Tax Stumbles and Regulatory Mumbles

Stumbling Forward:  Tax reform legislation continues to barrel along, leadership plans to sign off on the House-Senate conference report today in anticipation of a final vote next week with the hope of achieving Trump’s goal of passage before Christmas.  However, despite their plans, the bill has hit a few speed bumps.  Several of the concessions made during committee negotiations make the bill even more expensive, and even with the increase in the corporate tax rate from 20 to  21%, the price tag for the resulting bill far exceeds $1.5 trillion, the amount allowed by its authorizing resolution. Although the obvious solution to the math problem would be to ratchet the corporate rate up another point or two, the committee is instead looking to make up the difference by having the individual tax cuts expire a year or two earlier than initially planned, for the record the corporate tax cut never expires.  Working out the final details is just one of the problems.  Despite Trump’s bluster the tax plan may still be short a few votes.  Yesterday Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio threatened to withdraw his support unless the child tax credit is made more generous.  Utah’s Senator Mike Lee shares Rubio’s concern though he hasn’t said that he will hold up his vote.  As to “little Marco,” he has a history of folding at the last minute so it’s not clear whether he will really remain a hold out but with Trump’s star losing its luster, Rubio, a presidential aspirant, who is already on record saying that the bill is unfairly generous to corporations at the expense of individuals, may be feeling emboldened enough to hold firm.  By retaining the Senate’s elimination of the Obamacare individual insurance mandate the tax bill looks a lot like the “skinny repeal” that Maine’s Senator Susan Collins voted against earlier in the year. She still thinks that the promise that she extracted from Majority Leader McConnell for legislation with some offsetting Obamacare fixes is going to be kept, but if she wakes up to reality over the weekend her vote could shift into the no column. For its part, despite Trump’s efforts to kill it, Obamacare enrollment figures for 2017 are ahead of prediction, indicating that a lot of people won’t be all that happy with Republicans when they realize that their elusive tax cuts are being more than offset by increases in their health care premiums.  Then there are the “sick” senators, Arizona’s John McCain and Mississippi’s Thad Cochran.  Cochran is recovering from skin cancer surgery which wouldn’t seem like a big impediment except for the fact that he’s already very frail from other health issues.  McCain is still “recovering” from his latest round of chemo at Walter Reade. Unless he changes his mind, the increasingly independent minded Bob Corker remains a definite no.  Speaker Paul Ryan insists that he has the votes to get the bill through the House even without the help of many of his high tax state members who remain unsatisfied with the anemic solution to their concern about the elimination of the state and local tax deduction so once again the vote hold up could be a Senate problem. The vote concerns are real enough that Vice President Pence has delayed his plan trip to Israel in case he needs to cast the tie breaking vote.  This could be another nail biter with or without John McCain’s thumb.

Russia, Russia, Russia:  Yesterday the Washington Post published another one of their heavily sourced Trump damning stories.  This one details how the thin skinned Trump refuse to give any credence to intelligence reports about Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election.  Even though his advisors, including Jared Kushner and Reince Priebus,  pushed him to accept the reports that were presented to him as early as January by the heads of the intelligence agencies, he refuses to acknowledge the results because he viewed any acceptance that the Russian’s had interfered as an attack on his election victory.  To this date, he grows increasingly agitated when shown any intelligence reports that suggest any Russian interference so much so that security advisors adjust his “presidential daily briefing” reports, burying information about Russian meddling, so as not to inspire his ire. He’s tried to undo sanctions against Russia, was infuriated far more than was publicly disclosed when Congress passed legislation increasing those sanctions, and has never held a Cabinet level meeting to develop a plan to prevent future Russian election attacks.  Yesterday, during his traditional and rather lengthy end of year presentation to the press Russian President Vladimir Putin defended BFF Trump praising his accomplishments while attacking the Washington media for their unfounded “spy mania.”  Trump must have been very appreciative, later in the day he called Vladimir for an unscheduled bro-chat. As to Vladimir and his Russian cut outs, they started offering their services to Trump’s team earlier than was previously reported.  About a month after Trump announced that he was running for president, Rob Goldstone, the British music promoter who later helped set up the meeting between Don Jr and Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya,  told the Trumpsters that his pop-star client, the son of Trump’s Russian real estate oligarch associate, would be happy to arrange a meeting with Putin. You’ve got to give it to Putin, talk about planning ahead, at a time that no one thought that Trump stood a chance of becoming president, he was already laying the groundwork for his devious plans.

The Internet:  As expected net neutrality is dead, or at the very least on life support.  Yesterday, led by Trump appointee Ajit Pai, a former Verizon executive, the FCC voted to dismantle net neutrality rules, a move that favors broadband providers like the phone and cable companies over content providers like Facebook and Netflix and individual consumers.  Several Democratic legislators are calling for a bill to replace the rules and the Attorneys General of New York and Washington plan to file suit to stop the change.  They will probably be joined by several consumer groups and the Internet Association, the group that represents companies like Google and Facebook. In his continuing effort to deregulate everything, Trump held one of his heavily staged news conferences yesterday.  He had his staff bring every stack of paper they could find in Washington, Maryland and Virginia to the White House.  Then with the stacks of paper standing by his side, Trump bragged about all of the government harming regulations that he had eliminated to date, failing to mention that most of them were out of date rules that were due to expire anyway.  He finished his speech by cutting the “big red ribbon” that had been tied around all of the papers.  A staged reality moment from the Reality Star in Chief.  While he was performing, the other reality star Omarosa Manigault was promising to provide the inside scoop on the goings on at the White House, but only after she receives a big fat book advance.  As to her departure, when asked about diversity at the White House, Sarah Huckabee Sanders assured the press corps that the White House staff was diverse.  With Manigault’s departure, the number of African American members of the White House staff slips to zero, leaving HUD Secretary Ben Carson as the only remaining senior African American member of Trump’s team.  Expect to see Carson in each and every one of Trump’s photo-ops going forward.