Senate Republicans Scramble to Find Revenue for Tax Bill With Vote Expected Friday

• The Senate will not vote on its tax bill tonight. It will convene at 10 a.m. Friday to continue the debate on taxes.

• Republicans are considering raising some taxes down the road to help offset the cost of their tax bill after the Senate parliamentarian rejected the idea of a trigger that would have automatically increased taxes if economic growth fell short of projections.

• Congress’s bipartisan tax referee said that economic growth induced by the tax cut would only offset $458 billion of its cost over the next decade. The analysis put the bill’s total price at $1 trillion, contradicting the Republican argument that the measure would essentially pay for itself.

• Earlier in the day, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who had been undecided about the bill, said he would vote yes, but Senator Susan Collins of Maine said she remained undecided.

• Though Republicans sound optimistic, party leaders still do not have firm commitments from enough senators to ensure the bill will pass.

The Senate is looking for hundreds of billions of dollars.

Senate Republicans are scrambling to figure out how to offset the deficit effects of the bill after the Senate parliamentarian rejected a trigger mechanism that would have automatically increased taxes if economic growth projections were not met. Several Republican senators, including Bob Corker of Tennessee, have expressed concerns about piling up debt as a result of the tax overhaul.

Continue reading the main story
One idea being discussed is reinstating the alternative minimum tax on some corporations and individuals. There is also discussion about increasing the corporate tax rate above the 20 percent after a period of years. This could involve slowly raising the rate after some time, though it is unclear when it would take place.

An analysis said the Senate bill would increase federal deficits by $1 trillion over a decade.

The Senate’s Official Scorekeeper Says The Republican Tax Plan Will Add $1 Trillion to the Deficit
There is no consensus among economists about the amount of growth that would occur under the plan, but key models predict it would not cover its cost.

The Joint Committee on Taxation said Wednesday afternoon that the Senate tax bill would add $1 trillion to federal budget deficits over the next decade, even after accounting for additional economic growth, a major blow to Republicans’ contention that the $1.4 trillion tax overhaul would pay for itself through growth.

The committee, which serves as the nonpartisan scorekeeper for growth and revenue estimates in tax bills, estimated that the Senate bill would boost economic growth by 0.8 percent over a decade. Republicans have said they expect substantially stronger growth than that to result from the tax cuts.

Throughout the tax debate over the last month, Republican leaders have frequently cited other analyses by the committee in order to make their case for the bill.

The committee said economic growth generated by the tax cut will offset losses by about $458 billion over the next decade. Over that same period, an additional $51 billion will be needed to pay interest on the additional debt the government will borrow to pay for the tax cuts.

“Overall, the budgetary effects of changes in economic growth are projected to reduce the deficit by $407 billion during the budget window,” the committee said.

Republican leaders threw cold water on the analysis.

A spokeswoman for Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican who leads the Finance Committee, said the joint committee’s analysis understates the actual economic growth and is not based on the current version of the bill.

“An analysis of tax provisions that do not reflect the final outcome of the evolving Senate tax bill — which will be amended on the floor this week — is incomplete,” said the spokeswoman, Julia Lawless. “The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (C.B.O.) has said it was ‘not practicable’ to issue a macro view of the Senate bill at this time. And given that leading economists have projected the Senate tax bill will deliver significantly higher amounts of economic growth and federal revenue than the Joint Committee on Taxation (J.C.T.) reports, the findings of J.C.T. are curious and deserve further scrutiny.”

Democrats wasted no time in seizing on the analysis.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said the analysis “ends the fantasy about magical growth and claims that tax cuts pay for themselves.”

“What it proves is that this bill offers very little other than a holiday bonanza to multinational corporations and special interests,” he said.

Source :- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/us/politics/tax-overhaul-senate-debate.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront