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Thanks to their buddy in the White House, to whom wealthy New Yorkers reached out personally, the tax cut for the really super rich people is going to be bigger, with a tax rate lowered by nearly 3 percentage points. Which doesn't match the shrinkage in the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, but they'll probably still be able to live with it. Because they can afford health insurance, unlike the 13 million people likely to be forced out of the market when the individual mandate ends.
This, along with other deals reached entirely out of the public eye, with absolutely no input from Democratic conferees, means that the bill could hit the Senate floor as soon as Monday. Not all of the details have been released yet, but gleaning from public statements by leadership, we know a few additional details.
The pass-through deal Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Steve Daines (R-MT) negotiated for their own, personal businesses will stay, and businesses will get to write off investments starting immediately and for the next five years. That big drafting error that hit corporations on the alternative minimum tax has been removed. The estate tax stays, but the exemption for it has been doubled. The homeowners deduction on mortgage debt is reduced from $1 million to $750,000, and graduate students get a rare win for normal people—their college tuition waivers won't be considered income and be taxed. The rest of the mess isn't getting public, because this is how the thing happened.
Democrats made their own, largely futile attempt to slow the fast-moving bill on Wednesday at the lone official meeting of the House-Senate conference committee. “This is the ultimate betrayal of the middle class,” thundered Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. At various points, Democrats called the meeting “a sham,” “a mockery,” and “a farce” as they noted ruefully that Republicans were going through the motions of transparency mere minutes after striking a deal among themselves behind closed doors. “This is the United States Congress, not the Duma,” complained Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas, accusing Republicans of presiding over “a steady erosion of democracy.”
But they can say they had a conference committee meeting, even though it was a sham. They can say they did this with regular order, even though the handful of hearings held were a sham and the whole thing was written, and rewritten, by a handful of Republicans. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), that bastion of principle and regular order, has been appeased and is willing to leave his sickbed to vote for tax cuts for the wealthiest. That he's taking health insurance away from millions apparently is not relevant to him.