Comment by cjbgkagh
Comment by cjbgkagh 8 days ago
It wasn't intended to stick, it's a bad idea that was intentionally bad in order to make it easier to reverse.
Comment by cjbgkagh 8 days ago
It wasn't intended to stick, it's a bad idea that was intentionally bad in order to make it easier to reverse.
Reducing taxes on businesses by 30%+ and high earners and the middle class by a smaller percentage. It’s a direct effect of the 2017 Republican tax reforms.
If you want to pass something using only 50% of our representatives you have to pay for it with something else to balance the change. 60% of the vote and you don’t care what the Congressional budget office says. The primary software development hubs are not Republican leaning. The same reason SALT was changed. Voting matters.
The other responses have the right idea, but in more detail:
All congressional bills receive an estimate of their budget impact over the next ten years. Whatever happens after ten years doesn't count.
The politics are that a bill should have no budget impact within that ten-year window. As an uncharitable stylized example, you'd propose to start paying random subsidies to constituents immediately in the amount of $200M / year, forever. 8 years out, you also plan to raise taxes on somebody else, someone who would never vote for you in a million years, in the amount of $1B / year, which may or may not fade out after two years. This is a bill with no budget impact.
It doesn't matter, to you, whether that spike in collections for years 9-10 actually happens or not. If you failed at targeting it exclusively to people you hate, you might prefer that it doesn't.
ok, got it. So... this helped it pass because it allowed the headline to be "budget neutral" even though all signs point to this piece getting removed quickly and ultimately expanding the deficit. Sounds dishonest but logical if the objective is to reduce taxes without genuine consideration of the deficit. Thanks (to you and siblings) for the explanation.
The worse it was the better it worked as a budget fudge and it could be included in projections and allow a budget neutral bill to be passed. And by being so bad it would be easier to reverse as fewer people would defend it. There was an attempt to eat their cake and have it too.
The Republican Party is actively antagonistic to any legislation from the Democratic Party basically.
You need a 60% vote or you need to take away someone else’s pie. Medicaid/medicare/social security are current contenders based on Republican planning.
The bigger issue is Republican voting districts gain less from putting it back in place. Most software devs are on the coasts and Denver.
Because it wasn't bad enough. Look at the fervor it's causing now - now imagine if it was worse.
In politics it may seem like a good idea to create these time bombs because they can't imagine them going off but sometimes they do and here we are. The pied-piper strategy with the basket of deplorables was supposed to make it easier for Hillary to win 2016 but she didn't so we got the bomb going off instead.
Republicans really want to cut taxes for rich people but they don’t want to just straight-up acknowledge a huge debt increase for that goal, so they come up with different ways to say that something is budget neutral. That’s why a lot of the 2017 bill cuts were time-limited so regular people got the tax cut immediately and would hopefully remember it, but the time limit meant that CBO wouldn’t count it as a long-term debt increase and it’d be someone else’s problem when those expired and most people notice their taxes go up.
I don't follow. What is the motivation of doing something intentionally bad to make it easy to reverse?