'Big' Tax Reform Will Happen This Year: Treasury's Tony Sayegh

Throughout his campaign and his first 100 days in office, President Trump has repeatedly called for “the biggest tax cuts since Reagan,” and Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at U.S. Treasury, Tony Sayegh, is confident it will get done this year.

“We have great consensus on a lot of things. We believe that the ‘big’ can get done because it is needed by the economy. We have had very little sustained economic growth since the financial crisis, that is bad news for everybody - bad news for workers, bad news for companies, bad news for the government,” he said during an interview with FOX Business Network’s Charles Payne.

Sayegh explains that the tax reform plan is “pro-growth, it focuses on a middle income tax cut, it simplifies the tax code - something I think every American could certainly agree on, and it makes businesses competitive again, so that we can start having smaller businesses create more American jobs.”

Trump has suggested simplifying the tax code, reducing the number of tax brackets from seven to three with individual rates of 10%, 25% and 35% and lowering the corporate tax rate to 15%.

“The idea on the individual side is a significant middle income tax cut - that is the focus,” Sayegh said. Obviously when it comes to the code itself, the two deductions we have taken off the table are charitable and home mortgage interest - those are shared by a large number of Americans.”