20 ms·

There's a lot of attacking in this thread from people who haven't bothered to think about the math. It's an existential risk to some companies, and one that was

There's a lot of attacking in this thread from people who haven't bothered to think about the math. It's an existential risk to some companies, and one that wasn't more widely planned for because it wasn't even believed to be intended to actually occur. Most tax experts considered the removal a budget gimmick so that the 2017 December republican majority could quickly pass a new budget using the budget reconciliation process, which can't be used to increase the deficit after a 10-year period so they had to add a time limit to a bunch of benefits "on paper" to use the reconciliation process. There appeared to be broad support for fixing it later, but the bipartisan spending bill expected to include it fell apart because they couldn't get agreement on other parts of it. To the best I can tell this isn't tech companies complaining about paying fair tax; it's a congressional oversight that is quadrupling the taxes of small business out of nowhere which nobody in power has bothered to fix.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
missingcolours 4y ago
I understand the arguments for it, and maybe even on net it’s beneficial because it prevents other bad things from happening, but the amount of byzantine dysfunction that’s downstream of the United States Senate Filibuster rule is really something to behold.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  To the extent that the filibuster's beneficial, I'd say it's only so because of our bad electoral system that stabilizes at only two viable parties, and sometimes results in minority rule.
  - ChrisLTD 4y ago
    The filibuster guarantees minority rule, in the Senate.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Yes, but it also means that the minority is less effective when it gains an electoral majority and takes 'hold of the gavel. That makes it harder for them to, say, change things to further entrench minority rule—which is real problem in several state-level governments.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        This sounds like a positive because it makes sure the support backing actually enacted policies is not balanced on a knife edge.
        yamtaddle 4y ago
        This might be true, if the policies advanced by legislators more-closely reflected what voters want. Instead, we have a bunch of very-popular reforms that never get done for a variety of reasons, but the one-two punch of the two-party system and the Senate filibuster are a big part of why. Though, personally, I'd say our system naturally stabilizing at two parties is the bigger of those two problems—it's the core reason why major legislative bodies in the US can end up maintaining or advancing laws and policy that differ sharply from what a large majority of voters want, session after session. Unfortunately, fixing that would require a bunch of legislators or a bunch of states to vote against their own interests. So, probably not gonna happen, ever.
    - filibustedbyD 4y ago
      This is why the civil rights act was never passed, and schools in the US are still segregated to this day, because Sen Byrd (D) filibustered
    - fwungy 4y ago
      The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government. Given how difficult it is to predict policy outcomes this is probably a good idea. Even if a collection of policies are good on the individual level there is no way to figure out if the interaction will be net positive, nor if the cost of remedy reverses the calculus.
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    I dunno, it still might be pretty tricky to put together 60 votes for cloture in a 3 or 4 party system. It might even be harder! Fractious multi-party coalitions in parliamentary systems commonly fail to scrape together bare majorities- they're not exactly known for making it easy to produce supermajorities either.
    - vertis 4y ago
      Various European democracies seem to have done fine, even if it is at times the coalitions become unstable. Australia, even with a 2 party preferred, still often has smaller parties hold the balance of power. Often this is quite beneficial since the big party has to water down their ambitions.
      - tempestn 4y ago
        It's the case in Canada right now too.
        tlavoie 4y ago
        I sure would have liked to see the Liberal party follow through on their promise to engage in electoral reform though. It seemed to have completely slipped their minds once they found a majority. Perhaps related, but I find minority governments to be the most aligned to how I think things should work. It's not that they can't get anything done, but rather they have to actually engage with the other parties to find common ground. Crazy idea, I know...
