White House

Trump advisor Gary Cohn: All the options for tax reform are on the table now

Gary Cohn: We're putting forth a pro-growth strategy
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Gary Cohn: We're putting forth a pro-growth strategy

Top White House economics adviser Gary Cohn told CNBC on Friday the Trump administration is doing everything possible to boost the economy and create jobs.

Cohn said business leaders are telling the White House that onerous regulations, high taxes and crumbling infrastructure are impediments to prosperity.

"We're very much into a pro-growth strategy here," the director of the White House National Economic Council said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street."

President Donald Trump on Friday met with another group of CEOs at the White House, including financial chiefs JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon, Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman and BlackRock's Larry Fink.

Cohn said all options for corporate tax reform are on the table, including the border adjustment levy, which taxes imports. He stressed that no decisions have been made on particular provisions.

The goal is to reduce corporate taxes to the "lowest possible level," Cohn said. "We have high taxes relative to the rest of the world. That's a disadvantage for U.S. companies."

The federal corporate tax rate is 35 percent, compared with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average of about 23 percent, he said. "We can't be that much higher than the rest of the world."

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The interview with Cohn, formerly No. 2 at Goldman Sach, also came on a day when Trump plans to take steps that will almost certainly result in the end of some bank regulations.

Trump is expected to sign an executive order directing the Treasury Department and other regulators to review parts of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law that was put in place after the 2008 financial crisis, including the Volcker Rule, according to a senior administration official.

Asked about banking regulations, Cohn spoke more generally and said the president has asked his economic team to identify the top growth-zapping regulations and respond with ideas.

In a presidential memo,Trump is expected to direct the Labor Department to delay implementation for the next 90 days and conduct a review of the Obama administration's "fiduciary rule," designed to prevent conflicts of interest when financial advisors give retirement advice.

Cohn said the rule ended up "highly limiting" consumers' choices. At a time when younger people need to be brought into the fold to invest for their future, limiting choices is counterproductive, he said.

With Trump's push to bring back manufacturing jobs to the U.S., the administration is also cognizant of how advances in technology and robotics are changing the needs of the modern workforce, Cohn said.

"We really have to think about what our workforce is going to look like in 2020, 2030, [and] 2050," he said, adding he's thinking about how to re-educate Americans for the jobs of the future.