AZ Congressional Delegation

Update on the Senate GOP tax bill clusterfuck (updated)

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The  tragedy of the  political career of John McCain is that he is a man who frequently espouses high morals and principles and assails others for not having them, McCain: Trump doesn’t have any ‘principles and beliefs’, but he has regularly failed to live up to the very principles which he espouses. He is ultimately a “say anything” politician who plays to his fawning base, the beltway media and Arizona media, who treat him as if he is a senior statesman. McCain is and has always been nothing but a deeply flawed hypocrite.

On the same day McCain criticized our Twitter-troll-in-chief for not having any principles and beliefs, McCain demonstrated that he does not follow his own principles and beliefs, recently expressed in his August op-ed John McCain: It’s time Congress returns to regular order and his dramatic floor speech in the Senate chastising his colleagues prior to the vote on the “skinny repeal” of Obamacare.

Mr. “regular order” gave his consent to the Senate GOP tax bill which at this very moment is still being drafted with provisions no one has seen or read, a tax bill which Senate GOP leadership drafted in secret without Democratic input, committee hearings, stakeholder or public testimony or input (both stakeholders and the public are opposed to this terrible bill), and was just introduced last week, with only a markup before the Senate Finance Committee which reported out the bill on a party-line vote, so that it could be rushed to a vote by the end of this week before anyone could discover what is in it.

As Laurie Roberts of The Republic laments, John McCain’s support of tax reform bill is another ‘danged fence’ moment. Even when confronting his own mortality and having to answer before his God, John McCain simply would not do the right thing for the American people.

Other key developments in the GOP tax bill on Thursday: the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), employing magic asterisk dynamic scoring sprinkled with “trickle down” fairy dust, nevertheless says the Senate tax bill will add $1T to deficits, even with growth:

The Senate GOP tax bill won’t produce enough economic growth to fully pay for its tax cuts, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) said in an analysis released Thursday.

The bill’s macroeconomic effects would reduce the deficit by $408 billion over 10 years, but the bill overall would still cost about $1 trillion, the JCT said.

The JCT had earlier estimated that the bill would lose $1.4 trillion in federal revenue before accounting for economic growth.

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The final countdown on the Senate GOP tax bill has begun: call your senators now

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The Senate voted 52-48 along party lines Wednesday to begin debate on the Senate GOP tax bill. Several Republicans who have not committed to voting for the final bill, including Sens. Collins, McCain, Corker and Flake, voted in favor of moving forward to debate. But final passage could be another story.

Currently there is no firm agreement on the trigger provision Sen. Corker wants, no pay-for to partially keep the state and local tax deductions Sen. Collins wants, and no language on the pass-through changes for small businesses sought by Sens. Johnson and Daines. Senate Republicans are about to overhaul the tax code, and they don’t know what’s in their bill yet;

Senate Republicans are in such a rush to pass a tax overhaul in the next few days that they voted to start debate on a bill that could still undergo a bevy of last-minute changes they haven’t seen in writing — changes that could dramatically affect the US economy over the next decade.

But most Republicans aren’t letting some last-minute deal cutting that could mean billions of dollars in tax increases, tax cuts, or federal spending cuts get in the way of moving the bill along.

Even Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), who’s one of the senators most skeptical of the bill and is pushing for the major addition of automatic tax hikes if the federal deficit grows too quickly, voted to start debate on the bill. He had told reporters earlier that he couldn’t describe the changes “until we get it in writing.” Corker later told reporters they could “throw away” anything they’d heard about the deal because it is “still evolving.”

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The Senate GOP tax bill is also an assault on health care

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I explained the other day how the mythical moderate from Maine, Senator Susan Collins, is being played by the Trump White House on her wholly insufficient “Obamacare” reinsurance fund bill in order to gain her vote on the Senate GOP tax bill. In major policy reversal, Trump now backs bipartisan fixes to ‘Obamacare’ to get Sen. Susan Collin’s vote on GOP tax bill.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has now scored the bill negotiated by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) to stabilize the “Obamacare” market, and it also comes up woefully short. The CBO just released a report that should worry Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski:

A new report from the Congressional Budget Office dealt what should be a crushing blow to the tax bill: The deal that was crafted to win key senators who objected to the bill’s provision that would leave millions uninsured won’t actually stanch the loss in coverage.

With moderates expressing concern over a provision that would repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate — leaving an estimated 13 million more uninsured by 2027 — Republican leadership hatched a plan to simultaneously pass a bill to stabilize the Obamacare marketplaces, a proposal negotiated by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA).

But this proposal hit a major snag Wednesday when a new CBO report found passing the Alexander-Murray proposal — the centerpiece of which is funding Obamacare’s cost-sharing reduction subsidies that Trump has threatened to pull — would not in fact help mitigate the coverage losses and premium hikes triggered by repealing the individual mandate.

Previous estimates from the CBO found that repealing the individual mandate, the Obamacare policy that penalizes people who opt out of buying health insurance, would leave 13 million fewer insured by 2027 and increase premiums by an average of 10 percent over the next decade.

“If legislation were enacted that incorporated both the provisions of the Bipartisan Health Care Stabilization Act and a repeal of the individual mandate … the effects on the premiums and the number of people with health insurance coverage would be similar,” Keith Hall, the CBO’s director, wrote in a letter to Murray.

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New problems for the GOP tax bill are reasons to kill it

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The Senate is racing towards a vote on its ill-conceived and fiscally irresponsible tax bill by the end of this week. It seems the evil GOP bastards have run into a new problem: the Senate GOP tax bill does not comply with the “Byrd Rule,” which means GOP leadership technically cannot pass the bill with … Read more

The GOP tax bill is generational theft that steals from our future

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Republicans only care about the federal deficit and national debt when Democrats are in charge of Congress and the White House.

When Republicans are in charge, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,” as Dick Cheney infamously once said.

Remember when Republicans used to say that the national debt was “generational theft” from future generations of taxpayers? Funny how we are not hearing this from Republicans now.

But here is a recent example from Neal Urwitz at the conservative Newsmax, regarding the current GOP tax bill that will add another 1.5 trillion dollars plus to the national debt in order to give tax cuts to corporations and Plutocrats. It’s Not a Tax Cut — It’s Generational Theft:

Hey Baby Boomers — if you could stop stealing from my generation, we’d really appreciate it.

To be clear, I’m referring to President Trump’s tax-cut proposal. His proposal, if enacted, would increase the federal government deficit by trillions of dollars. Sure, the administration claims it’ll be revenue neutral, but there’s no way that’s true.

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So it’s simple math: taxing less + spending the same amount = massive deficit.

Sure, some people argue that the increased economic growth from tax cuts will make up the resulting deficit — this theory is known as the Laffer Curve — but even Republicans don’t really believe that anymore. The theory has simply been tried and failed too many times for anyone to reasonably think it’ll work this time.

To state the obvious, if we accumulate massive debt as a nation, someone has to pay the piper. And that is going to be all the generations after the Baby Boomers …

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The upshot is my generation will have to pay much higher taxes and will have less money for the things we’ll need in the future — like sophisticated defense, functioning education, homeland security, or fixing our crumbling infrastructure. Oh, and we’ll have to do it with anemic economic growth.

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