        tempestn 4y ago
        Agreed on both counts, with the added note though that minority government only works in multi-party systems. US-style split government is far less functional. My understanding of what happened with the electoral reform promise is that the Liberals wanted a specific form of electoral reform: ranked choice. Unsurprising, because as the centrist party, they would stand to benefit most from that system. Which isn't to say I necessarily disagree with it; personally I think a system that encourages moderation is probably a good thing. Anyway, when the committee they put together to study the issue didn't come back with that option, they just shelved the whole thing.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    The filibuster rule is from a time when the Senate was selected by the States, not the people. It was designed as an effective State Veto. It works for that purpose and in that context and IMO is good. We should return the Senate to be the States representatives in congress, and the House is the People. Instead of having both the Senate and the House be popularly elected. Return to more republican (i.e Republic not the party) style of governance, and less democratic, but I know that is heresy today where democracy is the new religion and people fail to learn the lesson of Athens
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      "Republic" and "democracy" are not antonyms. This was a bit of linguistic prescriptivism put in by the John Birch Society that I feel the need to correct. "Republic" just means that the head of state is elected and "democracy" just means that there's voting. Whether they're voting on individual bills or voting for representatives, it's still democracy. Hell, people in the UK refer to themselves as "republicans" because they want to get rid of the monarchy, not because they oppose direct democracy. The problem with state-appointed Senators is that it was warping gubernatorial politics. If you didn't like your Senator, you had to have the state governor replace him, and in practice most people were treating their vote for state governor as a senatorial vote anyway. Direct election of Senators just cut out the middleman. Furthermore, we should be very careful with veto powers in a democratic system. Have you ever heard about a study which claims that the US is run by rich people? Well, the thing is, it's true, but not entirely. All classes are still capable of advancing an agenda. Louis Rossman can sit on a chair and yell into the microphone about right-to-repair[0] and get a bunch of state bills proposed. But rich people uniquely have veto power. They can, say, have a 'robust conversation' with a Senator or Representative to kill an R2R bill, or have New York State's governor change the R2R bill at the last minute to completely remove the legislative intent. Filibusters are another veto mechanism; they raise the vote threshold from 50 to 60. Furthermore with the procedural filibuster they are significantly easier to use, so they get used all the time. You know how Brexiteers were really mad about how the EU has a lot of unelected political appointees making law? They're not wrong about that. You see, whenever a political party in Germany, France, or the UK (pre-Brexit) wanted to push an unpopular policy, they'd make it into an EU-wide regulation and then blame the EU for it, because they think voters are stupid[1]. They were able to do this specifically because the EU works exactly like how the US Senate used to, with member state representatives not elected by the people and thus not accountable to them. And the only democratic accountability provided to stop this is to replace your member state's government with one that'll replace the appointee in the European Commission, which is now two levels of indirection. Personally I'd rather live in the world with a straightforward democratic system with as little indirection as possible and few veto powers. Yes, you can point to rising populism as a counterargument, but the problem is that populism is rising because nobody's voice is getting heard. The more that the rich use their veto powers instead of relenting to the will of the majority, the more that the majority will turn to non-democratic means of power, and then we'll wind up in a dictatorship with exactly the kinds of people you don't want running things in office. [0] Right to repair is a political campaign to undo several harmful effects of copyright and trade secrets law by explicitly requiring manufacturers to sell replacement parts and provide unlock codes to pair them onto equipment. It does not actually obligate them to repair the device, in fact that's counterproductive to the actual point, which is to restore ownership of your device (or car, or tractor) back to you. [1] They're not.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  What other bad things does this prevent from happening? I can't think of anything, unless you think double-taxing income is good.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Income gets double-taxed and triple-taxed and more all the time. Sometimes even by the some government body.
