Story here:
Top White House and GOP leaders have agreed to raise the lowest individual tax rate from 10 to 12 percent, paired with doubling the standard deduction, 5 senior Republicans tell us.
The standard deduction becomes the football in this scheme. If the doubling survives intact, which is hardly certain, down the line someone can say it must be reduced, without advocating a change in the bracket percentage and voila, you've got a nice little tax increase on the poorest members of society without directly raising taxes.
This ridiculous tinkering with rates and deductions just continues ad infinitum since 1913.
As with the Obamacare repeal efforts, there are no guiding principles informing the tax reform debate.
Mandating health coverage at the federal level is tyrannical, and so is the income tax, quite apart from its deliberate inequalities.
Trump kept insisting on a replacement for Obamacare as well as a system of progressive taxation during his speechifying.
There's no there there.
