Amazed, though I shouldn't be, that Trump was still on the postcard talking point in his address just one week ago ("single, little, beautiful sheet of paper").

What are some good policy countermeasures when we have an opening, and knowing congressional Dems are much more likely to be on board with aggressive Dem-support-only changes? At the very least when there's an opening we can't be content with just restoring upper-level rates, we have to increase them from where they were. If 39.6% went to 37%, a fix should bring it up to at least 42.2%.

I was just looking through and found to my surprise they're not doing nearly as much to the estate tax as I assumed - the exemption is doubling to $11.2m (inflation-adjusted) through 2025, then reverting, but the rates are not changing. Of course plenty of other giveaways to passive wealth.

I'd like to see upper-upper level tax rates. Like, sure 39.6% above $250,000 and 42.2% above $400,000, but also 45% above $1 million, 50% above $5 million, and 55% above $10 million.

2: Good, yes.

Pathetically disingenuous plea of incompetence from an anonymous WH source on the carried-interest loophole, the only tax policy item where Trump theoretically had a position distinguishing him from other GOP. In the process misidentifying it as a "deduction".

Maybe the idea is that they passed their controversial bill in 2017. So, having a victory might suck the funds out of 2018 primary challengers, because they finally did the thing their big backers have been long awaiting, but it'll be 10 month old news by the general election.

Special bonus: they can continue to praise the "huge, huge" tax savings that people are going to get on their 2018 taxes, but no one will have completed them in November, so they can freely lie and only deal with people's actual tax experiences after they're reelected.

I for one like expiring estate tax decreases, because I am a fan of upper-class true-crime murder stories.

The original House bill had the estate tax being entirely repealed, but it didn't make it through the Senate.

As a moderate, I would like a 90% top marginal tax rate that'd kick in somewhere in the $5-20 million range.

5.1 is right.

Also, 5.3.

6 & 7 are right.

8: right.

4.2: Dems should put out better calculators between now and then so that people will have a better idea what is coming.

Both Marshall and Yglesias have had good recent pieces on how the GOP is just straight-up looting the country.

Meanwhile, Jon "Pangloss" Chait prefers to focus on the electoral upside for Democrats (which is indeed likely to be substantial).

Special bonus: they can continue to praise the "huge, huge" tax savings that people are going to get on their 2018 taxes, but no one will have completed them in November, so they can freely lie and only deal with people's actual tax experiences after they're reelected.

Nobody noticed their tax cuts from 2009 enough to give Obama credit for them, and I doubt anyone will notice these either, except the rich.

In addition to being bad on the large scale, this bill is an especially bad example of our system where there's one House bill and there's one Senate bill and they disagree on about 50 things, and and the House passes "the bill", and the Senate passes "the bill", and then after we've already heard all this news about what's in "the bill" and the media moves on to other things, they combine the two bills into one bill and nobody knows which things are still in "the bill" and which were cut out.

All I know is it cuts taxes on corporations and the rich, it doesn't have the measure that would abolish graduate school anymore, and it does a thousand other minor things that will create random windfalls for random people and put other random people out of business.

And it also does something bad to health insurance, possibly the same thing everyone was mobilizing against in May, or July, or September.

And it allows ANWR drilling, which used to be one of the number one political flashpoints, but nobody had mentioned it for a decade until yesterday when it turns out that hey, ANWR drilling is now allowed, because of "the tax bill".

Democrats should hit hard on the carried-interest loophole thing but they won't, because Chuck Schumer.

And it allows ANWR drilling, which used to be one of the number one political flashpoints, but nobody had mentioned it for a decade until yesterday when it turns out that hey, ANWR drilling is now allowed, because of "the tax bill".

Can ANWR possibly be profitable to drill right now, given the amount of slack production still around after the 2014 oil price crash?

Woah, it allows ANWR drilling? They're like cartoon villains. I'm surprised there's no mention of coats made from dalmatian puppies in the tax bill.

2: there's a proposed state constitutional amendment in MA to charge 10% on income above 1 mil. Earmarked for education and transportation.

I don't know how I feel about the ear Mark part. Paid FMLA and $15 min wag I support.

Can ANWR possibly be profitable to drill right now, given the amount of slack production still around after the 2014 oil price crash?

No, and it's mostly a symbolic thing for Alaska politicians at this point. What the tax bill actually mandates is one lease sale within four years and another within seven. If anyone ends up bidding, and the whole thing doesn't get derailed by litigation, there might be some oil production in ten years or so.

Saw Paul Ryan on TV this morning. CBS did a decent job describing the bill, but journalists remain near-powerless against politicians whose strategy is to lie, lie, lie.