- bradleyjg 4y ago
  The filibuster continues to exist each new day because a simple majority of senators continue to want it to exist. Don’t let that majority off the hook for anything by pointing to a rule they could remove at will.
  - brightball 4y ago
    IMO doing anything at the federal level should require a supermajority anyway. The country shouldn’t swing back and forth due to a simple majority. If a supermajority can’t agree, leave it to states. We would all be a lot better off.
    - bradleyjg 4y ago
      There’s already a de facto supermajority requirement in that you need the senate, which represents states, and the house, which represents people. Also, it turns out that when the legislature doesn’t act, because it was deliberately hobbled by its designers, you end up with an ultra powerful executive rather than things being left to the states. It would be better if more Americans recognized the flaws in the design of our system of government instead of quasi-worshipping the Founding Fathers and insisting that any problems are because we are unworthy of their great design.
      - brightball 4y ago
        That’s a valid point. IMO the executive should have been more limited.
      - bink 4y ago
        > hobbled by its designers Minor quibble, but the filibuster is nowhere in the Constitution. And it was most recently modified in 1975.
        bradleyjg 4y ago
        The legislature was split in two because it was considered the most dangerous branch. Or at least that’s one of the explanations they gave when arguing for its ratification.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  It may have been beneficial on net at some point in the past, but it's just bad at this point.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  The filibuster is fine, in its original form. Manipulate the parliamentary process to push the date close to the end of session, then have some windbag with sufficient endurance read the phone book for a few days. The current version, where you declare yourself filibustered, is too cheap. In the old days, they just filibustered stuff like voting rights, not procedures for borrowing money to support the adopted budget.
  - graeme 4y ago
    How does that happen anyway. Why does the party with the majority allow a filibuster to happen without an actual speech?
    - roywiggins 4y ago
      The modern ("two-track") system was designed to be less disruptive to the Senate overall because it allows votes to happen on other, non-controversial bills while the filibuster is ongoing.
      - graeme 4y ago
        Thanks. Seems it was put in place in the 1970s after the filibuster of a civil rights bill. Still think they should make someone talk somewhere to keep the filibuster going. Cure seems worse than disease. Doubt they expected routine filibusters
  - ticviking 4y ago
    A proper endurance filibuster is fine, the current version is just pretending
  - duped 4y ago
    I think both are undemocratic, and doubly so since it's in the vestigial organ of our former slave-driven agrarian economy. There's no good reason to have the senate, let alone the filibuster and effective super majority required for legislation.
AdamH12113 4y ago
Thank you for providing the actual political context. It is much more helpful to know who did this and why then to complain about an amorphous and unchanging "Congress".
- YeBanKo 4y ago
  I read the message you are replying to three times and I still don’t understand who did this and why? Can elaborate more?
  - Clent 4y ago
    It's the House of Representatives. That body is the origin of all taxing. The leader of the House is Kevin McCarthy. It's is ultimately on him to lead the House (or get out of other's way) in passing a tax bill. The reconciliation process allows this to occur with less bipartisan support. The interesting part of this appears to be that the Republicans removed this from the tax code but were expected to add it back in a new form. This did not occur in time for tax bills to be due.
  - ec109685 4y ago
    To get the tax cut law through congress without requiring support from democrats, they had to raise revenue somehow, so they cancelled this provision, with the idea they would add it back later.
  - AdamH12113 4y ago
