You Cannot Be Too Cynical About the Republican Tax Bill The speed from introduction to passage — seven weeks, with no substantive hearings — effectively precluded expert examination of the legislation’s regressive core, its special interest provisions and the long-term penalties it imposes on the working poor and middle class through the use of an alternative measure of inflation — the “chained CPI.” Only last Friday, when the legislation came out of conference committee and was no longer subject to amendment — and when decisive majorities of House and Senate Republicans had publicly committed to vote for the legislation — did experts and journalists begin to fully catch up with its defects. Two days before Congress gave final approval, a group of 13 tax law experts released the most incisive critique of the tax bill to date, a 30-page document called “The Games They Will Play: An Update on the Conference Committee Tax Bill.” The primary authors of the report — Ari Glogower, David Kamin, Rebecca Kysar, and Darien Shanske — describe the legislation as “a substantial blow to the basic integrity of the income tax” that will “advantage the well-advised in ways that are both deliberate and inadvertent.” The authors cite a wide range of specific flaws, but their main argument is that the measure is gravely deficient at its core: The most serious structural problems with the bill are unavoidable outcomes of Congress’s choice to preference certain taxpayers and activities while disfavoring others — and for no discernible policy rationale. What may prove even more significant is that the shift to chained CPI — a less generous, slower-growing measure of inflation than the one currently in use — would not only result in a tax increase over time, it would set a precedent for Republicans who would like to use the same method to pare back so-called entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
