Before tax reform, one more attempt at ACA repeal and replace. The Senate may vote this week on legislation sponsored by Sens. Lindsay Graham and Bill Cassidy. Their bill would replace the Affordable Care Act’s tax subsidies with state block grants. Republicans have until September 30 to pass repeal under budget reconciliation and Senate Democrats are demanding a full CBO score before voting. But CBO says it may only have rough estimates of the budgetary effects of the bill in time. It won’t have a complete budget score or coverage projections for “at least several weeks.”
One week left before the GOP leadership releases a tax plan. What do we know? The President still wants a 15 percent corporate tax rate, but he seems to be the only one convinced it can happen. (Tax reformers could get a rate that low and retain revenue neutrality but they’d have to make some tough decisions, like adding a consumption tax to the mix.) What will the top rates be? What preferences will be cut? Whose taxes will drop the most? Will tax changes be retroactive? So many questions, yet so little time between now and next week, when GOP leaders promise to release plan details.
Attention must be paid. Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch is getting testy about efforts to trim his panel’s clout. Last week, he warned that whatever tax plan the Big Six proposed, the Finance panel would write its own bill—even though Hatch is one of the six White House and GOP Hill leaders trying to draft a tax measure. Then Hatch told Politico that Senate Health Committee chair Lamar Alexander is "stealing our jurisdiction," by trying to draft an ACA replacement without the participation of the Finance panel.
Tax reform affects the level of economic output, not its growth rate, in the long run. TPC’s Ben Page explains why “even the most optimal version of tax reform is likely to result in a one-time increase in economic output [rather] than an ongoing year-after-year hike in the pace of growth and economic activity.” So next time you hear backers of a big tax bill claim it will boost long-run economic growth, grab that salt shaker.
In the meantime, aiming for revenue neutrality is a good thing. Maya MacGuineas, of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, writes for Forbes that revenue-neutral and gimmick-free tax reform is hard, but worth it.
Good things come to those wait… a long time. Budget expert Stan Collender says everything one needs to know about tax reform lies in the fact that “It's about to take a very small group of senior policymakers more than six months to agree on the broadest of principles...and the broad principles will be the easy part.” Tax reform isn’t likely this year, he concludes, and 2019 is far more likely than next year.
Texas will lose tax revenue in 2020. Tax Analysts reports (paywall) that Texas, one of seven states that will lose the ability to tax internet access under the permanent extension of the Internet Tax Freedom Act, stands to lose about $358 million in associated tax revenue. The Lone Star State loses its “grandfathered” status under the law in 2020.