these days from Trump economic officials about trade and DOGE and the benefits of falling stock prices — but not as much about things that could stop the selling, such as the push for tax cuts.
That’s in part because tariff talk is perhaps drowning out everything else for markets but also because the slow pace of Capitol Hill tax talks has offered Trump’s team very little in the way of news to share.
A recent example of the dynamic came over the weekend when Trump’s top tax evangelist, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press but only directly brought up tax cuts once in the 11-minute conversation.
“Corrections are healthy,” he offered instead, referring to recent market losses.
Bessent only mentioned tax cuts briefly to say that tax changes would be felt by markets “over the long term” alongside other more market-friendly ideas like increased energy production and deregulation.
It’s a dynamic likely to continue in the foreseeable future, with lawmakers currently out of Washington for recess as tariff speculation mounts ahead of a key April 2 deadline and Elon Musk’s DOGE effort as prominent as ever.
That left Bessent, for this weekend at least, spending time focused not on tax cuts but on trying to convince taxpayers that Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts at the IRS wouldn’t hurt the coming tax filing season.
The president’s louder message about tariffs when compared with taxes was also touched on by Evercore ISI’s Sarah Bianchi in a recent research note.
She wrote that Trump has put forth an array of troubling policies for markets to kick off his administration but “perhaps more troubling is the erratic nature of policy implementation, making risk assessment and pricing exceedingly difficult.”
As for the question of whether Trump will soon pivot to taxes to calm markets, she said “even this isn’t a clean story,” adding that “some of these efforts will simply take time, and the outcomes will be uneven across sectors.”
The slow pace of talks on Capitol Hill has also contributed to a larger downplaying of tax cuts for now.
Some have sought to cast last week’s shutdown drama as a sign that Republicans may be able to unite behind a tax bill after House Speaker Mike Johnson corralled his caucus to unify and force Democrats’ hand even as much more complicated tax issues loom.
That debate ground on last week — with the House Ways and Means Committee gathering to try and move closer to a deal — but headlines were of course dominated by Trump tariffs and threats that often changed by the hour.
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