The end of a GOP tax reform bill shows the weakness of Republican reformers.
David Camp, the Republican chair of the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee, unveiled a sweeping tax reform bill a few weeks ago. The plan was fairly complicated, but basically would have paid for lower tax rates overall through closing a number of tax loop holes and deductions while also taxing some institutions like big Wall Street banks even more. Initially it was meet with approval from conservatives like Ross Douthat as well as liberals like Jonathan Chait.
Then, for a variety of reasons, the reform bill was promptly killed. Conservative writers like Douthat may have liked the bill, but by and large Republicans responded coolly. Furthermore, the finance industry went absolutely bonkers after learning that they were singled out for higher taxes. As Chait put it:
What set off Wall Street was a tax Camp levied on the largest banks. Their size made them “too big to fail,” thus lending them an unfair advantage, which Camp proposed, with shocking rationality, to recoup. The banks, predictably, do not see things this way. Wall Street unleashed a furious campaign to destroy and isolate Camp, canceling all fundraisers for the party until his fellow members agreed to denounce his heresy.
Thus ending the great tax reform push of 2014. And this seems begs the question, why normal policy making is so hard for today’s GOP?
Some of it probably has to do with the nature of tax reform itself. Simply put it’s really hard because as Jonathan Bernstein sums up:
Revenue-neutral tax reform—in which lower rates are exchanged for the elimination of special treatment of certain types of income and activities—produces lots of very small winners and a few big losers. That’s a recipe for failure because the design of the U.S. system tends to favor engaged minorities over indifferent majorities.
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I think that’s basically right but these sorts of failures at nuts and bolts policy making is nothing new for today’s Republican Party. We have been hearing for four years now about how the GOP is just about to offer a health care alternative to Obamacare, except it never quite arrives. We’ve also been hearing about anti-poverty policies that boil down to little more than conservative platitudes about “culture.” So it shouldn’t be very surprising that this tax reform bill was chucked under the bus a few weeks after it was rolled out.
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It would be so easy if we would just make the profession of “Lobbyist” a synonym of ‘Enemy Combatant’ and summarily ship them all to Gitmo to be water boarded for their crimes against humanity, or until they recant and begin to live a life according to the bare minimum of acceptable ethical behavior. The hordes of lobbyists are FAR and away more dangerous to the stability, and livelihoods of not only the American state, but of each individual American citizen. (This is a perfect time to plug the fact that in tandem with this move, we should revoke Citizens… Read more »