With the healthcare push finished after a hard fought three weeks, Trump and Ryan are now turning their eyes to tax reform. Often talked about, never really tackled, for the same reasons healthcare is often talked about and never really tackled.
Given what just went down with healthcare, what can Trump and Ryan hope to accomplish? The hard right will be pushing for dramatic cuts in personal and business tax rates, back to zero capital gains taxes, etc. Lots of talk about “job creators” will follow, but can they accomplish anything real?
Or will Trump really reach out to Democrats as he is threatening to do?
What does a moderate, centrist tax reform plan look like? Lower personal and business taxes in exchange for a VAT? I don’t even know.
The thing is, Democrats are under huge pressure to not cut deals with Trump.
Call it payback for how the GOP treated Obama, multiplied by Trump’s sheer idiocracy/asshole factor. Any Dem that deals is going to be immensely unpopular. They’ll get primaried, for sure.
Maybe, but the Democratic base is far more open to results over ideology. I can’t see Trump really bringing anything to the table that would tempt them though. He might toss a single crumb their way to try to balance out a mountain of crap, but that isn’t going to cut it.
Tax Reform only affects literally everything in the government, so I’m sure this will all be handled really elegantly and in a completely organized fashion.
Hopefully the public will eventually recognize his tax reform ideas for what they really are and turn against him again. I want to see Trump and the GOP completely annihilate themselves.
It will be interesting though, considering that TrumpCare was both a massive tax cut for the rich combined with stripping 24 million people of their current healthcare. They even tried to make healthcare worse for the people who weren’t among the 24 million.
You’d think that hiding tax cuts for the rich inside of a gussied up healthcare bill would be a bit easier to do if the healthcare parts looked somewhat appearing to constituents by putting enough lipstick on the pig. But they even completely failed to sell the healthcare part of the bill because the bill was so awful.
Now they’re undoubtedly going to push for tax cuts for the rich again and tax increases for the poor, but they don’t even have the opportunity of healthcare to hide behind. So I’m curious to see how they try to sell their bullshit this time.
I’ll put all my chips on “a poorly messaged wreck of a tax reform bill that does little to simplify the tax code, and where it does is an enormous handout to large corporations and the rich that blows a huge hole in the budget and is ineptly sold as a win for “small businesses” because it drops their owners’ overall tax burden by five percent.”
If they pass anything more significant than a garden-variety unfunded tax break for the wealthy, likely in the form of lowering or reducing capital gains taxes, I’ll be shocked.
That’s the most likely scenario. I’d expect something along Bush Jr’s tax cuts. Massive barely-hidden cuts for the top with middling cuts for the mid and lower end with no plan to remotely pay for any of it.
Will Trump have any input on Tax Reform? Or will he just attempt to ‘sell’ whatever Paul Ryan writes?
I expect the latter. Trump seems to have opinions on everything, but little knowledge and no actual beliefs. So the eventual Tax Reform bill will again have Trump backing something that does little for his base of rural and rust-belt whites, while providing huge benefits to the rich (the ‘job creators’). It’ll be more Ayn Rand bullshit.
Serious question. Do you honestly believe he gives a damn whether he keeps his promises? I certainly don’t. Or more accurately, he will keep up with some ridiculous justification why the insane thing he did that 70+% of the population doesn’t not want is exactly what he promised.
I actually think they’ll succeed on this one as all Republicans love tax cuts. Some may argue for more but no one’s going to break ranks because they didn’t get to steal as much wealth as they ideally wanted and for sure no one’s going to break ranks because they think the tax cuts are too big. It will be a giant wealth redistribution love in. Only they are so fucking arrogant and stupid that the thinly veiled excuses they come up with to justify these cuts to the people won’t hold water so they may see some backlash from working class voters who are already feeling burned. (Then again, the “tax cuts are always good” Kool-Aide is so strong, they probably won’t see nearly the resistance to this that they saw with their health care act, especially if they do like Bush did and throw in a little $500 payoff check so everyone in the middle class can go buy themselves a new pair of shoes.)
Trump and Ryan both want the same thing. Massive tax cuts for the rich paid for by cutting services to everyone else.
This is actually something Trump cares about so i expect he will have people briefing him on what policies will give him and the royal family the most money.
I’m expecting a lot of bullshit propaganda about cutting taxes to “job creators” to unleash the economy.
The whole reason for Trumpcare first (really Ryancare, but could you ever imagine Trump letting anyone else’s name on something big?) was to set up the possibility of jamming permanent tax cuts through the budget reconciliation process (from Trump Regrets Backing Ryan’s Plan to Do Health Care First, but I’ve seen the same analysis elsewhere as well):
The House Speaker insisted on this sequence because his dream of passing permanent regressive tax cuts depends on it. To avoid a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, Republicans must pass their tax plan in the form of a budget-reconciliation bill — a type of legislation that can pass with a simple majority in the upper chamber. But budget-reconciliation bills cannot increase the budget deficit outside of the ten-year period after they’re passed.
This means that Republicans can either put a ten-year time limit on their tax cuts — as they did under George W. Bush — or they need to find a way to make their tax cuts revenue neutral.
That latter gambit may sound impossible. And it probably is. But it’s a bit less impossible if Republicans repeal Obamacare first, as Jonathan Chait has explained:
The Republican plan to repeal Obamacare would eliminate all the taxes that were raised to help pay for the benefits — about $1.2 trillion over the next decade. This would lower the baseline of tax revenue, meaning that Republicans would need to design a tax code that raises $1.2 trillion less in revenue in order to be “revenue-neutral.” That makes it crucial for them to repeal Obamacare before they cut taxes.
Exactly. I said it in the Obamacare thread, but calling the AHCA a healthcare bill was insulting. It wasn’t a healthcare bill at all, but a partial dismantling of an existing healthcare bill to pay for a tax break for the 1%
