Thread: More GOP senators willing to tell Trump to take a hike

More GOP senators willing to tell Trump to take a hike

An increasing number of Republicans have nothing to lose in crossing the president and Mitch McConnell — a warning sign for tax reform.

By BURGESS EVERETT and SEUNG MIN KIM
10/04/2017 05:06 AM EDT

Susan Collins, John McCain, Bob Corker, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul are pictured.

Republican leaders are already chafing at the resistance forming to a tax reform cause that was supposed to unify the party after the wounds opened by health care. | Politico Illustration/Getty Images and AP

There’s a growing faction inside the Senate Republican Conference, and it looks like bad news for Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump: The devil-may-care caucus.

Unbeholden to Republican orthodoxy and freed from the burdens of imminent reelection campaigns, more GOP senators are flexing their independence in the aftermath of the party’s failed effort to repeal Obamacare. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee is the latest addition to the ranks. Days after announcing he would not seek reelection in 2018, he threatened to buck Republicans on tax reform and stood by his earlier criticism of Trump as lacking the stability or competence to be president.

Corker joins longtime GOP contrarians John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Rand Paul in a group that’s willing to vote principle over party line, even if it means sinking some of the party’s cherished agenda items. Roy Moore might be next: The rabble-rousing conservative is favored to win an open Alabama Senate seat after being bombarded by millions of dollars in McConnell-sanctioned campaign ads.

McConnell struggled mightily — and unsuccessfully — to corral his narrow, 52-member majority to back a bill to repeal Obamacare. Now, the swelling number of Republican rebels could spell trouble for the party’s hopes of passing a major tax bill, and potentially imperil their majority.

In an interview, Corker acknowledged his freedom from facing reelection made it a “little easier” to take on his party. He’s declared he will oppose any tax plan that adds “one penny” to the deficit, which the GOP proposal is widely expected to do. Not only that, Corker told Politico, he’d “rail against” any such plan.

“People have lost their heads since the election,” Corker said of his party’s lurch from fiscal conservatism. “It’s a debate about the future. Are we folks who care about leaving this country better for future generations? Or are we all about ‘party-time’ here, to make ourselves beloved by people not having to pay taxes but throwing kids under the bus down the road?”

Leaders are already chafing at the resistance forming to a cause that was supposed to unify the party after the wounds opened by health care. Asked to respond to Corker’s criticism, Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) wound up to lay into his colleague: “Anybody who says you can’t have any deficit, is not living …” he started, before catching himself.

“Let me put it this way, is acknowledging that it’s impossible to even get there unless you have” deficits, Hatch said.

Republicans are hoping budget scorekeepers will eventually mollify Corker by showing that cutting taxes will spur an economic boom. But the problem is much broader than one senator. At least five Republicans are seriously viewed by GOP leaders as potential “no” votes on tax reform. Only three of them could cost the Republicans a centerpiece of their agenda. And that’s before Moore potentially arrives in December and a bill has been written.

The issue for the GOP is that while the entire 52-member caucus is frustrated with inaction, there’s no one to unify them. Trump regularly strays from pushing his agenda to personal feuds. And both he and congressional leadership are broadly unpopular, emboldening individual members to go their own way.

Plus, McCain, Paul and Murkowski were just reelected, Corker is retiring, and Collins might run for governor.

“Although they like to assert their independence at times, the team’s got to produce results if we’re going to continue to keep our majority,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 Senate Republican.

While the rest of the party swivels to tax reform, McCain is privately urging the GOP to commit to a budget deal that boosts military spending by December, according to two sources familiar with the matter. That could delay tax reform, which GOP leaders are hoping to cram through by the end of the year.

On substance, McCain could be a separate problem: He voted against the Bush tax cuts last decade because they disproportionately aided the wealthy. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center concluded last week that the new GOP tax plan would have a similar impact, putting Republicans on defense before the battle’s even been joined.

“Is it accurate to say as some of these reports have said that this is about tax cuts for the top 1 percent? It’s not,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said.

Paul is complaining about analyses that show some taxes would go up under the GOP tax framework. The plan would slash corporate taxes from 35 percent to 20 percent, expand the standard deduction and cut taxes on unincorporated businesses. An aide said Paul is worried “that it won’t be a tax cut for a lot of people,” and GOP leaders are taking him seriously.

Yet satisfying him might require deeper tax cuts and more long-term debt, which would turn off Corker. Asked how to square the two, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn deadpanned: “Piece of cake.”

Perhaps knowing that Murkowski will be a tough vote to get, Republican leaders offered the Alaska senator a sweetener: raising money by opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. But Murkowski declined to say whether that move — which McCain and other senators would likely oppose — would do the trick. “I’m not in a situation where I’m saying, ‘OK, if you don’t include this, I’m not going to be there’” on tax reform, she said.

Collins has been especially critical of the GOP’s reliance on the party-line “reconciliation” tool to jam through legislation, the same reason she cited in opposing Obamacare repeal proposals.

“I would very much like for us to try to produce a bipartisan tax bill,” she said.

