Teeny tiny violins. They voted for this. Coal is a dying industry anyways.
It sounds like the Corp AMT is going to cause some problems for Conference. If it does contribute $300B in revenue then that might be why the senate kept it in. If you look at the senate version, there seems to be more generous allowances to individuals. The child credit is higher and the income phase out is higher also. There are a couple more things that they did for the middle class to take some fire out of the democrats objections to only helping the rich. They needed a way to pay for these items and kept AMT and the estate taxes in and postponed the corporate cut for one year.
I too have not heard any grumblings from Collins or Flake. If not, then all that was just for window dressing.
Either that or they just said what they thought they needed to say to get elected and then did something different once in office. Happens all the time. On both sides of the proverbial aisle.
I think it was a genuine miss. You know how we advise students not to wait til the last minute to do assignments and to proofread carefully? Well…
I too think it was a genuine miss. Genuine preening, smug, bumbling incompetence. Only incompetent legislators would believe they could produce a well-crafted bill while writing it three hours before voting on it.
I think at least in part its due to the “instant” world in which we live. I work on transactions that 15-20 years ago took 3-4 weeks to document. Now clients want them done in less than a week. The don’t wait until the last minute and proofread carefully has gone out the window to a large extent.
I have a feeling there are all kinds of provisions that were inserted into the bill that Senators will later say “oops”. What a nice convenient cover. “we did not even know what we were voting for”. Gotta love the casual nature afforded to a major revision to something that affects every single American and numerous business entities.
Wait…I thought coal mines…and steel mills…were coming back. No?
Carry on!
Lest the outrage die, two things to consider.
1.) This tax bill, riddled with errors, while ostensibly a tax cut is least popular tax cut ever and indeed less popular than some tax hikes.
Why is that? Perhaps because:
2.) This tax bill is not really a 1.5T tax cut. It is a 6T tax cut on corporations and the very wealthy and 4.5 T tax hike on the lower and middle classes.
This wasn’t rushed because of how society is today (not because people rush more). It was rushed because every day public support was going down, and they knew that more exposure would hurt the chances of passing it.
And after declaring that he promised Susan Collins nothing and less than one week after the all night session, Mr. Speaker overtly delcares Medicare is on the chopping block:
Chopping Medicare will help alleviate other SS issues… 'cause folks will live less long.
Hell is waiting for Paul Ryan with open arms.
But for now - the conference is considering “raising” the corporate tax to 22%
Oh, so it matters if it’s DONORS who complain and not just all us constituents!
Any word on the screw the grads tax yet?
Next time public support matters to large numbers of folks in DC is the 2018 midterms.
And of course what donors say matters. Again for both sides of the aisle. Naïve to think otherwise. And a factor in the speed of the tax bill. At this point current Congress has been in place for almost a year but enacted next to nothing of any significance. Supporters are looking to see something done.
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“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” the speaker of the House, Paul D. Ryan,…
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They’re just so painfully predictable.
They have been campaigning on entitlement reform pretty much my entire adult life. And have pretty much done nothing to enact any. Its called the third rail of politics for a reason.
I think they have the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and a reckless disregard for what the voters think right now. Only the donors count.
Paul Ryan has wanted to kill Medicare and Medicaid his entire political career. It’s just a sickeningly cynical move on his part, on the verge of pushing through a tax bill that will increase the national debt by at least $1 trillion, and probably more like $1.5 trillion, to then turn around even before the bill is enacted and start salivating over the opportunity to argue, “Oops, we have no money, so now we need to slash Medicare and Medicaid.”
I’m 65, still working, still paying into Medicare as I have done for nearly 45 years now. I have seen how Medicare stood as the only thing that kept both of my parents, and both of my wife’s parents, from falling into abject poverty in their waning years under the weight of mounting medical costs. Medicare allowed all four of them to die with dignity. I gladly paid my Medicare taxes to achieve that result. I’ve also seen many of my parents’ friends and extended family members literally spend down all their assets on medical costs, then need to go into nursing homes, and it was only Medicaid that stepped in to pay the bills to allow them to get the 24/7 nursing care they needed. Paul Ryan wants to take all that away from us. This tax bill is just a giant Trojan horse that he hopes will get him there by getting enough people to buy into the notion that a $300 or $700 or $1200 tax cut now is a welcome gift, oblivious to the prospect of higher taxes later, along with deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid in their retirement years. It’s a sucker’s bargain.