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Idea Transcript
There’s a lot that’s wrong with the GOP’s tax overhaul, and much of it can be put down to the speed at which it has been flung together, speed that, given the breadth of the proposed changes and the complexity of the tax system, is quite astonishingly reckless. There is absolutely no need to declare ‘victory’ (it’ll be anything but) by Christmas. And, yes, while the complexity of the tax system is part of the problem that the GOP has set out to tackle (without, I suspect, much success), that does not mean that it can avoid the uncomfortable reality that simplifying the complex can itself be complex. The Gordian option is not always available. A week or so back, I quoted something written by the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip:
Now there’s this from Politico (my emphasis added):
Quite how that is taxpayer-friendly escapes me. And then there’s this (via Richard Rubin in The Wall Street Journal, again, my emphasis added)
Virtue-signaling (for the benefit of an audience that will not be won over) comes at a price. Meanwhile, while we should be pleased that the GOP withdrew its earlier plan to attack 401k plans, it appears that the Republican war on savers is not over. The Wall Street Journal:
After complaints, mutual funds and ETFs have been exempted from this particular twist of the Republican knife, but the GOP Senate majority’s message to individual investors is to drop dead or, rather, to pay up. It’s a move that punishes both the buy-and-hold and dollar cost averaging approaches preferred by many smaller investors and is made all the more iniquitous by legislators’ long-standing refusal to inflation-adjust capital gains that, in the real world, may be far less than they seem. At least House Republicans appear to see that there’s a problem:
And
Another vote-winner! When are the midterms again? And
Meanwhile, via Politico (yet again, my emphasis added):