Cory Gardner and the GOP’s drunken tax giveaway

Colorado’s Republican Sen. Cory Gardner voted Saturday for a tax plan that ditched the strict and boring adult in the room, otherwise known as reform, and went to the party with the fun kids, known as tax breaks.

Which is an American tragedy, because the only way to justify spending $1.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years is if that money is used as political cover to clean up a tax code that over decades of congressional giveaways has become fundamentally unfair.

Republicans in Congress are on the verge of blowing a oncein-a lifetime opportunity. They bowed to the whims and desires of those hoping to come out ahead in a deal that should have been moving away from picking winners and losers.

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the one-time leaders of the tax reform conversation, said in an op-ed for The Washington Post that the Republican bill cuts $3.7 trillion in tax breaks over the next decade. The experts in tax policy bemoaned that it was a small chunk of what the current tax code will give away, $18 trillion in tax breaks.

Why were Republicans able to achieve so little in their effort to fix the broken tax code? Remember the promise of being able to file individual taxes on a postcard?

Gardner’s efforts to amend the bill illustrate all that went wrong.

Instead of fighting in the direction of eliminating tax breaks and a more fiscally conservative plan, Gardner was, well, joining the party.

His big push in the final moments before the bill passed was for an amendment that would let families with the financial means to save money for a pre-K to 12 private school education for their children do so in 529 plans that exist now to provide tax breaks for those fortunate enough to be able to save money for college tuition.

So instead of getting rid of a tax break that is fundamentally unfair, benefiting only those wealthy enough to sock away cash for their kid’s education, Gardner proposed using this opportunity to expand it.

Now multiply that kind of bad decision-making times the 50 senators and the vice president who voted for the bill and you get a tax plan that reads like a house party hoping the cops don’t show up. You get a tax plan that adds billions to the deficit every year by reducing the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, but doesn’t do away with tax policies that hurt our economy by forcing businesses to chase tax breaks instead of chasing sound business decisions.

The public was treated to a montage of crying seniors with big medical bills who wouldn’t have been able to write off their medical expenses, college students threatening to drop out if the value of their tuition waivers are taxed or if they lose tax exemptions for interest paid on student loans, nonprofits worrying that if no one itemizes their tax bills anymore the deduction for charitable giving will be rendered obsolete and all giving will dry up. Nothing tells the story of the failure to stay strong than the last-minute decision to allow car dealerships to write off all of the interest payments made on inventory.

All of those things, while impacting individuals in negative ways, would have moved this nation to a fairer and more equal tax code. It’s apparently too much to ask for a tax code that treats all individual and corporate taxpayers equally — a nation where tax rates are tax rates regardless of how someone spends, saves or makes their money.

Gardner and other Senate Republicans certainly didn’t let the perfect get in the way of the good, pushing ahead with the most appealing part of their plan — a tax cut to the corporate rate that will make America extremely competitive in the international market.

Now Gardner must pray the ensuing economic growth is so great that in the end it won’t matter the Senate started taking shots midway through this debate because America will be drunk with, well, winning.

He has until 2020.