    Sure. Here's the key sentence: > Most tax experts considered the removal a budget gimmick so that the 2017 December republican majority could quickly pass a new budget using the budget reconciliation process, which can't be used to increase the deficit after a 10-year period so they had to add a time limit to a bunch of benefits "on paper" to use the reconciliation process. In 2017, the Republican majorities in Congress passed a budget that would have increased the federal debt significantly over a ten-year period (i.e., it was a long-term deficit increase). Such an increase is not allowed under the rules of the Senate's budget reconciliation process, so they added sunset provisions that would have brought the deficit back down by making some of the deficit-increasing provisions (in this case, mostly tax cuts) expire early. The next sentence clarifies: > There appeared to be broad support for fixing it later, but the bipartisan spending bill expected to include it fell apart because they couldn't get agreement on other parts of it. These changes were made "on paper" to meet the reconciliation rules in time to pass a budget and avoid a government shutdown, but they were not intended to be permanent -- they were just a quick hack to work around procedural limitations. The intent was to fix this later, but the fixes were never implemented due to disagreement about how to handle other parts of the bill. The advantage of this kind of description is that it gives you a piece of a larger story and leads to some obvious follow-up questions. Why did it take until the last minute for Republicans to pass a budget when they had full control of Congress and the White House? Why couldn't they pass a budget that didn't increase the deficit? Why does the Senate have such weird procedural issues and why haven't they been fixed? You can find some of the answers by looking into the bill itself[1]. But even if you don't you can pick up other pieces later by hearing other bits of news. The factions and political processes that produce bad legislation can be understood, and with that understanding the power to alter them, even if only by voting. The other kind of description, which I see far too often, treats bad legislation the same way we treat bad weather. It can be predicted a few days in advance, but we have no control over it. It's just something that happens, and all we can do is let it wash over us. The clouds bring the rain and Congress brings bad legislation; thus has it ever been. It's an ahistorical form of learned helplessness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017
taxopinion 4y ago
[flagged]
- pc86 4y ago
  What does any of this have to do with libertarians?
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Nothing. It's an oddball comment, for sure! As a minarchist (form of libertarian), I would love to see the state operate more efficiently. That would achieve a part of my own personal political beliefs. I recognize the need for a state and the role society must have in shaping it for it to be a stable, functioning state. Surprise rules dramatically increasing taxation due to political judo performed six years prior is horrible.
fredgrott 4y ago
It gets worse, we do not reach true majorities in the House and Senate until 2030. Thus until then budgets get passed under budget reconciliation.
Workaccount2 4y ago
[flagged]
rodgerd 4y ago
The thing that is most striking to me about your explanation is that the change was made six years ago; it seems that anyone responsible for a company's tax position and cashflow (CFO, accountant, etc) should have been planning for this between then and now. Much like the SVB panic, a great deal of this seems to be people running companies without either paying attention to things that could have a significant impact, or hiring someone who does.
- citizenkeen 4y ago
  When I took tax law, one of the things that blew my mind is that it can be retroactive. An exemption might expire, but then be retroactively reinstated. This happens all the time. There is the tax law that applies to your 2022 income now, and then there's the tax law that will apply to your 2022 taxes in five years.
- mjwhansen 4y ago
  They have been. Large companies have been engaging with Congress since 2019 on this, reminding them that they intended to revert this before it took effect. CFOs wrote a letter to Congress in November. https://investinamericasfuture.org/Communications/letters/ https://investinamericasfuture.org/Communications/letters/
  - newswasboring 4y ago
    Maybe they put too much trust in the US congress' functioning
Spooky23 4y ago
I don’t know why you’d think it was an oversight. After all, they pushed SALT, which raised the taxes of any homeowner living in a high cost of living state, and further transfers wealth to flyover country and the south.
newswasboring 4y ago
This whole thing sounds so shady to me, can't believe this is how they are running a country.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

