Waiting on the inevitable
“Failure is not an option when it comes to the Republican Party and cutting taxes.”—Lindsey Graham, Republican humorist, philosopher and U.S. senator from South Carolina.
It’s coming together for Republicans in the U.S. Senate on tax cuts, as was inevitable. You never really thought it would turn out otherwise, did you? Republicans do two things. One is hate liberalism. The other is cut taxes.
Even Donald Trump couldn’t mess up a tax cut.
Beyond that, we behold the rest of what the above-mentioned Lindsey Graham said the other day. It was that failure to deliver a tax cut would ruin Republicans in next fall’s midterm elections, leading to myriad investigations and even impeachment of Trump, and conceivably render the Republicans indefinitely powerless, considering that they’re an uneasy alliance of about three opposing Republican parties already.
He said all those things like they were bad things.
So, it appears that taxes will be different in 2018, perhaps even lower for some in the working class—depending on their deductions, whether they’re standard or itemized, and, if itemized, on what basis and for how much.
Taxes will be unambiguously lower for corporations and the upper class, because that’s where across-the-board tax cuts always flow most abundantly, and it’s where Republicans intend for them to flow.
Republicans in the Senate have been doing light editing on the tax-cut text this week, adding a little phrasing here and there to bring along maybe a half-dozen varyingly balking members of their caucus who have been concerned about little things like blowing up the deficit or destroying health insurance.
Those balking are balking less each day.
Tennessee’s Bob Corker is a deficit hawk who wants to cut taxes but has not been convinced the tax-cut bill won’t send the deficit higher than prevailing forecasts. So, there’s a little phrase being inserted for him about adding a deficit-reduction trigger if, at a checkpoint over the next 10 years, economic growth is less than officially forecast.
Corker declared himself pleased with that little can-kicker, because, after all, he’s a Republican and he wants to cut taxes. A Republican can see through Trump for the clown and fraud he is—as is the case with Corker—but what he can’t do is vote against tax cuts.
Maine Sen. Susan Collins—a better Democrat than some Democrats, but, down deep, a Republican always— was concerned about the bright idea championed by our own Tom Cotton to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to buy health insurance by doing away with the tax penalty for noncompliance.
Collins thinks that could destabilize and perhaps sabotage an already imperiled health-care market, which is precisely what it would do, and which is what Trump and Republicans want it to do so that they can repeal all of Obamacare and put madness in its place.
So, reportedly, Trump assured Collins in a caucus meeting the other day, in front of witnesses, that, if she’d vote for the tax cut, he would support in a subsequent measure the Lamar Alexander-Patty Murray bill to restore by statute for two years the cost-sharing subsidies of Obamacare that Trump did away with by executive action a few weeks ago.
Collins apparently trusts Trump to keep his word—or that he understands what he just promised. She apparently is not concerned that the guy is famously transactional, and that the transaction before him is to pass a tax cut, and that tomorrow offers an opportunity for an altogether new set of hallucinations for him.
The cost-sharing subsidies go to health-insurance carriers to offset their costs of covering out-of-pocket charges for lower-income customers buying subsidized policies on the health-care exchanges. Without them, rates would soar even higher for everyone.
It’s a tradeoff—one outrageous sabotage of Obamacare instead of two.
Meanwhile, a couple of reliably conservative senators objected that, while corporations would get their taxes cut from 35 percent to 20, small-business owners who pay taxes on pass-through earnings from those businesses would continue to pay individual income taxes and not share the bounty of large corporations.
They wondered: Do we really support small businesses as we say, or do we only support rich corporations as the Democrats say?
Apparently what Republicans are doing on that account is inserting a few phrases to give small businesses some special and additional credits and deductions in the individual income-tax system in which they will remain.
There could always be a wild card. John McCain could pull another thumbs-down stunt. Deals could be undone when the Senate version goes to a conference committee for blending with the House version.
But the smart money is that Republicans will get the tax cut passed.
The over-under is whether the Senate will get it done before or after Roy Moore befouls the Republican caucus upon his election from Alabama on Dec. 12.