This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help.
This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find.
David Dayen, American Prospect
A couple dozen provisions have been removed. No ruling yet on the biggest one, which could mean $3.7 trillion in fake ‘savings.’
The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect
a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee
on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend.
How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the
Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax
cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only
cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other
rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly
wipe out all of the costs!
The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline.
Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in
place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy
would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one
day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion,
depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill
extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same
Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver
are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.
The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline
that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost
$3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion
estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is
$400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus
already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget
hawks in the Senate are grumbling about. ...
In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a
purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget
item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic
senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the
parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as
the “Byrd bath.”) ...
For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion
over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4
trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the
$3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the
parliamentarian. ...
