Comment by cjbgkagh 8 days ago
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.
Don’t need 60% for budget bills in reconciliation (the process of merging bills from the House of Representatives and the Senate). One of the times filibusters (which create 60% requirement) do not apply.
The "or you need to take away someone else’s pie" is the relevant part here
The 174 changes (and SALT changes, and some other stuff) were how TCJA got balanced and passed without a 60% majority. 50%+1 is enough to undo previously passed legislation that was also passed with 50%+1 in this case (handwaving - not exactly right, because the balancing point is a different time range, so the math might not work out exactly the same).
The Democratic party absolutely could have passed some legislation in 2021-2023 to undo a lot of TCJA with just a 50%+1 vote, if they cut other stuff to balance. They didn't do that though. In part because they had literally 50%+1 majority and couldn't lose a single vote in the Senate, and couldn't come to an internal agreement.
Uhm, but the Democrats held the House and Senate for two years during the Biden administration, which came after the Trump tax cuts.
I don't believe that's true. I remember gnashing of teeth about this during the Biden years.
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.
There's a risk they'll try to break the Senate rules outright [0], by pretending that certain promised-to-be-temporary tax cuts now cost $0 to extend.
To put it in domestic terms:
* [January 1st] "Honey, I want to rent a Ferrari, I did the math and it fits if it's just one month! Pleeeeeease?"
* [February 1st] "Oh, that? It's the Ferrari rental-fee for the next month, don't worry, it's an existing expense, it's already part of our regular budget, so clearly we've proven we can afford it. We'll just have to cut back on insulin for the kids."
[0] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/senate-republicans-...
Both parties do this to make spending bills appear smaller. This is why clean energy tax credits generally passed during Democrat administrations have to be periodically renewed.
Why is it still in place?