Steven Mnuchin said at an event Friday that he will push Congress to enact comprehensive tax reform by its August recess, though he acknowledged that the timetable might slip.
.. Reworking the health-care law as the House envisioned would have also cut roughly $1 trillion in revenue. That would have made it simpler for Republicans to pass a future overhaul of the tax code because they wouldn’t have needed to find additional revenue to offset new tax cuts.
.. Grover Norquist said the bloc of hard line Republicans who helped stymie the health-care overhaul were guilty of “ripping the lungs out of tax reform.”
.. “they didn’t shoot and wound health-care reform, they shot and killed permanent tax reform.”
.. widen the deficit by anywhere from $2.6 trillion to $7 trillion over 10 years
.. Many Republicans have long vowed that an overhaul of the tax code must be “revenue neutral,” which means they need to find new revenue to offset the reduction in rates.
.. Ryan has proposed a border-adjustment tax that would essentially create new taxes on items imported into the United States as a way to raise close to $1 trillion in new revenue
.. the Republican agenda is also undercut by “a president who’s out of his league and doesn’t know how to legislate.”
.. Newt Gingrich, who was a close adviser to Trump during the campaign, said the White House should postpone what is expected to be a messy battle over the tax code and instead pivot toward trying to build a large infrastructure package.
.. A principal reason changing the tax code is so difficult is because interest groups flood Washington looking for tax cuts but fight vigorously against any measure that would increase their bills.
.. there are very different views within the Republican Party.
.. holdouts can kill it. That empowers the holdouts.”
.. Congress must also reach an agreement to raise or suspend the debt ceiling by August or September
Republicans Keep Repeating the Same Tax Mistake
For budget wonks, the saga of the Kansas budget will be reminiscent of the Reagan years, when supply-side tax cuts resulted in big deficits. The administration had hoped that the tax cuts could be paid for by a combination of faster economic growth unleashed by lower marginal rates, and the infamous “magic asterisk” (in which unidentified spending cuts were promised, details to come later).
.. Reagan was forced to do another tax reform a few years later, hiding the fact that he was increasing taxes by cutting marginal rates but doing away with the generous exemptions that had dramatically lessened what people actually paid. Nonetheless, it took two more tax hikes — under Bush the First, and Clinton — to get the budget into some semblance of structural balance.
The answer is, I think, that a lot of Republicans have a view of how taxes affect labor markets that is simple, intuitive, and wrong.
.. Many of you will recognize that I am describing the famous Laffer curve. And the Laffer curve is absolutely right — for some effective tax rates. It has not, however, turned out to be correct for the tax rates actually prevailing in the United States during the later postwar era. Relatively modest decreases from modest tax levels do not increase economic growth enough to offset the losses from the lower tax rate, at least not in the short or medium term. In fact, they may not increase economic growth at all.
.. People who expected great things from tax cuts were essentially hoping that labor supply was very elastic
.. Yes, as your hourly wage rises, each additional hour of leisure is more costly in terms of other stuff you could buy. On the other hand, it’s also more enjoyable.
.. If you have a yacht and can afford to cruise around the world staying in fine resorts, each hour of leisure lost is more painful.
.. I haven’t even gotten into complex effects, like the fact that many high-income, high-status people like working.
.. most of what happens in the economy will end up being determined by other factors,
- such as regulation,
- technological change,
- demographics,
- and the individual decisions made by millions of people about what they want to do with their lives.
Affordable Care Act revision would reduce insured numbers by 24 million, CBO projects
But the GOP legislation, which has been speeding through House committees since it was introduced a week ago, would lower the deficit by $337 billion during that time, primarily by lessening spending on Medicaid and government aid for people buying health plans on their own.
The report predicted that premiums would be 15 percent to 20 percent higher in the first year compared with those under the Affordable Care Act but 10 percent lower on average after 2026. By and large, older Americans would pay “substantially” more and younger Americans less.
.. The 37-page report provides the most tangible evidence to date of the human and fiscal impact of the House GOP’s American Health Care Act. It also undermines President Trump’s pledge that no Americans would lose coverage under a Republican remake of the Affordable Care Act, which was enacted by a Democratic Congress in 2010.
