$1.5 Trillion GOP Tax Cut Thread

[Tintrlvr]

In their rush to pass this scam, the Senate GOP didn't realize they defacto repealed literally every corporate deduction: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/senate-gop-accidentally-killed-all-corporate-tax-deductions.html

FF's. Closing loopholes is a good thing .

But not for their donors.

They're standing up to their donors. True champions of the people/fiscal responsibility!

Except, of course, that this was unintentional and is going to get removed/"fixed".

Yeah, I know. Would this even require a new senate vote? They can just sort this out in conference right (of course the senate has to vote for that anyway)?

The Senate has to vote for any change to their bill. The plan was that the Senate wouldn't have to vote again at all because the House would just vote for the Senate bill, and the Senate bill would become law without another Senate vote. But, if they have to make any changes to the Senate bill, those changes have to go through the Senate again. Could be risky if it ends up being after the Alabama Senate election; if Doug Jones wins, Susan Collins (or someone else) might start demanding more concessions when any lone defector would sink the bill.

[Tintrlvr]

Current GOP discussions on SALT deductions are a compromise where instead of a cap of 10K  on real estate taxes it would be a 10K cap on all SALT deductions and the taxpayer can pick between state and local income taxes OR real estate taxes.  Does not seem to me that this will make much of a difference for married taxpayers.  I guess it would for single taxpayers in some cases.

This is more of a giveaway to the rich than restoring SALT entirely since it only affects people who wouldn't otherwise take the standard deduction if SALT were entirely abolished - people with big mortgages or large charitable donations (or both).

[Tintrlvr]

Current GOP discussions on SALT deductions are a compromise where instead of a cap of 10K  on real estate taxes it would be a 10K cap on all SALT deductions and the taxpayer can pick between state and local income taxes OR real estate taxes.  Does not seem to me that this will make much of a difference for married taxpayers.  I guess it would for single taxpayers in some cases.

This is more of a giveaway to the rich than restoring SALT entirely since it only affects people who wouldn't otherwise take the standard deduction if SALT were entirely abolished - people with big mortgages or large charitable donations (or both).

Sure.  But the people that usually itemize are higher income taxpayers (in high tax states) anyway.  So the tax plan came in to hurt them and when there is a compromise, sure, it then "unhurts" them a bit.

Well, yes and no. People in NYC, for example, right now always itemize down to about 75k in income just on the basis of SALT. This does nothing for the people in the lower end of that group but is helpful for people around 300k or so (it also favors older people over younger ones since it's really all about whether you have a mortgage or not, but that's more of a feature of the mortgage deduction that has knock-on consequences here).

[Tintrlvr]

It is really not that complicated. The fact that is a such a large number of people who have absolutely nothing, no property. nothing. It pulls average down far below what you would consider "middle class", thus statements about someone having a $300,000 or $500,000 property, being "middle class" comes off as out of touch.

Well, my main point was that everywhere outside the US 'middle class' means the upper strata of society.

I don't think that's true in the developed world. If you're talking about the Chinese middle class or the Brazilian middle class, sure, you're talking about the 80th to 99th percentile incomes of the country, but I don't think that's true of Germany or France or Canada or Japan. (Britain I'll leave aside since class in Britain is less about income/wealth than other things.) The definition is perhaps not *quite* as expansive as in the US (where the real problem is that everyone self-identifies as middle class rather than that people really mean 90% of society when they use the term "middle class"), but it at least drops to the 40th percentile or so of income.