I can see the War on Christmas is in full swing.
Happy Holidays, everyone!
Merry Wintereenmas, every one.
Just want to note, on several occasions over the past couple of days (including when I was being sedated for my frigging colonoscopy!) I’ve heard folk discuss the proposed tax bill. Every single comment concerned the impact it would have on the individual’s tax liability. I lost consciousness before I could observe that not a single person has commented one way or another on the underlying propriety of the action - apparently reducing taxes on the wealthy, whether economic stimulus would result, or the increase of the debt.
Congrats to the Repubs for capitalizing on we Americans being exceptionally egocentric, greedy, and short-sighted folk.
Tax reform of any kind is really meaningless until we put a balance budget in place.
Half of the budget is the revenue side.
Cutting revenue is not something that usually helps to balance budgets.
How’s that goin’ for ya?
Well, you were hearing about it in a manner that was quite appropriate to the overall effect the tax bill will have on the country. 
That is true. But the Senate bill initially used the same $250K threshold as the House bill, and that number was amended after Toomey proposed the “Hillsdale exemption.” In other words, at the time Toomey and Cruz put it forward, the exemption would only have benefited Hillsdale.
What is unclear is why he was still defending the exemption when it no longer benefited anyone (unless perhaps the DeVos family told him they were about to make the endowment a whole lot bigger).
What is unclear is how anyone could consider the Hillsdale giveaway to be the key feature of the bill.
Not a key feature, but kinda cute, in the Adopt a Mangy Puppy sort of way.
Your Father’s Oldsmobile Republicans used to crave intellectual foundations. They want learned papers from academic economists who will stroke their chins and say that this whole supply-side approach is the bee’s knees. And that massive tax breaks for the well-to-do and corporadoes will shift the economy into high gear.
Not so many of them left any more, but they are still there. They still hunger to drape some intellectual dignity on bankrupt policies and theory. As said, their power has waned since the arrival to power of the Batshit Baboon Brigade, but still enough to sneak in this little morsel.
Well, it certainly wasn’t a reduction of AMT.
This article says that the AMT shortfall is 300 billion. So, that’s another 300 billion worth of revenue (or spending cuts) they have to find now.
Does the Treasury Department report get factored into the Senate scoring of the bill for reconciliation? Or is it just political ammunition?
For which side? The report says the tax cuts will pay for themselves. But only if they pass other legislation that makes the tax cuts pay for themselves. Which is not how this works. In other words, the report confirms that the tax cuts will not pay for themselves.
No. Only CBO scoring can qualify a bill for passage via reconciliation.
Thanks, that’s what I suspected, but I appreciate the confirmation.
I’m mildly curious about this for reasons I don’t fully understand, but why can’t you quote from PDFs?
Some PDFs have strange formatting when you copy/paste like below.
Random section from the linked PDF.
If that happens, to try to make it more readable I’ll copy into Word first, so I can get this:
At times, that doesn’t work either, so I’ll do some global search/replace to eliminate them. Here’s an example of how to do that. Worst is when the PDF is an image scan, then if I really want to quote from it I’ll have to retype it.