After the GOP’s epic Obamacare repeal failure, Americans are wondering if the party can fulfill its other big promise to voters, tax cuts.
Specifically the GOP has focused on cutting America’s corporate tax rate, the highest in the developed world. The high rate harms American businesses, especially small businesses that can’t afford to navigate through tax code loopholes to lower their rates.
Today on Bloomberg, Sahil Kapur details the movement in Washington around a potential tax bill. Kapur writes:
The House GOP tax blueprint backed by Ryan calls for a 20 percent corporate rate, while Trump’s White House tax outline released in April sets a 15 percent rate. Ryan has also called for full and immediate expensing, while the White House has seemed cool to the idea.
“There are so many other questions,” Meadows said. “We need a lot more level of detail before you can opine on whether it’s good or bad.”
Still, some House members said they’re content with leadership’s handling of the proposed tax revamp so far. Representative Devin Nunes of California, a Ryan ally and member of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, said he’s “absolutely” satisfied with the Big Six’s progress. But he voiced some concerns that the death of the border-adjusted tax would make it harder to cut rates “as far as we need to get them down.”
“Right now, there’s just a lot more education that needs to occur,” Nunes said in an interview.
Health-Care Lessons
The Big Six has made headway on the broad principles, and the House and Senate tax-writing committees will now write the legislation, said AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Ryan.
Republican leaders and staffers on the tax committees are holding regular discussions about the road ahead, hoping to reach agreement on the details of legislation before subjecting lawmakers to difficult votes, a lawmaker and aides said.
William Gale, a tax policy expert at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, said the lack of policy guidance may be due to the fact that the Big Six — Ryan, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch — appear to have made little progress on the specifics of a tax plan.
Read more here.
