A Christmas surprise — most Texans to benefit from tax reform

It’s been a long year, and at several points during it I have been critical of Republicans. That being the case, I really wasn’t expecting any of them to give me a Christmas present.

And although I’m not opposed to the passage of federal legislation that benefits me personally, I don’t expect the Republicans who currently control both chambers of Congress to make that a priority. It’s true that some of them, like John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, work for me, but they also work for 28 million other people. And many of my fellow Texans are currently dealing with unusually difficult circumstances. Some were displaced by Harvey, for example, and are still looking for housing. Some receive the medical care they need through the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Some are going to lose their work authorization pretty soon, unless Congress passes a Dream Act.

Meanwhile, I haven’t even asked for a tax cut, and I don’t need one. But Republicans in Congress are giving me one anyway, for some reason. And there’s a good chance that the same is true in your case, by the way. Polling has found that a majority of Americans are opposed to the tax reform bill they passed this week. I’m not thrilled about it, either.

With that said, the bill is not nearly as abhorrent as many Democrats seem to think. There are actually some good things about it, in my opinion. And one of them is that it doesn’t have adverse implications for Texas specifically. Most Texans will get a tax cut, and none of us has to worry about getting an unpleasant surprise.

Taxpayers elsewhere can’t necessarily say the same. According to the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank, 80 percent of Americans can expect to see a tax cut next year. Many of them may not realize that yet because Republicans

rushed this bill through Congress in less than six weeks, and helping middle-class taxpayers was obviously never their primary goal.

I was actually bemused in November to realize that I would be one of the few hardworking Americans who would receive any tax relief under the earliest version of the Republican plan. Their initial proposal struck me as exactly the kind of thing politicians might come up with if they were hoping to lower the corporate tax rate and curry favor with billionaires, while using middle-class taxpayers as a fig leaf.

At that point, there were not many of us who clearly stood to gain.

I was one of them, despite the fact that many Republican leaders have concluded that a journalist like me belongs on the naughty list. I thought that was funny.

By contrast, some Republican voters are not even remotely amused by the fact that their leaders were finally in a position to pursue tax reform and did so by passing a bill that does not directly benefit them.

“I will get no tax cut whatsoever primarily because I live in California,” tweeted John Dean, a former White House counsel for Richard Nixon, after consulting one of the calculators that have popped up online to give Americans a sense of how the bill would affect them.

“We’ve got to help out red states, or is it that the GOP decided to steal from blue states?” he added.

State, corporate taxes

While serving in the Nixon administration, Dean was involved in the Watergate scandal. That’s really all I knew about him before I saw this tweet, which struck me as deeply obnoxious.

Taxation isn’t actually theft, for one thing. So the Republicans who passed this bill aren’t stealing from anyone. And their bill doesn’t target blue states like California with punitive intent, or in order to help the red ones that voted for Trump. It puts a cap on the amount of state and local taxes that Americans can claim as a deduction, if they earn enough that they itemize deductions in the first place.

Since the deduction in question is currently unlimited, I would probably be annoyed by this change, too, if I were an affluent American who had chosen to live in a state with an income tax. But I wouldn’t blame people who choose to live in red states for my decision to live in a blue one, or act as if the tax reform bill should be evaluated on whether it gives me a tax cut.

As it happens, I think there’s a good case to be made for lowering the corporate tax rate. But Republicans in Congress still haven’t made it. They were busy insisting that doing so would unleash so much economic growth that no one should worry about things such as the fact that absent such growth, their cuts would add roughly $1.5 trillion to the national debt.

The bright side

According to actuarial projections, I’m among the American taxpayers who can look forward to dealing with that problem in the future. But the same can be said of some of the Republicans who led the tax reform effort, including House Speaker Paul Ryan.

And since I assume Trump will sign their bill, I’m trying to look on the bright side. Americans my age may never be able to retire, but that was true already. And according to the online tax calculator I consulted, I can expect a tax cut of about $2,000, so I can at least take a vacation.