House and Senate Republicans have reportedly reached in agreement in principle on a final version of their tax cut bill according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal has corroborated the Washington Post's report that the bill will include a new tax cut for the rich, but it will also eliminate another corporate tax.
The agreement would set the top individual tax rate at 37%, down from today’s 39.6%, a person familiar with the deal said. The corporate rate would be 21% and would take effect in 2018, the person said. That is higher than the 20% Republicans had agreed on.
The agreement is also expected to eliminate the corporate alternative minimum tax, the person said. That was a late addition to the Senate bill that many companies had opposed.
Their final moves were to add another tax cut for the rich and eliminate the minimum tax for corporations. There's nothing in there for middle and working class Americans.
Although they've reached an agreement on a final bill, we probably won't be able see the bill until the last minute because it hasn't actually been written yet. It would be reasonable to assume the final text will include even more goodies for the rich and corporations after lobbyists take a swing at it.
Following Doug Jones' victory in Alabama last night, congressional Republicans are going to move as quickly as they can to pass something before they lose a seat in the Senate. We should expect their bill will be riddled with errors and contradictions because it was drafted so hastily.
We should also expect to see a series of minor to major financial disasters in the near future because the final version of the GOP bill is said to take effect immediately in 2018, not in 2019 as the Senate GOP intended. States and major institutions will have virtually no time at all to reconcile and adjust to new codes that may not even make sense on paper.
I imagine we could even see litigation filed against various new policies that we don't even know about yet.