missingcolours 4y ago

I understand the arguments for it, and maybe even on net it’s beneficial because it prevents other bad things from happening, but the amount of byzantine dysfunction that’s downstream of the United States Senate Filibuster rule is really something to behold.

yamtaddle 4y ago
To the extent that the filibuster's beneficial, I'd say it's only so because of our bad electoral system that stabilizes at only two viable parties, and sometimes results in minority rule.
- ChrisLTD 4y ago
  The filibuster guarantees minority rule, in the Senate.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Yes, but it also means that the minority is less effective when it gains an electoral majority and takes 'hold of the gavel. That makes it harder for them to, say, change things to further entrench minority rule—which is real problem in several state-level governments.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      This sounds like a positive because it makes sure the support backing actually enacted policies is not balanced on a knife edge.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        This might be true, if the policies advanced by legislators more-closely reflected what voters want. Instead, we have a bunch of very-popular reforms that never get done for a variety of reasons, but the one-two punch of the two-party system and the Senate filibuster are a big part of why. Though, personally, I'd say our system naturally stabilizing at two parties is the bigger of those two problems—it's the core reason why major legislative bodies in the US can end up maintaining or advancing laws and policy that differ sharply from what a large majority of voters want, session after session. Unfortunately, fixing that would require a bunch of legislators or a bunch of states to vote against their own interests. So, probably not gonna happen, ever.
  - filibustedbyD 4y ago
    This is why the civil rights act was never passed, and schools in the US are still segregated to this day, because Sen Byrd (D) filibustered
  - fwungy 4y ago
    The founders designed a system that was slow to act on purpose. They did not want a strong federal government. Given how difficult it is to predict policy outcomes this is probably a good idea. Even if a collection of policies are good on the individual level there is no way to figure out if the interaction will be net positive, nor if the cost of remedy reverses the calculus.
- roywiggins 4y ago
  I dunno, it still might be pretty tricky to put together 60 votes for cloture in a 3 or 4 party system. It might even be harder! Fractious multi-party coalitions in parliamentary systems commonly fail to scrape together bare majorities- they're not exactly known for making it easy to produce supermajorities either.
  - vertis 4y ago
    Various European democracies seem to have done fine, even if it is at times the coalitions become unstable. Australia, even with a 2 party preferred, still often has smaller parties hold the balance of power. Often this is quite beneficial since the big party has to water down their ambitions.
    - tempestn 4y ago
      It's the case in Canada right now too.
      - tlavoie 4y ago
        I sure would have liked to see the Liberal party follow through on their promise to engage in electoral reform though. It seemed to have completely slipped their minds once they found a majority. Perhaps related, but I find minority governments to be the most aligned to how I think things should work. It's not that they can't get anything done, but rather they have to actually engage with the other parties to find common ground. Crazy idea, I know...
        tempestn 4y ago
        Agreed on both counts, with the added note though that minority government only works in multi-party systems. US-style split government is far less functional. My understanding of what happened with the electoral reform promise is that the Liberals wanted a specific form of electoral reform: ranked choice. Unsurprising, because as the centrist party, they would stand to benefit most from that system. Which isn't to say I necessarily disagree with it; personally I think a system that encourages moderation is probably a good thing. Anyway, when the committee they put together to study the issue didn't come back with that option, they just shelved the whole thing.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  The filibuster rule is from a time when the Senate was selected by the States, not the people. It was designed as an effective State Veto. It works for that purpose and in that context and IMO is good. We should return the Senate to be the States representatives in congress, and the House is the People. Instead of having both the Senate and the House be popularly elected. Return to more republican (i.e Republic not the party) style of governance, and less democratic, but I know that is heresy today where democracy is the new religion and people fail to learn the lesson of Athens
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    "Republic" and "democracy" are not antonyms. This was a bit of linguistic prescriptivism put in by the John Birch Society that I feel the need to correct. "Republic" just means that the head of state is elected and "democracy" just means that there's voting. Whether they're voting on individual bills or voting for representatives, it's still democracy. Hell, people in the UK refer to themselves as "republicans" because they want to get rid of the monarchy, not because they oppose direct democracy. The problem with state-appointed Senators is that it was warping gubernatorial politics. If you didn't like your Senator, you had to have the state governor replace him, and in practice most people were treating their vote for state governor as a senatorial vote anyway. Direct election of Senators just cut out the middleman. Furthermore, we should be very careful with veto