Republican leaders are already privately fretting that her vote, as well as McCain’s and Paul’s, are going to be difficult to get. They are slightly more confident about Murkowski and hope to finish tax reform before Moore arrives.

But Corker is a real wild card. Though he’s open to the possibility that tax cuts would create enough growth to offset deficits, he suggested there are limits to that argument.

“I’m now nervous about where this goes,” Corker said. “I hope that in the end if it’s a big deficit creator, then our caucus will not support it.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/1...connell-243421

Susan Collins was on the health care working committee in the US Senate. She ended up voting against her own plan.

John McCain voted against the health care bill he never even read because he was sick, then decided to vote against another one because it was nice to Democrats because they all opposed it.

Bob Corker, well, I mean what is wrong with this man? He's fallen off his ladder and obviously hit his head, hard. He's going to vote against tax cuts because there's a short term deficit and he's worried about the future? The man doesn't even understand how you fix a business, let alone an entire economy. Without tax cuts to turn this economy around, there is no future.

Rand Paul in Kentucky ... who does he represent? You mean the people of Kentucky who elected him don't want a repeal and replace of Obamacare? You mean they don't want new jobs and higher wages that the tax cuts will generate??!!

Lisa Murkowski .... well, all I can say is she just makes you miss the hell out of Ted Stevens.

GOP tax cut: Small biz boon or loophole for rich and Trump?

• By MARCY GORDON, AP BUSINESS WRITER

WASHINGTON — Oct 4, 2017, 2:16 PM ET

The Associated Press

In this Oct. 2, 2017, photo, from second left, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Ivanka Trump, the daughter and assistant to President Donald Trump, and White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, walk on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. President Donald Trump and his Republican partners in a nearly $6 trillion tax-cutting plan insist it would benefit middle-class Americans and not the wealthy. But a key provision of the plan would slash tax rates for a special kind of business set up by owners of profitable firms, including Trump and his family. Instead of paying the current top rate of 39.6 percent, owners of these businesses would be taxed at 25 percent under the GOP plan. That would deliver a substantial windfall to Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who have reported holding stakes in more than 200 limited liability companies. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
President Donald Trump and his Republican partners in a nearly $6 trillion tax-cutting plan insist it would benefit middle-class Americans and not the wealthy. But a key provision would slash tax rates for a special kind of business set up by owners of profitable firms, including Trump and his family.

The GOP tax blueprint would cut rates for businesses whose profits are taxed at the owners' personal income rate, with proponents casting it as tax relief for small business. Known as "pass-through" companies because their profits are pipelined into the owner's personal tax bucket, those businesses span a huge range, from the local florist and family-owned restaurant to law firms, hedge funds and privately held large firms such as real estate companies — and Trump's own property empire.

Instead of paying the current top rate of 39.6 percent, owners of these businesses would be taxed at 25 percent under the GOP plan. That would deliver a substantial windfall to Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who have reported holding stakes in more than 200 limited liability companies, or LLCs.

One example is a cluster of LLCs involving the historic Puck Building in Manhattan, a property that Kushner's family bought when he was 5. Kushner, who helped add penthouses, made more than $5 million from the companies last year.

Trump himself owns about 500 entities structured as pass-throughs, according to his lawyers, making the Trump Organization less a single business than a grab-bag of units drawing on the fancier parts of the tax code: sole proprietorships and limited liability partnerships. Unknown at this point is how much Trump would gain, because he hasn't disclosed how much he pays in taxes.

With the release of the tax plan last week, Trump maintained that the rich won't capitalize and neither will he. "No, I don't benefit. I don't benefit. .... I think there's very little benefit for people of wealth," the president said.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, begged to differ. "There is in the Republican plan a brand new pass-through proposal that invites tax cheats to skip out on paying their fair share," he said in a Senate speech Wednesday.

But House Speaker Paul Ryan, one of the chief architects of the tax plan, said in an interview with radio station WISN in his home state of Wisconsin that 90 percent of businesses in the state are pass-throughs. "And these businesses in Wisconsin are competing in a global economy ... so we're taxing these businesses in our economy at double the rates" of other industrial countries, Ryan said.

Small business is a cherished touchstone of Republican politics, a pillar of small-town Main Street and the Rotary Club where everyone knows the local proprietor. And the new tax proposal, which deeply reduces levies for corporations and nearly doubles the standard deduction used by most Americans, pays homage. "Small businesses drive our economy and our communities, and they deserve a significant tax cut," the blueprint says.

Democratic lawmakers are raring to set out new restrictions and protections against abuse of the lower tax rate for pass-through companies. They want to write the protections into the tax legislation. Republicans could be looking to head off stricter protections by putting forward their own and getting them written into law. "We have spent an enormous amount of time on the anti-abuse language," Gary Cohn, Trump's chief economic adviser, told reporters at the White House last week. "The last thing we want to see is wealthy individuals or wealthy groups or families move their tax rate down ... to the 25 percent rate."

No specifics yet. But Cohn offered that, "guys like myself should not be allowed to put their assets into a partnership and reduce our tax liability by 10 percent."

