The Republicans, after holding one sham “public hearing” on their conference bill (without any text released) have on late Friday released the text of their (Republicans only) agreed-upon final bill that will be put to a House and Senate vote as early as Tuesday, December 19, even though there is no score from the Congressional Budget Office or analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Here’s the link to the 1097 pages of the tax bill:
http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20171218/CRPT-115HRPT-466.pdf
Here’s the link to the 570 pages of the Joint Conference explanation:
http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20171218/Joint%20Explanatory%20Statement.pdf
(Hat tip to Ellen Aprill for sharing the links with tax professors as soon as they became available.)
As a Vox article announcing the release notes, “the bill is a far cry from the simplified tax code that Republicans have long been promising, but it is a substantial reshaping of the nation’s tax base.” Tara Golshan, Full Text: Republicans unveil their final tax bill (Dec. 15, 2017 6:05 pm EST).
Partly as usual it depends on which numbers you look at if you take the rate brackes and look at taxable income it works for a 50 k taxable income that the taxes due are down 17% from 6820 (old)to 5619(New) (before any credits applied(married filing jointly) Or if you take a 54 k agi including the 24 k standard deduction, it works out to taxes before credits from old 3820 to 3219. So the prototypical family with2 kids under 17 including the 2000 tax credit and the 1400 refundable part will pay a net negative tax of 781 I.e. get 781 back more than they paid in withholding.
I build a spreadsheet with the old and new brackets and limits and calculated the numbers for taxable incomes from 10k to 150 k and on the married filing jointly the decrease in tax calculated (before credits) decreases between 15 and 31% on the married filing jointly side and about 1/2 that on the single schedule since it is now 1/2 the mfj scale like it was in the old days.
And 8 years later it begins to disappear. Up until that point when the tax breaks begin to disappear, there is still the issue of one hell of a deficit created to fund the tax breaks. Eight years out and the 1% will be riding on the backs of the middle and lower incomes as they keep their tax breaks and the middle and lower incomes begin to pay for it..
The reality of this tax break is to return to the 1% of the taxpayers making greater than $500,000 annually the Bush tax breaks which were sun set due to no corresponding revenue as promised by Bush II. Obama increased those taxes on the 1% and then moved forward with investment taxes to fund ACA subsidies (which also went to younger adults), Medicaid, and Medicare.
The tax cuts for those making <$75,000 look great on the surface until you see the deficit, what happens 8 years out, and what plans Ryan has to cut a fully self funded SS, partially self funded Medicare, and Medicaid. Also, Simplicity in tax code certainly was not increasing the numbers of tax brackets. It is a shell game to confuse the voters and toss a few tidbits to the bulk of the nation's constituency, the plebeians while ~66% of the tax break is skewed to the 1 percenters and corporations neither of whom need or deserve such. A quote from Vox:
“Overall, 47.5 percent of taxpayers see their taxes go up, with an average hike of $150; but 31.3 percent see their taxes go down, by $1,500 on average.
These percentages vary widely between income groups. Within the middle quintile, people earning $54,700 to $93,200 a year, 62.2 percent would see their taxes go up. But only about 0.1 percent of the very richest one-thousandth of Americans would see a tax hike.”
Hat Tip to Linda Beale for including Vox in her post.
Note the same thing happend to the 2003 Bush tax cuts that led to the financial cliff period after the 2012 election. Most were kept except that the top rate went up. And of course given the discussion of North Korea perhaps no one will care what tax rates will be in 2026 as society will be reduced to a much smaller version of itself after the Nuclear exchange.