Republicans seeking to overhaul the federal tax code faced new head winds Wednesday, including a new $74 billion hole in their plan and political fallout from GOP losses in Tuesday’s state and local elections.
Democrats won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday and also stood on the cusp of winning control of the Virginia House of Delegates – a setback that many are calling a wake-up call to the GOP.
But top Republican tax writers split on Wednesday over exactly what signal voters sent.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, said the losses could shape the tax bill going forward.
“It could,” he said in a brief morning interview. “I mean, it could, because the elections went against the Republicans.”
Asked if he is feeling pressure to tilt the tax plan more toward the middle class, Hatch said, “I think we’ve been moving that way anyway.”
But House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., said that he intended to move full steam ahead on a House plan that would cut taxes by $1.5 trillion over 10 years but deliver the bulk of the cuts to corporations and the wealthy.
“It doesn’t change my reading of the current moment,” Ryan said of the elections during a morning event hosted by the Washington Examiner. “It just emphasizes my reading of the current moment, which is: We have a promise to keep, and we have to get on with keeping our promise.”
He added, “I fundamentally believe, when we deliver on comprehensive tax reform and tax relief ... I think that’s going to bear fruit politically, but most importantly it’s going to help people.”
The initial version of the House tax bill delivered only 21 percent of its benefits to individuals, including the middle class, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. Four-fifths of the bill’s aggregate tax cut benefited corporations and business owners with family earnings of more than $260,000 a year, as well as wealthy individuals who would no longer be subject to the federal estate tax.
Republicans argue that the business tax cuts will drive economic growth, adding jobs and pushing up wages, thus creating benefits for Americans at large. But they have had to battle analyses showing that middle-class taxpayers would reap only a fraction of the bill’s direct benefits, and that some of those taxpayers would actually face a tax increase.
The Senate is set to release its own version of the bill on Thursday, which is expected to differ significantly from the House bill. It could delay a planned cut in the corporate tax rate, for instance, but also eliminate a popular individual deduction for state and local taxes.
Changes made to the House bill since it was released last week have largely benefited corporations at the expense of individuals. While a change on Monday restored a $3.2 billion middle-class provision allowing those enrolled in employer-sponsored dependent-care savings plans to deduct up to $5,000 from their taxes, a revision on Friday rolled back individual tax cuts by nearly $82 billion by indexing individual tax parameters to a different measure of inflation that tends to grow more slowly.
Another amendment adopted Monday largely reversed a 20 percent excise tax levied on certain transactions between subsidiaries of multinational corporations. That tax, intended to prevent companies from shifting profits to lower-tax overseas affiliates, had generated strong resistance from powerful business interests.
The Joint Committee on Taxation found in an analysis issued late Tuesday that the reversal of the excise tax would cut revenue by $147.5 billion over a decade. A tweak to another corporate tax, the JCT found, would cut another $9.6 billion in revenue.
Combined with other changes, that leaves the GOP plan costing $1.574 trillion - $74 billion over a $1.5 trillion limit imposed under budget procedures Republicans adopted to skirt a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
More than half of the overall tax cut, under the JCT’s number, now flows to corporations, with another 32 percent benefiting owners of businesses that pass their earnings to the owners to be taxed as individual income. Individuals would get 16 percent of the aggregate tax cut.
Members of the House Ways and Means Committee entered their third day Wednesday debating and seeking to amend the tax bill. Only one Republican amendment has been adopted; the committee voted down nine Democratic amendments that sought to highlight the bill’s impact on the middle class and on the federal budget deficit.
Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J., a member of the tax-writing panel, said Wednesday that Republicans were unwise to continue pushing along the same course after Tuesday’s election results.
“There’s a lot of squirming going on and a lot of unanswered questions that are being asked because they can’t justify them taking from Peter to pay Paul,” Pascrell said. “It’s quite obvious that the election is a symptom of what’s going on. This is bad bill, which they are stuttering through as they try to justify it, (is) only going to get worse as they try to change it.