16: They needed Murkowski's vote and that was her price.

Shit.

If anyone ends up bidding, and the whole thing doesn't get derailed by litigation, there might be some oil production in ten years or so.

Well, in ten years in may well be more economical AND a much warmer place in which to drill.

21: Lest anyone forget - WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.

Well, she could still win the coin flip.

And they could redo that other election that was close and hopelessly fucked.

It's like Fascism and pre-school combined into one big, orange baby.

And then there's the big joke about the giant bill to repair infrastructure. I guess the funding will come from all the new jobs that the jobs creators create but people in those well-paid class jobs will have lower tax rates, so they'll have to give corporations another tax cut so they can create more jobs.

Should we have a pool to guess how much of the tax giveaway corporations will use for stock buybacks?

21 Fuck. Why?*

*I can't read the news story.

The "won by one vote" election is now "tied by a court ruling."

Fuck that.

28: a lot (particularly given how much cash companies already have lying around already being used for this)

The thing I GENUINELY do not understand, except in a limited electoral year politics kind of way, is the obsession with making this thing retroactive to this past year. This is actually going to screw up things for a lot of people AND corporations. I mean, people (and in particular the rich GOP donor base!) do a lot of tax planning in advance, but even moreso, large corporations do parts of their tax planning YEARS in advance. Even if, in the long run, this bill will benefit them, in the short term, I'm seeing a lot of companies scrambling right now to figure out what the hell is going on, impact-wise, to their financials (and a lot of it is actually worse than you'd think, because thing like hedges and net-loss carryforwards that were in place under the existing regime are now going to be worthless or have negative effects).

Do you know what companies like more than a surprise tax cut? They like stability. And the ability to plan for things in advance.

28: I predict 87% of the new give away.

(For no real reason, other than it's a large percentage, which seems to match what business leaders have said all along.)

Are all charitable giving deductions gone?

Posted this off-topically at the bitter end of a thread so will repost Rep. Clyburn's spot on name for it "the Republican Donor-Class Relief Act."

Sorry 32, but corporations are SUPPOSED to be run exclusively to maximize their short-term stock price, not all this stability and planning and hedging mumbo-jumbo. Look at the S&P 500! Case closed, folks!

I paid a shitload of student loan interest this year as part of my big push to pay off my loans. I guess it's small in the scheme of things but that deduction is why I've gotten refunds the last few years.

Also, aren't there supposed to be checks against retroactive laws? What if you've been paying estimated tax all year? You could potentially end up with a penalty if the new calculation is far enough off, couldn't you?

32: I think we're seeing a drawing-apart of interests between the corporate-professional class and the corporate-owner class. Yes, the policy is horrible for corporate stability; but it's great for their major owners who increasingly just care about extracting cash.

Here's a bit of a microcosm of that divide as it manifests between the health care industry and the finance industry, the former of which has been a bit more of a force for good this year because they don't want the disruption of sudden uninsurance. Reported by Andy Slavitt:

A major health care CEO tells me hedge funds have been pushing them to back repeal....

Why the hell would we back repeal?- the CEO wanted to know. -It's bad for health care. It's bad for us.-

Doesn't matter if you lose customers or people lose care, hedge fund thinking goes. Because it will be offset by a giant tax cut.

lesson on Trump presidency. Financial markets & financial investors are obsessed with potential of tax cuts. And Medicaid can pay for it.

Also, aren't there supposed to be checks against retroactive laws? What if you've been paying estimated tax all year?

Actually this may not be quite as unprecedented as it sounds - it may hinge more on the tax preparation cycle than the tax year. I just checked a vague memory and confirmed: when Prop 30, the Jerry Brown initiative to raise CA sales and income taxes, passed in November 2012, the income tax part of it applied "retroactively to all income earned or received after January 1, 2012." (Not the sales tax part though.)

Nothing's retroactive in this, correct?

TIL that dogs lick their balls because they receive massive bribes to do so.

Since we are clearly still deeply in the Biff timeline, my pessimistic prediction continues to be that before/over the holidays Trump fires Rosenstein and McCabe (and maybe Mueller. or maybe that comes later); Dems win big in House next year but at most get small edge in Senate; House impeaches; not convicted in Senate.

Fox had tax lawyers and accountants as being among the winners. This was on Sheppard Smith.

The massive affirmation of this by big corps (and positioning of bonuses as "because of this") is predictable but frightening.How many Christmases are these fuckers going to ruin? All of them starting from last year is one guess.

