The 2017/2018 Trump/GOP tax plan

[HurricaneDitka]

@John_Mace

Sorry. I mean to link to the source.

BTW, thanks for this. this was the first time I’d seen this broken down like this.

[Robot_Arm]

@John_Mace

Agreed. I think they will find a way to keep tax breaks for middle class and below. They might raise taxes for “the rich” and possibly for corporations, but it’s politically very difficult to raise taxes on regular folks.

Are you talking about Republicans; where have you been for the last 35 years?

[HurricaneDitka]

The NYT reports:

Republicans hit a last-minute speed bump in their supercharged effort to pass a tax bill on Tuesday when the Senate parliamentarian advised that three provisions in the bill ran afoul of Senate rules.

The Democratic minority in the Senate said three components of the bill were at issue: a provision expanding the use of 529 savings accounts for K-12 expenses, a provision regarding the title of the bill, and part of the criteria for whether universities are subject to an excise tax that the bill imposes on investment income.

Not sure what that means for Hillsdale.

The House will have to vote again on the modified bill, presumably Wednesday.

[John_Mace]

No one knew that legislating was going to be so hard!!

[Velocity]

Wonder if maybe Senate Democrats have found dozens of glitches but are sitting on them so that they can announce them a few at a time, forcing the House to vote and re-vote each time. Didn’t some Obamacare opponents do that with the ACA?

[k9bfriender]

@Velocity

Wonder if maybe Senate Democrats have found dozens of glitches but are sitting on them so that they can announce them a few at a time, forcing the House to vote and re-vote each time. Didn’t some Obamacare opponents do that with the ACA?

Then, after the house finally votes on the same bill as the senate, point out that they forgot about the AMT again.

[HurricaneDitka]

@Velocity

Wonder if maybe Senate Democrats have found dozens of glitches but are sitting on them so that they can announce them a few at a time, forcing the House to vote and re-vote each time. Didn’t some Obamacare opponents do that with the ACA?

Wouldn’t make any sense to. If the Senate approves this version, it’ll just go back to the House and get approved there. I don’t believe there’s a mechanism to challenge it in the House like exists in the Senate.

[John_Mace]

@Robot_Arm

Are you talking about Republicans; where have you been for the last 35 years?

Yeah, I was thinking more in terms of if the Democrats retake Congress.

[k9bfriender]

@HurricaneDitka

Wouldn’t make any sense to. If the Senate approves this version, it’ll just go back to the House and get approved there. I don’t believe there’s a mechanism to challenge it in the House like exists in the Senate.

I think the point is, after the house approval, the senate dems point out another flaw to the bill the conservatives missed, making them have to go through the process again.

[HurricaneDitka]

@k9bfriender

I think the point is, after the house approval, the senate dems point out another flaw to the bill the conservatives missed, making them have to go through the process again.

I suppose they could do that, but at that point (assuming Trump signs it), it will be the law of the land. I don’t know why they’d hold up the entirety of their big tax cut bill for some small or medium-sized detail. If the plan was to hold out and dribble out the flaws one at a time to somehow prevent the bill from becoming law, I don’t see how that is supposed to work.

[elucidator]

Wouldn’t even need to be some sort of tactic, slap-dash way this was put together, could just be a standard up-fucking oopsie-daisy. Like that Corker guy, claiming that he didn’t even know there was something in there that gave him a metric buttload of money. That might even be true!

[k9bfriender]

@HurricaneDitka

I suppose they could do that, but at that point (assuming Trump signs it), it will be the law of the land. I don’t know why they’d hold up the entirety of their big tax cut bill for some small or medium-sized detail. If the plan was to hold out and dribble out the flaws one at a time to somehow prevent the bill from becoming law, I don’t see how that is supposed to work.

I wasn’t saying that was the plan. Just saying that there are probably many other flaws in the rushed bill that conservatives have not yet managed to find and fix.

If I were the democrats, I would find them, and point them out after they go through all the work of managing to pass it again.

If it were heading to Trump’s desk when they realized that they had forgotten to address AMT again, they would need to call it back, fix it, and revote on it.

Acts both as a stalling tactic to get Jones sworn in, and also as a method of pointing out how incompetent the republican leadership is, even the public at large is starting to notice.

[elucidator]

Slap us across the chops hard enough and long enough, sooner or later, we blink.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@septimus

The American Enterprise Institute is associated with the right-wing kleptocrats. When theft is so egregious that the AEI calls it “outrageous, revolting, unfair … corrupted” we should wake up and listen.

The same webpage where I got this quote has upgraded what I was calling the Trillion-dollar Theft — the larceny is now assessed as Two Trillion Dollars.

@RTFirefly

Ornstein made a clean break from the direction the GOP’s been going in back in 2012 with It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, the book that he and Thomas Mann wrote together. I’m amazed that the AEI hasn’t kicked him out, but he is NOT representative of the AEI’s point of view.

VICE posted an interview with Norm Ornstein today: The Craziest Part of the Tax Plan Is How We Got Here

@Norm Ornstein

In every instance, and that includes this one, you have people from the other party ready to participate. The reality is that [the Republicans] didn’t need to do this through reconciliation. There were 60 votes easily to be had for a tax reform that would very much have transformed the tax code structure, and along the way reduced rates and did the same kind of rate reduction and base broadening that was the model in 1986 and that remains the frame that the overwhelming majority of economists say is the right way to go.

This was a conscious choice to shut out the other party and you could see from the direct statements made by [Speaker Paul] Ryan and others—they had a president who they knew would sign anything they put in front of him, and they saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get what they wanted and they saw no need to compromise.

One of the main reasons that I have been so unhappy with McConnell blowing up all the norms of the Senate is that this really is a downward spiral. Once you start down this path, you’re left, as the Democratic Party, saying, Any gesture that we make to return to the regular order we know is not going to met in kind when they’re back in power.

Every piece of major legislation requires technical corrections. When the Medicare part D program went through—on a much more partisan basis than it originally started—Democrats participated in the technical corrections so that it would work. Then Republicans refused to do it for the Affordable Care Act. And now the Republicans are going to be begging for one on the tax bill, and if I’m the Democratic Party, I’m gonna say, If we do this, we know that it’s not going to be met in kind when we need it again in the future. So you’re basically creating a really unhealthy atmosphere, and I don’t know where it stops.

[elucidator]

Norm Ornstein? That crazy ass Trotskyist?

[John_Mace]

Can you believe someone trotted that guy out again?

[Snowboarder_Bo]

GOP on the verge of huge tax overhaul _ with one hiccup:

The Senate still expected to pass the legislation Tuesday night, but the plan to send it on to Trump for his signature had to be scrapped. Democrats noted that three provisions violated Senate rules and had to be removed. So the massive bill will be hauled back across the Capitol for the House to re-vote on Wednesday.

[Ravenman]

If a Democrat is elected President in 2020, how many people predict that the debt and deficit will once again be YUUUUGE PROBLEMS that tax-and-spend liberals have ignored for too long?

[HurricaneDitka]

Senate OKs tax reform package, sends bill back to House for final vote

The final vote, shortly before 1 a.m. EST, was 51-48, with no Democrats voting in favor of the bill and all Republicans supporting it.

Only U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who had announced his support for the bill earlier this month, was not present for the vote.

[galen_ubal]

@SenatorCollins said she’d oppose the bill if it cut taxes for millionaires. It does

@SenBobCorker said he’d oppose it if it increases the deficit. It does.

@JeffFlake said he’d oppose the bill unless he got ironclad pledges on DACA. He didn’t.

Steven Greenhouse