Yesterday, I discussed how the GOP was playing "small ball" when it came to tax cuts. There's no discussion of flat taxes, fair taxes, 9-9-9 plans, legitimate downsizing of the federal government, or any sort of plan that would substantively alter the brutal progressive tax system upon which liberals build their class-warfare rhetoric. They're either too cowardly, or too lazy, to make such arguments - or they genuinely don't believe all the alleged principles they've been spouting for decades.
Well guess what. The Senate just made things worse.
Yes, the revised Senate plan gets rid of the individual mandate (though not until 2019) and, yes, it raises the child tax credit to $2000.00. That's substantially more than the House plan. On the corporate side, it cuts business taxes to 20% just as the House bill does. ...But all of that comes with a catch.
According to the Senate bill, almost every corporate tax rate cut will be permanent - while virtually all individual rate cuts (aside from the individual mandate) will expire in 2025.
Yep. They all sunset at midnight, 12/31/25.
Jaime Dupree spells it out over in his Twitter feed:
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It's true. The modified standard deduction, upon which the entire tax cut scheme seems to rest, as well as the oh-so-important "simplification" of tax brackets will all expire if the bill passes as written. Businesses that file on the individual side of the tax code - things like proprietorships and S-Corporations - would also see their cuts vanish. That means that, after living with the new plan for 8 years, Americans will face a whopper of a tax increase on January 1st 2026.
The cowardice on display here - the abject betrayal of the most basic ideas for which the GOP supposedly stands - is simply staggering
Why is this being done?
It’s being done to appease the Democrat narrative. Basically, by sunsetting the cuts Republicans can say that the plan "costs less" over a ten-year period. That means they can go out there and claim that there's not as much to "pay for" if the cuts pass. Note that it doesn't eliminate the issue, it just minimizes it. This is exactly the kind of small ball B.S. I was talking about yesterday.
You don't have to "pay for" tax cuts
You don't have to "pay for" tax cuts. That's a left-wing lie that a bunch of stupid, feckless, impotent Republicans have decided to enshrine in their policy decisions. It boils down to the idea that, if the vaunted ruling class allows you to hang on to more of what you earn, they will have lost money that rightfully belonged to them. That's simply not true. It "costs" the feds NOTHING to let you keep a larger share of your hard-earned cash.
What it might do is put them in the position of actually having to cut something for once in their miserable lives.
Where is the fiscal conservative argument that the federal government should simply be forced to do less with less? I could have sworn that the GOP has based every single campaign of the last 50 years around shrinking the size of the United States bureaucracy. Now, they have complete control of the government and a President who's desperate to sign whatever they send him - and this is what we get?
The cowardice on display here - the abject betrayal of the most basic ideas for which the GOP supposedly stands - is simply staggering.
Yesterday, I discussed how the GOP was playing "small ball" when it came to tax cuts. There's no discussion of flat taxes, fair taxes, 9-9-9 plans, legitimate downsizing of the federal government, or any sort of plan that would substantively alter the brutal progressive tax system upon which liberals build their class-warfare rhetoric. They're either too cowardly, or too lazy, to make such arguments - or they genuinely don't believe all the alleged principles they've been spouting for decades.