42 - That prediction seems like about the most optimistic reasonably likely one, though what do I know.

I wonder how the tax prep software companies are going to have their software ready in a month.

It looks like in this case most of the changes (especially the rate cuts) start with tax year 2018, but some are retroactive (an increase in medical expense deductions, for example).

It bothers me that they went and did a whole tax reform without doing anything that stops TurboTax from the massive rent collecting operation the pull off every year. Why the fuck can't the IRS just put out its own software for filling out tax forms, and not charge for filing them?

||
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward...

Late imperial China came to feature a massive and unhappy reservoir of victims of debt, downward mobility, and bondage; a lower class of boatmen and porters, of drifters and bandits; of criminal gangs and sectarian adherents; of despised and legally disfranchised groups such as musicians, beggars, and the like that the Yongzheng emperor tried to emancipate in the 1720s and 1730s. There were more than sufficient labor reserves at hand to fuel the widespread bond servant rebellions and other disorders of the late Ming, as well as the huge Taiping and other upheavals that engulfed China in the middle of the nineteenth century.

48: I mean, you know the answer to this, right?

Yeah, the answer is looting, which seems to be very popular these days. At least now we will be able to fit our tax return on a post card, so I guess it won't be so bad.

True story. Because of identity theft, my 2015 return is still being processed. 2016 is done, but I guess they don't insist on sequential processing.

What happened? Did someone try to pull the old "file the victim's taxes in January and walk off with their tax return" trick?

Yes, I think so. They failed because I made estimated payments and those weren't mentioned on the return.

Sounds like I need to get off my ass and make some estimated payments. Its been a while since I've needed to, and before that my strategy was usually "completely forget about it and then pay a fine."

Of course that was all known 18 months ago. Various half-assing and a missed letter caused the delay.

Always make it that you owe money is my foolproof trick....

Except if they don't know you owe money, then it doesn't work.

I'm in total avoidance/denial of how awful this is all going to be.

Instead, I'm venting about my stupid Health Reimbursement Account company. How is it possible in the year 2017 for people to a) think that it's totally okey-dokey fine to use a Social Security Number as employee ID, and create a web form that doesn't even obscure the numbers as they are being entered?!

I blame Congress.

Apparently, the student loan interest deduction wasn't cut, so I personally am going to benefit, which I think in today's world makes the tax bill objectively good policy.

this WILL be one of the best if not Best presidency forever!!!!

26 pretty much sums it all up.

Also:

I'm in total avoidance/denial of how awful this is all going to be.

Yeah, me too.

More evidence of the divergence in 38, as the nation's Chets realize it's not so great for them after all.

Class consciousness for everybody.

Supposedly, Trump is trying to get Orin Hatch to not retire to keep Romney out of the Senate because you can't trust anyone under 75 if you want to destroy the future.

Mitt Romney's barely under 75 himself.

He manages to not look like death in a lounge suit better than Hatch.

Partially it's the hair, but mostly it's because he doesn't look like the collar of his shirt is what holds his head on.

Hatch has recently been trying to outdo Graham in the Sycophant's Derby:

"We are going to keep fighting," Hatch said. "And we are going to make this the greatest presidency we have seen, not only in generations, but maybe ever."

"Boy, that was good," Trump responded. House Speaker "Paul Ryan just said, 'How good was that?'"

None of them can lay a glove on Pence.

I admit to being puzzled by the degree of sycophancy even among politicians. For instance Pence's sort of prayer to Trump. Is it just that they are good at sussing out what makes Trump tick and have no scruples whatsoever? (Actually, asking the question answers it; but still the extremeness of it is a whole new level of disturbing.)

Asking the question does answer it, except that I have trouble understanding how saying something like that (even about someone who isn't objectively awful) doesn't make a politician seems like too big of a dipshit to vote for. To be clear, I understand the standards have shifted and I am now out of the loop of white-male-middleclassness as it is practiced by the majority of my demographic. But I don't approve even in the abstract.

Have some fucking dignity people.

I'm sure you'll be shocked/not shocked to learn that the rationale to get the VA election back to a tie was an argument that has been rejected by Republicans previously. Person voted for every other Republican so they must have meant to vote for this one too even though they marked both and crossed one out but also crossed out one previously on the ballot and didn't mark another. I can find you a few thousand old Jewish ladies in FL who wish that argument had been accepted when they voted straight Democrat except for anti-Semite Pat Buchanan.

As far as taxes, I have access to microfabrication capabilities so I am tempted to actually try to file my taxes on a postcard.

69: Rep. Diane Black (TN) made a run at it:

"Thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to have you as our President."