Opinion: The best parts of a dreadful tax bill

There aren’t many, but they do exist. View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Wednesday, December 20, 2017 [NYTimes.com/Opinion »]( [David Leonhardt] David Leonhardt Op-Ed Columnist The Republican tax bill will soon be law. But the fight over it is just beginning. Democrats will campaign against it and hope to repeal much of it. And no matter which party is in charge, Congress and the White House will have to revisit tax policy in coming years, because this bill is full of gimmicky expiration dates. It’s an unstable bill that’s “likely to prove fleeting,” as Fordham’s Rebecca Kysar and Linda Sugin [write in The Times]( today. So when Congress next takes up tax policy, are there any parts of the bill it should preserve? Yes. Even a bill as dreadful as this one has a few positive attributes. In particular, this bill contains the faint outlines of sensible tax simplification. They are very faint, to be clear. The status quo would be vastly preferable to this bill. But once this bill becomes the status quo, Democrats should avoid trying to repeal all of it merely for the sake of doing so. [As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox notes]( a lower corporate-tax rate makes sense. For years, this country’s corporate-tax code has been the worst of both worlds. The official rate has been higher than almost any other country’s, causing companies to distort their behavior to avoid paying that rate. Yet the government has raised relatively little money in corporate-tax revenue, because the code’s many loopholes allow companies to avoid the official rate. (I went into detail in [this 2011 column]( This bill solves only the first of those two problems and solves it too aggressively, cutting the rate to 21 percent, from 35 percent. As a result, it’s a huge handout to corporate America. “But,” Fox writes, “going back to 35 percent would be a bad idea.” The other part of the bill worth preserving is the move toward simplifying the tax code for individuals, as [Megan McArdle]( and [Tyler Cowen]( have written. The bill increases the standard deduction, which means fewer families will have to itemize, and it reduces the tax code’s needlessly generous subsidy for upper-middle-class home buying. Unfortunately, the bill’s bad parts — the shoddy process for passing it, which will create many loopholes; [the aggressive attempts to increase inequality]( the blatant ways it enriches members of Congress and the Trump family; and the bill’s fiscal profligacy — vastly outweigh its good parts. “This is a terrible, cynical way to make tax policy,” Fox concludes. “But future Congresses should extend some of the provisions anyway.” Critical feedback. At Splinter, Emma Roller argues I’ve been too kind to Senator Susan Collins and her vote for the tax bill. The piece is titled, “[Susan Collins Isn’t Being Duped Into Anything]( and Roller writes, “An alternate analysis is that Collins is not naive; that she knew all along that McConnell’s promises were worthless; and that she simply wanted a reason to justify (to constituents or to herself) voting for the tax bill.” Postscript. I cite three Bloomberg View columnists today, and that’s not coincidental. 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