The GOP Tax Bill Isn’t the End of the World. Far From It.

[EasyAce]

It's a conventional Republican tax plan with all the predictable problems — and benefits.
By Peter Suderman
http://reason.com/blog/2017/12/19/gop-tax-bill-not-apocalypse-end-world/print

Democrats have treated the bill's passage as an apocalyptic event. Earlier this month, when a previous
iteration of the bill passed in the Senate, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House Minority Leader, declared that it
was literally the apocalypse. "It is the end of the world," she said, singling out the bill's repeal of the individual
mandate. "This is Armageddon." How perilous the world must seem to her that this muddled bit of tax cutting
could bring it all down.

Pelosi's apoplectic reaction offers, among other things, a reminder of how long it has been since Republicans
last passed major legislation, and how unhinged the responses to such an event can be. The Tax Cuts and Jobs
Act (TCJA) is not the end of the world, nor anything close. It is not even, unfortunately, the end of the tax code
as we know it.

Instead, it is a predictable, conventional piece of Republican tax legislation, one that cuts taxes for corporations
and individuals while sharply increasing the deficit. It is the sort of thing you can imagine passing, more or less,
under Mitt Romney or John McCain or Jeb Bush. Which means, of course, that it has all the problems, and benefits,
of conventional Republican thinking about taxes . . .

. . . The Republican bill, and the GOP's evidence-free assertions about its likely budgetary effects, have all but
ensured a future in which politicians do not feel obligated to even engage in the pretense of fiscal responsibility.
Republicans complained endlessly about the
opaque process by which Obamacare was passed. But now they have
escalated the gimmick wars, and there may be no going back . . . understood more broadly, through the lens of
politics as well as policy, the effect of the GOP's duplicity, opacity, haste, and carelessness is not only to produce
bad legislation, but bad precedent — another excuse, going forward, for politicians of both parties to disregard
even the imperfect norms of transparency that have often governed the policymaking process whenever it is
convenient. So no, it is not the end of the world. Far from it. But neither, I suspect, is it a pathway to a better
one.