.. Declaring that the plans would usher in “the most fundamental entitlement reform in a generation,” Ryan said the legislation “is about giving people more choices and better access to a plan they want and can afford. When people have more choices, costs go down. That’s what this report shows.”.. Despite that sales pitch, early signs emerged Monday night that the CBO report was not helping to solidify GOP support. Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) announced he would oppose the bill.“I do believe that we can enact meaningful health care reforms that put the patient and health care provider back at the center of our health care system, but this bill is not the right answer,” he said in a Facebook post.Wittman’s stance could represent a new front of dissent among House Republicans. A six-term member who leads a House Armed Services subcommittee and represents a district that favored Trump by 12 percentage points, Wittman is neither a hard-right firebrand nor a wary moderate from a Medicaid expansion state. Rather, he is the sort of mainstream conservative that Ryan is counting on to toe the party line and pass the bill.
.. The analysis predicts that the number of people without health coverage would rise to 52 million by 2026, compared with 28 million if the Affordable Care Act remains intact. That erosion would mean that about 1 in 5 U.S. residents would be uninsured by 2026 — compared to 1 in 10 uninsured now and 1 in 6 who were uninsured before the Affordable Care Act was enacted.
.. “These kinds of estimates are going to cause revisions in the bill, almost certainly,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).
.. the House GOP proposal would administer Medicaid by giving each state a fixed amount of funding per person in the program rather than covering a fixed percentage of its Medicaid costs, no matter how high.
.. While the deficit would be lower, the legislation also would reduce federal revenue by $592 billion by 2026 by repealing several taxes that the Affordable Care Act created to help pay for more people to get insurance — notably taxes on high-income Americans, hospitals and health insurers.
..“They are implementing the biggest transfer of wealth in our history,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters Monday. “In terms of insurance coverage, it’s immoral. In terms of giving money to the rich at the expense of working families, it is indecent and wrong.”.. Next year, the forecast says, about 5 million fewer people would be on Medicaid. By 2026, the program’s rolls would shrink by nearly 15 million — almost 1 in 4 of the 68 million currently in the program... If the GOP plan is enacted, a 21-year-old making $68,200 would pay an average of $1,450 for a year’s worth of insurance premiums after the new tax credits, compared with $5,100 under the current law... On the other hand, the cost of a year’s worth of premiums would stay about the same for a 64-year-old at the same income level. For a 64-year-old making $26,500, the cost would rise sharply, from $1,700 to $14,600.
The GOP’s dramatic change in strategy to pass its health-care law
The GOP’s dramatic change in strategy to pass its health-care law
To get the Affordable Care Act passed, Democrats used a big-tent approach, convening health-care groups that did not normally talk to one another while cutting deals and strong-arming key industry players to build broad support for the plan. First, the drug companies got on board. Then came the hospitals and the doctors.“It was a little thuggish. You’d be at the table or you’d be on the menu,”.. “I think they were largely left out. This was — from what I can tell and, I think, smartly — done behind closed doors,”
.. As GOP lawmakers move their bill through the House, plowing forward without each industry’s blessing may free them from special interests, allowing them to craft a policy that reflects the desires of their voters.
.. Republicans argue that, far from rushed, the broad outlines of the bill have been out in the open since last summer, when House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) introduced his “A Better Way” proposal.
.. “Our legislation gives the American people the freedom to make their own health care decisions.”
.. PhRMA.The industry trade group agreed to $80 billion in discounts on prescription drugs under Medicare and committed $150 million to an ad campaign to help get the bill passed.Among the concessions it won in return — efforts to control drug prices under the legislation were quashed.
.. The new bill gives the industry a big tax repeal, worth nearly $25 billion over a decade
.. A pharmaceutical industry official said that the industry is not going to be taking such a public or vocal approach this time, because the ACA insurance exchanges represent a tiny fraction of its business... hospitals may feel sidelined because their willingness to take cuts and support Obama’s law is still a sore spot for some Republicans... “Republicans generally feel there’s a lot of fat that can be cut from the hospital industry,” Condeluci said... Under the new bill, insurers would get a huge tax repeal worth $145 billion over a decade, more freedom to charge young people less and old people more for insurance, and a continuous-coverage rule