What the columnists said
Senate targets Obamacare with tax reform
The GOP’s effort to pass tax reform kicked into high gear this week as the House prepared to vote for a bill that would slash corporate taxes and overhaul the tax code, while Senate Republicans made the high-stakes gambit of adding the repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate to their own version of tax reform. Removing the mandate would lead to 13 million fewer Americans having health insurance by 2027, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, saving the federal government $338 billion in subsidies payments. Senate Republicans would use those funds to double the child tax credit to $2,000 and temporarily offer bigger tax cuts to people making between $38,701 and $200,000 a year. Those individual tax breaks would expire in 2025, while a deep cut in the corporate tax rate, from 35 percent to 20 percent, would be permanent—prompting Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to label the bill a “con job on the American people.”
House and Senate Republicans have yet to reconcile a number of differences in their tax bills, including the fate of state and local tax deductions. The Senate bill eliminates those deductions entirely; the House plan allows a property tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year. It was also unclear whether the surprise decision to end the Obamacare mandate would alienate moderate Republican senators who sank the GOP’s efforts this summer to dismantle the health-care law—potentially jeopardizing Republicans’ ability to muster the 50 votes needed to pass the tax bill. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), one of the health-care rebels, said tax reform was “complicated enough.” “The GOP tax plan just became an assault on Obamacare,” said Tim Dickinson in RollingStone.com. To fund massive tax cuts for the rich yet keep the cost of their proposal under $1.5 trillion, as budget rules require, Republicans will remove a “lynchpin of the Affordable Care Act.” Without the mandate, millions of young, healthy people won’t bother buying insurance, sending premiums for older, sicker enrollees soaring and jeopardizing the entire market. Nonsense, said the New York Post in an editorial. The CBO says markets will remain stable without the widely unpopular mandate. Republicans should seize this “ready pot of gold.”
There’s a far simpler way to make tax reform work, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. “All you need to do is scale back the corporate tax cut” to, say, 28 percent, instead of 20 percent, and use that revenue for permanent middle-class tax relief. Instead, GOP lawmakers have resorted to a “caricature of Reagan-era Republicanism”: heavy tax cuts for billionaires, while millions of nonrich Americans wonder whether they “even get a tax cut at all.”
Senate Republicans are “gambling bigly” with mandate repeal, said Tory Newmyer in WashingtonPost.com. Just 34 percent of Americans support the GOP’s tax proposals, according to a recent poll, and “voters trust the party even less on health care.” Don’t be surprised if Republicans drop mandate repeal as quickly as they picked it up—“a testament to how freewheeling the decision making on policy fundamentals remains.”