We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its editorial on the new GOP tax plan:
With their new bill that would slash taxes on the wealthy and blow up the federal budget deficit, House Republicans and President Trump are making it absolutely clear whom they are working for — the top 1 percent — and whom they consider dispensable. Well, that’s pretty much everybody else...It will take experts weeks to fully analyze the House tax bill, but what we already know is frightening enough. No Republican who cares about fairness, economic sense and the financial health of the government can support with a clear conscience this shameless wealth transfer.
Here is John Cassidy’s take at The New Yorker:
[I]n gauging how the legislation would affect corporations and very wealthy people, we can be definitive: they will benefit hugely. Despite the fact that the bill keeps the top rate of income tax at 39.6 per cent, it represents a big giveaway to the rich, particularly the very rich. How so? The measure shifts the burden of taxation in the U.S. from corporations, which are largely run and owned by rich people, to households. It cuts the top rate on “pass through” business income—the sort of money generated by sole proprietorships, investment partnerships, and S-corporations—from 39.6 per cent to twenty-five per cent. And it phases out the estate tax, which falls heaviest on the largest estates, starting in 2024. Indeed, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, fully three-quarters of the over-all tax cuts in the bill are directed at businesses and large estates.
Jonathan Chait:
Reports circulated Wednesday evening that Republicans would sunset the corporate tax cuts after a decade. They decided at the last minute not to do so. But they didn’t settle on a different solution to the no-deficits-after-ten-years barrier. The months they have spent trying to maneuver around Senate rules and avoid the mistake of the Bush years have come up mostly empty. They are going to leave it to the Senate to devise an answer to a problem they could not solve. In its most important aspect, then, the House tax-cut plan is a complete failure of governing.
Scott Bixby at The Daily Beast:
Currently, individuals can deduct most out-of-pocket medical expenses that exceed 10 percent of their annual adjusted gross income—that is, taxable income minus deduction-based deductions. But under the proposed plan, that deduction would be eliminated. For individuals or families with high out-of-pocket medical bills, such as the elderly or the chronically ill, killing the deduction could mean major tax increases.
Jeff Spross at The Week looks at the bill’s uncertain future:
The problem is that every loophole in the tax code is there because someone lobbied to put it there. Which means every loophole the GOP kills is going to piss someone off, which could lose them votes.
The way Congress dealt with this challenge in the past was by making tax reform a bipartisan affair. Think of the 1986 tax overhaul, which used the same cut-the-rates, clear-out-the-loopholes logic. Getting both parties involved maximizes the potential combinations of votes you can use to get to a majority.
But this time, the Republicans have decided they don't want the Democrats involved at all.
Switching topics, here’s Lawerence Tribe’s op-ed again the death penalty:
After more than 40 years of experimenting with capital punishment, it is time to recognize that we have found no way to narrow the death penalty so that it applies only to the “worst of the worst.” It also remains prone to terrible errors and unacceptable arbitrariness.
On a final note, don’t miss Eugene Robinson’s latest:
By now it should be clear that racism is a feature of the Trump administration, not a bug. [...]
Making whites feel embattled and aggrieved is central to the Trump presidency. It is what makes him different from all other recent presidents, perhaps going back as far as Woodrow Wilson, who imposed Jim Crow segregation on the federal workforce. It is what makes Trump so corrosive to the national fabric.
There is one master practitioner of identity politics in the United States today. Shamefully, he lives in the White House.