Update 196: Tax Talk of the Town What Have the Secret Six Unveiled? The Administration is in critical straits. While fending off accusations of Russian collusion, dithering and infighting, ignoring its half-filled sub-cabinets, reversing constitutional rights via Twitter, and failing even to repeal the ACA, they have had little time to deal with tax policy. …
Update 195 — Tax Reform Drill Down: The Business Interest Deduction The latest today is that we may have recess as originally scheduled — i.e., starting at COB Friday — after all. That night, the (not so) Secret Six Republican tax planners — Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, Paul Ryan, and Kevin …
Update 192: Health Care, Death & Taxes The Devil You Don’t Know Yet… Hatching Yesterday, Senate Finance and today House Ways and Means held hearings to examine tax reform. Republicans have been meeting regularly in secret for months working on a plan as costly in fiscal terms as the GOP health care bill is in human …
Update 191: Policy Worth Its SALT? State of Play State and Local Deduction The Trump administration’s fiscal policy is either difficult to discern or exists only in default. The elimination of the state and local tax deduction appears to be the only substantial revenue-generating proposal under consideration. The proposal is unlikely to pass the Congress. No Democrat …
State of Play State and Local Deduction (Jul. 14) Read More »
Update 185 — Ryan, GOP Tax Hopes Still Spring Eternal as Summer Starts This afternoon, Speaker Ryan delivered a widely anticipated speech on tax reform before the National Association of Manufacturers. Ryan maintained that 2017 is the year for comprehensive tax reform based on principles of simplification, territoriality, and permanence. He decried America’s relatively high statutory corporate …
Update 180 — Lights, Camera, Inaction Now Playing: No Country For Tax Reform Lost in the din and clatter of all things Russia last week was a House Ways & Means hearing that showcased the coming attractions of a feature-length Congressional GOP tax production. But no mention was made of a release date beyond “this …
Update 176: Trump’s Income Tax Avoidance Plan All of 200 words and 7 numbers, President Trump’s one-pager tax plan released this week generated scores of lengthy news articles and analysis in the last three days, each pounding out the rates, revenues, arrears and the ramifications of this bare-bones proposal. Given the limited scope of the …
Update 172 Recess Recap Trump’s Economic Policy Scorecard As Congress prepares to go on a two-week recess, the Trump administration enters April with has no legislative productivity on big ticket items to its credit, its dreams of passing anything significant before August, a stated tax reform goal, looking remote. Trump made many campaign promises …
Recess Recap Trump's Economic Policy Scorecard (Apr. 6) Read More »
Update 171 — Pivot to Tax Policy Time to Pass a Bill or Pass the Ball Donald Trump’s presidency is at risk on several fronts. For our purposes, the most serious of these is the risk of a legislatively stillborn administration. After the Trump-Ryan health care brick at the buzzer last week, you might think …
Update 168: Unsettling Scores The Tax Take on CBO’s AHCA Report The eagerly awaited CBO report on the GOP’s healthcare replacement plan released this afternoon set out what would be talking points, or rallying cries, for Democratic candidates and causes in the 2018 midterms. As most serious analysts predicted, the American Health Care Act is officially projected …