powers in a democratic system. Have you ever heard about a study which claims that the US is run by rich people? Well, the thing is, it's true, but not entirely. All classes are still capable of advancing an agenda. Louis Rossman can sit on a chair and yell into the microphone about right-to-repair[0] and get a bunch of state bills proposed. But rich people uniquely have veto power. They can, say, have a 'robust conversation' with a Senator or Representative to kill an R2R bill, or have New York State's governor change the R2R bill at the last minute to completely remove the legislative intent. Filibusters are another veto mechanism; they raise the vote threshold from 50 to 60. Furthermore with the procedural filibuster they are significantly easier to use, so they get used all the time. You know how Brexiteers were really mad about how the EU has a lot of unelected political appointees making law? They're not wrong about that. You see, whenever a political party in Germany, France, or the UK (pre-Brexit) wanted to push an unpopular policy, they'd make it into an EU-wide regulation and then blame the EU for it, because they think voters are stupid[1]. They were able to do this specifically because the EU works exactly like how the US Senate used to, with member state representatives not elected by the people and thus not accountable to them. And the only democratic accountability provided to stop this is to replace your member state's government with one that'll replace the appointee in the European Commission, which is now two levels of indirection. Personally I'd rather live in the world with a straightforward democratic system with as little indirection as possible and few veto powers. Yes, you can point to rising populism as a counterargument, but the problem is that populism is rising because nobody's voice is getting heard. The more that the rich use their veto powers instead of relenting to the will of the majority, the more that the majority will turn to non-democratic means of power, and then we'll wind up in a dictatorship with exactly the kinds of people you don't want running things in office. [0] Right to repair is a political campaign to undo several harmful effects of copyright and trade secrets law by explicitly requiring manufacturers to sell replacement parts and provide unlock codes to pair them onto equipment. It does not actually obligate them to repair the device, in fact that's counterproductive to the actual point, which is to restore ownership of your device (or car, or tractor) back to you. [1] They're not.
dahfizz 4y ago
What other bad things does this prevent from happening? I can't think of anything, unless you think double-taxing income is good.
- brewdad 4y ago
  Income gets double-taxed and triple-taxed and more all the time. Sometimes even by the some government body.
bradleyjg 4y ago
The filibuster continues to exist each new day because a simple majority of senators continue to want it to exist. Don’t let that majority off the hook for anything by pointing to a rule they could remove at will.
- brightball 4y ago
  IMO doing anything at the federal level should require a supermajority anyway. The country shouldn’t swing back and forth due to a simple majority. If a supermajority can’t agree, leave it to states. We would all be a lot better off.
  - bradleyjg 4y ago
    There’s already a de facto supermajority requirement in that you need the senate, which represents states, and the house, which represents people. Also, it turns out that when the legislature doesn’t act, because it was deliberately hobbled by its designers, you end up with an ultra powerful executive rather than things being left to the states. It would be better if more Americans recognized the flaws in the design of our system of government instead of quasi-worshipping the Founding Fathers and insisting that any problems are because we are unworthy of their great design.
    - brightball 4y ago
      That’s a valid point. IMO the executive should have been more limited.
    - bink 4y ago
      > hobbled by its designers Minor quibble, but the filibuster is nowhere in the Constitution. And it was most recently modified in 1975.
      - bradleyjg 4y ago
        The legislature was split in two because it was considered the most dangerous branch. Or at least that’s one of the explanations they gave when arguing for its ratification.
sanderjd 4y ago
It may have been beneficial on net at some point in the past, but it's just bad at this point.
Spooky23 4y ago
The filibuster is fine, in its original form. Manipulate the parliamentary process to push the date close to the end of session, then have some windbag with sufficient endurance read the phone book for a few days. The current version, where you declare yourself filibustered, is too cheap. In the old days, they just filibustered stuff like voting rights, not procedures for borrowing money to support the adopted budget.
- graeme 4y ago
  How does that happen anyway. Why does the party with the majority allow a filibuster to happen without an actual speech?
  - roywiggins 4y ago
    The modern ("two-track") system was designed to be less disruptive to the Senate overall because it allows votes to happen on other, non-controversial bills while the filibuster is ongoing.
    - graeme 4y ago
      Thanks. Seems it was put in place in the 1970s after the filibuster of a civil rights bill. Still think they should make someone talk somewhere to keep the filibuster going. Cure seems worse than disease. Doubt they expected routine filibusters
- ticviking 4y ago
  A proper endurance filibuster is fine, the current version is just pretending
- duped 4y ago
  I think both are undemocratic, and doubly so since it's in the vestigial organ of our former slave-driven agrarian economy. There's no good reason to have the senate, let alone the filibuster and effective super majority required for legislation.

