The Washington D.C. rumor mill is predicting an effort by the GOP to pass what has come to be known as Tax Cut 2.0. Republicans want to make permanent the individual tax cuts enshrined in last year’s tax reform, and to make additional tax cuts.
To get the cuts passed though, the GOP will need buy-in from at least 9 Democrats. Bloomberg reports:
Democrats have assailed the new law as a giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, and they’ve called for drastic changes.
“I’m ready to have a discussion with them. They want to fix some problems in the tax law? I want to fix some problems in the tax law,” said Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat. Murphy said one of his demands was reducing the deficit impact of the bill.
Making the individual cuts permanent is estimated to cost $1.5 trillion in the decade after 2025, according to a Tax Foundation analysis using numbers from the Joint Committee on Taxation. Republicans had to sunset the individual changes to conform to the budget they set under Senate rules.
Raising the issue now forces Democrats to take an uncomfortable stance against middle class tax relief. If the individual tax breaks expire at the end of 2025, the bottom 80 percent of Americans would pay higher taxes than they would if the law never passed, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
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