Tax cut bill shrouded in myths, pure politics

Americans offered an unambiguous response to tax cuts in 1981. The most obvious item is the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which, if not for the multi-trillion-dollar tax overhaul in question, would be a blockbuster proposal on its own. Only through adopting policies that help Americans create wealth can those tax cuts come to mean for Americans what they did in 1981 when 71 percent of the public supported them. “Frankly, it’s the health care entitlements that are the big drivers of our debt, so we spend more time on the health care entitlements because that’s really where the problem lies, fiscally speaking”. But the mandate has never worked as its creators intended, it remains more unpopular than Obamacare as a whole, and it penalizes a narrow class of middle-class individual market buyers instead of spreading the burden of the system’s costs more widely.

Our inability to understand the impact of the tax cuts is partly because we don’t know what all the tax cuts are.

Read this analysis of which of the tax bills would benefit New Jersey residents.

“Every state has the ability to go in and just adjust where they start their calculations of income for tax purposes”, he said. Looking at the bill, you will see handwritten notes adding and changing provisions.

Republicans may be resolute on dumping spending on social programs, but they’re practically daring Americans to vote them out of office in doing so.

If it wasn’t already clear from his refusal to hold a town hall this decade, this tax bill is Exhibit A that Roskam works for his donors. The deduction is for business owners who report their business income on their individual tax returns. As University of California Hastings College of the Law Associate Professor Manoj Viswanathan observes in another recent analysis, “Many more taxpayers could take advantage of state-level initiatives that essentially reclassify state and local tax payments as federal charitable contributions”, essentially allowing them to “double dip” and obtain both state and federal tax benefits from a single donation. However, personal exemptions are eliminated. For example, one part of today’s tax reform is its abolition of the deduction, from federally taxable income, of money used to pay state and local income taxes. The bill is badly designed but it does some good things, including some things that could be done only in the teeth of Democratic opposition. But that’s just another myth. These numbers don’t take into account possible changes to the standard deduction as proposed by Congress. It’s the content that counts.

The Senate bill also incorporates the Length of Service Award Program Cap Adjustment Priority Act, legislation introduced earlier this year by Rep. Peter King (R-NY) that increases the amount that certain plans can pay to bona fide volunteers for firefighting and prevention services, emergency medical services, and ambulance services without having the plans treated as deferred compensation plans. That approach opened the way to all the special interest deals in the middle of the night. Republicans in Congress are trying to hammer out differences between the two bills, with the goal to vote on final passage by December 18.

In contrast, compassionate conservatives (the few of us who remain) view healthy, sustained economic growth as a moral achievement – justly rewarding effort and enterprise and allowing society to be more generous to those in genuine need.

Myth 4. This tax bill makes permanent changes in the tax code.

The chances of laws swinging wildly back and forth with the change of parties should encourage cooperation and moderation. Republicans tried and failed to eliminate this deduction in 1986, but it was spared by the efforts of representatives of high-tax states such as California and NY.

After all, it is hard to say this bill is geared for the wealthy when the child tax credit increase would apply to those making $230,000 or less. According to the Centre for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank, the tax system as a whole reduced the GINI index, a measure of inequality, by 5% before the reform, but by 7% after it. These companies, such as Shell and Energy Transfer Partners operating in Pennsylvania, span many aspects of the industry, from drillers to pipeline operators to gas processors and oil refiners. They are rushing to get something done after a year of absolutely no legislative accomplishments and are essentially ramming this down the American people’s collective throat.

There are rejoinders based on facts to all of these points, and such debates should play a central role through the 2018 midterm elections.