GOP/TAXES/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “There is a math problem at the root of the Republican delay in introducing a sprawling tax bill, and it grows, in part, from President Trump’s two non-negotiables on taxes.
Mr. Trump has insisted on ‘massive’ tax cuts, including reducing the top corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent and delivering a tax cut for the middle class. Both those goals have proven difficult for the Republicans crafting the House version of the tax bill, who are trying to offset revenues lost from those cuts, and finding political challenges at every turn.
The president, for example, has resisted a push to reduce the cost of the corporate rate cut — which is estimated to reduce revenues by $2 trillion over a decade — by phasing it in over time. Rank-and-file Republicans in the House have pushed back against efforts to raise revenues by changing the tax treatment of retirement savings and limiting deductions for state and local taxes paid…
And on Wednesday morning, business lobbyists began raising concerns that the bill now taking shape was seeking to offset individual tax cuts by increasing its taxation of multinational companies, possibly through a larger-than-expected tax on income earned outside the United States. A plan to nearly double the standard deduction for individuals and families, for example, is expected to cost $800 billion over a decade.”
-Jim Tankersley, Thomas Kaplan, and Alan Rappeport, “Math Problem Bedevils Republican Tax Rewrite,” The New York Times online, Nov. 1, 2017