AdamH12113 4y ago

Thank you for providing the actual political context. It is much more helpful to know who did this and why then to complain about an amorphous and unchanging "Congress".

YeBanKo 4y ago
I read the message you are replying to three times and I still don’t understand who did this and why? Can elaborate more?
- Clent 4y ago
  It's the House of Representatives. That body is the origin of all taxing. The leader of the House is Kevin McCarthy. It's is ultimately on him to lead the House (or get out of other's way) in passing a tax bill. The reconciliation process allows this to occur with less bipartisan support. The interesting part of this appears to be that the Republicans removed this from the tax code but were expected to add it back in a new form. This did not occur in time for tax bills to be due.
- ec109685 4y ago
  To get the tax cut law through congress without requiring support from democrats, they had to raise revenue somehow, so they cancelled this provision, with the idea they would add it back later.
- AdamH12113 4y ago
  Sure. Here's the key sentence: > Most tax experts considered the removal a budget gimmick so that the 2017 December republican majority could quickly pass a new budget using the budget reconciliation process, which can't be used to increase the deficit after a 10-year period so they had to add a time limit to a bunch of benefits "on paper" to use the reconciliation process. In 2017, the Republican majorities in Congress passed a budget that would have increased the federal debt significantly over a ten-year period (i.e., it was a long-term deficit increase). Such an increase is not allowed under the rules of the Senate's budget reconciliation process, so they added sunset provisions that would have brought the deficit back down by making some of the deficit-increasing provisions (in this case, mostly tax cuts) expire early. The next sentence clarifies: > There appeared to be broad support for fixing it later, but the bipartisan spending bill expected to include it fell apart because they couldn't get agreement on other parts of it. These changes were made "on paper" to meet the reconciliation rules in time to pass a budget and avoid a government shutdown, but they were not intended to be permanent -- they were just a quick hack to work around procedural limitations. The intent was to fix this later, but the fixes were never implemented due to disagreement about how to handle other parts of the bill. The advantage of this kind of description is that it gives you a piece of a larger story and leads to some obvious follow-up questions. Why did it take until the last minute for Republicans to pass a budget when they had full control of Congress and the White House? Why couldn't they pass a budget that didn't increase the deficit? Why does the Senate have such weird procedural issues and why haven't they been fixed? You can find some of the answers by looking into the bill itself[1]. But even if you don't you can pick up other pieces later by hearing other bits of news. The factions and political processes that produce bad legislation can be understood, and with that understanding the power to alter them, even if only by voting. The other kind of description, which I see far too often, treats bad legislation the same way we treat bad weather. It can be predicted a few days in advance, but we have no control over it. It's just something that happens, and all we can do is let it wash over us. The clouds bring the rain and Congress brings bad legislation; thus has it ever been. It's an ahistorical form of learned helplessness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017

taxopinion 4y ago

[flagged]

pc86 4y ago
What does any of this have to do with libertarians?
- tomrod 4y ago
  Nothing. It's an oddball comment, for sure! As a minarchist (form of libertarian), I would love to see the state operate more efficiently. That would achieve a part of my own personal political beliefs. I recognize the need for a state and the role society must have in shaping it for it to be a stable, functioning state. Surprise rules dramatically increasing taxation due to political judo performed six years prior is horrible.

fredgrott 4y ago

It gets worse, we do not reach true majorities in the House and Senate until 2030. Thus until then budgets get passed under budget reconciliation.

Workaccount2 4y ago

[flagged]

rodgerd 4y ago

The thing that is most striking to me about your explanation is that the change was made six years ago; it seems that anyone responsible for a company's tax position and cashflow (CFO, accountant, etc) should have been planning for this between then and now. Much like the SVB panic, a great deal of this seems to be people running companies without either paying attention to things that could have a significant impact, or hiring someone who does.

citizenkeen 4y ago
When I took tax law, one of the things that blew my mind is that it can be retroactive. An exemption might expire, but then be retroactively reinstated. This happens all the time. There is the tax law that applies to your 2022 income now, and then there's the tax law that will apply to your 2022 taxes in five years.
mjwhansen 4y ago
They have been. Large companies have been engaging with Congress since 2019 on this, reminding them that they intended to revert this before it took effect. CFOs wrote a letter to Congress in November. https://investinamericasfuture.org/Communications/letters/ https://investinamericasfuture.org/Communications/letters/
- newswasboring 4y ago
  Maybe they put too much trust in the US congress' functioning

Spooky23 4y ago

I don’t know why you’d think it was an oversight. After all, they pushed SALT, which raised the taxes of any homeowner living in a high cost of living state, and further transfers wealth to flyover country and the south.

newswasboring 4y ago

This whole thing sounds so shady to me, can't believe this is how they are running a country.