President Trump is reportedly considering trying to cut taxes without an act of Congress. The idea is to use executive action to change the way capital-gains taxes are calculated, so that they would no longer apply to inflationary gains.

I wrote about this a few months ago. My main points: It makes sense to index capital-gains taxes to inflation; most of the criticisms of indexing are not criticisms of doing it in principle; but it’s an area where Congress should legislate rather than where the president should act on his own. But I would not be surprised if he acts. There are more Republicans who really want Trump to do this than there are who are passionately against it, and I doubt the rule-of-law problem will weigh heavily on him.