Tag: Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017

The Story: Representative Peter T. King (R - NY), a veteran law-maker (in office for more than a quarter of a century) announced Monday that...

Share H.R. 1, the political regulation omnibus bill, contains “provisions that unconstitutionally infringe the freedoms of speech and association,” and which “will have the effect of harming our public discourse by silencing necessary voices that would otherwise speak out about the public issues of the day.” Don’t just take my word for it; that’s the view of the American Civil Liberties Union, expressed in this March 1 letter (more). For example, the bill would apply speech-chilling new restrictions to issue ads by cause organizations, should they happen to mention individual lawmakers. The House of Representatives nonetheless voted Friday along party lines to pass the bill, which was sponsored by Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD). For now, it has no prospect of passage in the Senate. The issues raised in the ACLU letter aside, H.R. 1 contains many other provisions that likely are unconstitutional, unwise, or both. Colleagues Ilya Shapiro and Nathan Harvey enumerate some of them (“If ever adopted, [HR1] would give power to one slice of Washington’s elite at the expense of American democracy’s carefully crafted checks and balances”). More criticism: Brad Smith on the bill’s restrictions on discussion and coordination of expenditures on speech; David A. French (“At its essence, the bill federalizes control over elections to an unprecedented scale, expands government power over political speech, mandates increased disclosures of private citizens’ personal information (down to name and address), places conditions on citizen contact with legislators that inhibits citizens’ freedom of expression, and then places enforcement of most of these measures in the hands of a revamped Federal Election Commission that is far more responsive to presidential influence.”) On gerrymandering, an issue on which the Constitution does grant Congress a power to prescribe standards which I’ve argued it should consider using more vigorously, the bill takes the heavy-handed approach of requiring all states to create a commission of a certain format. Whatever the comparative virtues of one format or another, that would likely run into the Supreme Court’s doctrine against federal “commandeering” of state government resources.

The largest expanse of pristine wilderness in the United States, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), is at risk of becoming a staging ground for heavy machinery, with oil drilling projects threatening to displace and damage wildlife and natural ecosystems. A rider slipped into Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 lifted a decades-long bi-partisan ban on oil and gas leasing in ANWR, marking one the most egregious examples of the Trump administration’s short-sighted focus on so-called “energy dominance” over rational policy. The new legislation directs the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to hold two lease sales, of not fewer than 400,000 acres each, within the Coastal Plain of the Refuge within 10 years. For decades, ANWR has been off limits to oil and gas development. In 1980, Congress expanded the area to almost 19 million acres and gave it permanent protection as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. At the time, Congress set aside a 1.5 million-acre expanse known as the Coastal Plain, prohibiting any oil and gas development there unless authorized by an act of Congress. It is designated as a critical habitat for polar bears, a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, which concentrate their dens within the Coastal Plain. Adding to the directive’s irrationality, the United States does not need this oil and gas. The results of the midterm election afford a chance for Congress to promote rational, responsible management of our public lands by rescinding the rider and restoring the refuge as protected wilderness. Jayni Hein is the policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, where she also teaches natural resources law and policy.

Obama complained in two recent speeches that he has not received adequate recognition for his contribution to the soaring economy, for which he claims credit. This is Obama’s fantasy land, because he has a total misunderstanding of basic economics. Obama reopened his assault on President Trump and congressional Republicans with a claim that tax cuts increase the deficit but that Republicans really don’t care about deficits and national debt. But as Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s chairman of the White House National Economic Council, reported on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last month, “Even the [latest] CBO numbers show now that the entire $1.5 trillion is virtually paid for by higher revenues and better nominal GDP.” Many people have trouble understanding the relationship between tax policy and the economy, and the economy’s effect on tax revenues resulting from differing tax policies. Today, the economy is booming in response to the 2017 tax reform, and the resulting effect on tax revenues is so strong that even state and local tax revenues are increasing. Similarly, when Reagan entered office in 1981, he led Congress to enact across-the-board tax cuts of 25 percent and, in the 1986 tax reform, replaced the entire federal income tax structure with just two rates — 28 percent and 15 percent. Even with those sweeping tax cuts, federal tax revenues during Reagan’s presidency actually doubled because of the booming growth resulting from such tax liberation. As former senior congressional staffer Mike Solon reported in Real Clear Politics on Aug. 5, CBO’s April 2018 Budget and Economic Outlook stated (page 94) that 10-year federal tax revenue estimates had risen by $1.008 trillion “for economic reasons.” Solon said, “This is the largest jump in revenues ‘for economic reasons’ ever reported by CBO and results from, in CBO’s words, their ‘current projections suggest[ing] a stronger economic outlook than those that the agency published in June 2017.’” In June 2017, just the anticipation of Trump’s tax cuts led to increased investment and growth, producing $195 billion in new revenues “for economic reasons.” With further revenues and increased growth by April 2018, the total resulting revenue increase was $1.238 trillion, offsetting 88 percent of the originally projected $1.456 trillion revenue loss, or virtually all of it. By Obama’s last year (2016), CBO’s 10-year projected revenue loss from his 2013 tax increase had ballooned to $3.1 trillion, almost five times his supposed tax increase, which only further increased the deficit. The Trump/Republican tax reform is not significantly increasing the deficit, but rather producing growth that is paying for the tax cuts, just as Reagan’s and Kennedy’s did.