TAX BLACK FRIDAY

 There is a great probability that by the time you are reading this The Senate will approve their version of the tax reform bill.

 I am sure that no Democrat has read it and most likely at the most 5 Republicans have read the entire bill including the pork belly riders. The rest if they have looked at it at best have relied on staff reports.

 I have not read any of it, but have relied on comments from many sources and have excerpted statements.

 No comments have addressed what goodies have been inserted in this bill in exchange for votes. And because the Republican cannot get any Democrat votes to assure the 60 needed for passage the process of Reconciliation (which I don’t understand) that requires only a simple majority is being used.

“Relying on reconciliation … amplifies the partisanship that drives its use in the first place,”... And reconciliation spotlights cleavages within the majority party, making it harder to blame the opposition for legislative failure, as we saw with the health-care vote.” (Power Post; Washington Post).

 Not only has there been a lack of meaningful committee hearings to scrutinize the draft legislation means flaws and problems won’t become totally clear until after it takes effect – at which point it will become much harder to grapple with unintended consequences Instead, most of the senators who plan to vote for the biggest overhaul to the tax code in 30 years still don’t seem to have a super clear sense of what exactly it would do.  The biggest motivating factor is desperation for a political victory after a year of legislative failures (Power Post; Washington Post).

 But along with the fact that there is a sunset provision for personal taxes reform, and none for the corporate provisions there is the fact that taxpayers with incomes of less than 100K will be paying more taxes if not in 2018 but in the next few years.

 According to NBC; the wealthiest, including Trump, are the biggest beneficiaries under the Senate bill. According to the Tax Policy Center, by 2027, the wealthiest get nearly 62 percent of all benefits under the Senate bill (while two-thirds of middle-class Americans would face a tax increase).

 What’s more, per NBC’s own analysis, Trump and his family could save more than $1 billion under the House bill. According to the Washington Post based on an incomplete redacted 2005 statement; “Trump would have saved as much as $42 million on his 2005 taxes under the House bill and $35.1 million under the Senate bill. A big part of the savings is from elimination of the alternative minimum tax, and of course we do not know how often he was subject to it or how much was due to net operating losses that could be limited under the legislation.”

Not mentioned is the estimate that this bill will increase the debt by over 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000.00) in 10 years. “The Joint Committee on Taxation said Thursday that the Senate bill would add $1 trillion to the debt, even after accounting for economic growth, the Washington Post reports.”

 This does not take into consideration the impact on b individual health insurers who rely on the exchanges with the abolition of the mandate. The fact that there will be no penalty for not buying health insurance will permit the healthy and low risk young population to drop out raising the premiums significantly for those remaining, if they can even find an insurer, due to risk factors and a smaller pool.

 All this only points out a few reasons why I consider this bill to be bad for the average American tax payer.