Cohn, who rose at Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs to become its president before he came to the White House, is one of the administration's wealthiest members. He received at least $40 million in income last year from Goldman-related dividends, interest, salary and bonuses, about half of which came in the form of stock compensation, according to his financial disclosure filings.

Rep. Richard Neal, the top Democrat on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, promises to focus on preventing potential abuses of the special tax structure. Is he convinced by the White House effort? "I've yet to see evidence of it," Neal said in an interview. "They've said in a very general way, 'We can build these walls.' I want to see that."

But Rep. Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican who heads the House Small Business Committee, is unfazed. "We need to be mindful of (potential abuses) when we're putting this bill together," he said. "But for most small business folks, it will have a significant, positive impact."

Small businesses are divided about the Republican proposal.

"That's not a very targeted way to benefit most small businesses," said John Arensmeyer, CEO of Small Business Majority. The proposed rate cut wouldn't help most small companies, he said, because the top current rate of 39.6 percent is paid by less than 2 percent of them.

Still, other small business advocates — the National Federation of Independent Business and the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council — support the proposed rate reduction.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/gop-tax-cut-small-biz-boon-loophole-rich-50283291

Rich would benefit most from Trump tax cut plan: policy group

EconomySep 30, 2017 05:18AM ET
2

© Reuters. Trump delivers remarks on proposed changes to the tax code at an event in Indianapolis

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The wealthiest Americans would benefit the most from President Donald Trump's proposed tax cuts while many upper middle-income people would face higher taxes, independent experts said on Friday in the first detailed analysis of the plan.

A U.S. Senate panel took Trump's proposal, announced on Wednesday, a step forward by unveiling a budget plan for the coming fiscal year that acknowledges lost revenues from tax cuts, while Trump pressed ahead with selling the plan to the public.

A report from the non-profit Washington-based Tax Policy Center found that in 2018, about 12 percent of taxpayers would face a tax increase of roughly $1,800 on average.

That includes more than a third of taxpayers making between about $150,000 and $300,000, mainly because most itemized deductions would be repealed including for state and local taxes, it said.

Its analysis showed that the Republican tax proposal would fuel the growing federal deficit, providing $5.99 trillion in tax cuts while reducing federal revenues by a net $2.4 trillion in the next 10 years.

Trump, who promised major tax cuts as a candidate, has called his proposal "a miracle for the middle class," but the report concluded it would provide middle-income taxpayers uneven tax relief. In 2018, all income groups would see their average taxes fall, but some taxpayers in each group would face tax increases, it found.

Taxpayers in the top 1 percent of incomes - above $730,000 - would receive about 50 percent of the total tax benefit from the tax overhaul, with their after-tax income forecast to increase an average of 8.5 percent, the group said.

"The biggest share of people with increased taxes will be ... people who might be considered upper-middle-income people, high-income professionals, people whose income is between $150,000 and $300,000 in a year in 2017," Tax Policy Center co-director Eric Toder said.

The bottom 95 percent of taxpayers could expect a tax cut of 0.5 to 1.2 percent, according to the analysis.

The proposed tax cuts for corporations and small businesses would reduce federal revenue by $2.6 trillion over a decade and largely would benefit high-income taxpayers, it said.

Trump, a real estate mogul-turned-politician, had pledged that the tax plan would not benefit the rich, himself included.

BUDGET RESOLUTION

The budget resolution released by the Senate Budget Committee, which would pave the way for Republicans to avoid potential Democratic procedural moves to block it, builds in $1.5 trillion in reduced revenue from tax cuts over the next decade.

The White House and Republicans in Congress aim to have the tax proposal passed by the end of the year. Republicans control the White House, the Senate and both chambers of Congress.

The resolution is vital to plans by the Republicans to move tax legislation through the Senate, which they control by a slim 52-48 majority, using a parliamentary process that lets them pass legislation without a customary 60-vote threshold that would necessitate some Democratic support.

The proposal calls for slashing the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent, the small business rate to 25 percent from 39.6 percent and the top individual rate to 35 percent from 39.6 percent.

Democrats call the tax plan a giveaway to the rich and corporations that would balloon the federal deficit.

"The Senate Republican budget is the clearest sign yet that Republicans are intent on pursuing a tax plan that would blow a huge hole in the deficit and stack up debt, leading to cuts in programs that middle-class Americans rely on," Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.

Trump talked up the tax proposal during a speech on Friday to the National Association of Manufacturers business lobbying group in Washington, calling it "a giant, beautiful, massive -- the biggest ever in our country -- tax cut."
"The biggest winners will be everyday working families, as jobs start pouring into our country," Trump said.

The U.S. national debt stands at about $20 trillion and the proposal provided few details on how to offset the federal revenues that would be lost with the tax cuts. Trump has failed to secure passage of any major legislation since taking office in January, with a healthcare overhaul collapsing in the Senate, money to build his promised wall along the border with Mexico failing to materialize and infrastructure spending legislation never getting off the ground.

https://www.investing.com/news/econo...ax-plan-534733

Yes, when you cut corporate and business tax rates, everyone with a corporation or business will benefit. I have no problem with that at all, since that is the whole point of the tax cut. DemoQuacks hate it of course because they hate American businesses.