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The Senate is emerging as a possible hurdle to achieving tax reform this year, as Senate Republicans have failed to say which tax breaks they're willing to take away in order to pay for tax rate reductions, unlike House Republicans who have already offered some ideas.

If Congress doesn't eliminate big tax breaks, it won't be able to lower tax rates without blowing out the federal deficit. Republicans have set ambitious goals for tax rates, with President Trump calling to lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent and House Republicans setting a target of 20 percent.

In their tax reform blueprint, House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Republicans identified three major ways they would raise revenue: One would be eliminating all itemized deductions, except for those for mortgage interest and charitable giving; another would be to prevent businesses from deducting the cost of interest on loans; and last would be the border adjustment.

While border adjustment has stirred the most recent controversy, all three would be difficult to pass. While none has a strong advocate in the Senate, all three have critics.

"That's obviously one of the problems you have with any kind of tax reform, is everybody loves their tax preference," said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch has suggested that all three of the House's major revenue-raisers, or "pay-fors," do not enjoy support in the Senate at the moment.

"I don't think in the final analysis they'll be able to do that," Hatch said of the idea of limiting the ability of businesses to deduct interest payments from taxable income, speaking after a meeting with the White House and House on tax reform this month.

Like every tax break, the deductibility of business interest payments has a dedicated coalition of businesses defending it. Real estate investors, private equity funds, telecommunication companies and other groups that have debt built into their business models will lobby to keep it in the tax code.

In theory, Republicans could be able to overcome industry resistance if they did so together. But one issue is that the White House has shied away from clearly advocating the elimination of many big breaks. "My preference is to maintain interest deductibility," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in congressional testimony on Wednesday, hedging that it was on the table.

As for the border adjustment tax, which would raise about $1 trillion, a number of senators have expressed doubt or outright opposition, and no senator has championed it.

Nor have any senators proposed curbing itemized deductions the way House Republicans have. Those include deductions for medical expenses, state and local taxes and much more.

The Trump administration has placed itself squarely behind ending the state and local tax deduction, a major itemized deduction that is worth well over $1 trillion over a decade. Although less ambitious than the House plan to end all itemized deductions, it is an ambitious proposal.

Yet no senator has committed to it. Asked Thursday if attacking the break is feasible in the Senate, Hatch simply waved the question off.

If Republicans hope to pass meaningful tax reform, though, they will have to get Senate support for limiting some big tax breaks.

Each break makes an enormous difference in terms of the tax rates that can be achieved. In the House blueprint, for instance, the inclusion of the border adjustment tax allows them to lower the corporate tax rate to 20 percent. Without it, they would be able to lower the rate to only 30 percent without adding to the deficit, said Kyle Pomerleau, the head of the tax modeling team at the Tax Foundation. A 30 percent corporate tax rate would still be well above the average for advanced economies and even higher than former President Barack Obama's target of 28 percent.

Another example: Eliminating the state and local tax deduction would raise about $1.8 trillion over 10 years in the Tax Foundation's model, which is based on one of the models used by Congress' own tax experts. That revenue pays for nearly all of the individual tax cuts in the House Republican plan, Pomerleau said, including the reduction in the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 33 percent, the collapse of seven brackets into three and cuts to capital gains taxes. "Without that," Pomerleau said of eliminating the state and local tax deduction, "it's really hard to get anything on the individual side."

At the same time, curtailing the ability of residents to deduct their state and local taxes would be a declaration of war on high-tax blue states and on the real estate industry, which hates the idea of families losing a break that helps them with property taxes.

The only way to get the public to go along with a tax reform that got rid of that tax break would be to simultaneously promise them that their rates will be lowered dramatically.

So far, unlike the House and White House, the Senate has not proposed a framework for reducing tax rates. That is part of the reason senators have been reluctant to run afoul of special interests by putting their tax breaks on the table, suggested Dean Zerbe, Alliantgroup national managing director and a former staffer on the Finance Committee.

"You always want to kind of have dessert at the same time you're serving the vegetables," he said.

See the article here:
Senate Republicans have no answer to the trickiest question on tax reform - Washington Examiner

House Speaker Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans must still resolve a handful of issues before agreeing on a tax-reform plan.

Will tax reform be tied to infrastructure spending? And, how long should tax changes last?

Those are 2 of 5 tax reform issues Republicans need to resolve as they march forward with an overhaul of the tax system, writes the Hill. The others are how low the tax rates will be; what will happen to the border adjustment tax; and how the tax bill will treat business investments. House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady have said the GOP agrees on about 80% of a tax-reform plan. But working through the final 20% could take some time.

Paris-accord decision time: CNN Money writes President Trump will decide this week on whether to stick with the Paris climate accord, and the heat is on from businesses to stay in. If he bails on the agreement, which has been signed by 195 countries, he will do so over the objections of hundreds of major U.S. businesses. In recent months, big business has lobbied fiercely in favor of the deal, which aims to end the fossil fuel era. Even major oil companies like Chevron CVX, -0.92% and Exxon XOM, -0.58% back it, CNN Money writes. Heres what Trump tweeted from Sicily last weekend:

Trade, military relationship with Germany will change, Trump says: Trump was busy tweeting on Tuesday morning, including about the U.S.s trading and military relationships with Germany. He said the U.S. has a massive trade deficit with Germany and that the country pays far less than it should for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This will change, he wrote.

Last week, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn said Trump believes Germany is very bad on trade.

Also: Mike Dubke resigns as President Trumps communications director: WSJ.

Trump to roll back Obamas Cuba policies: Trump is preparing to announce a rollback of former President Barack Obamas policies toward Cuba, according to the Daily Caller. Obama ended the policy known as wet foot, dry foot that gave Cuban illegal immigrants a path to legal status; opened travel to the island nation; re-established diplomatic relations; and loosened restrictions on doing business with Cuba. John Kavulich of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council said the administration will enact increased enforcement relating to travel, and focus on discouraging transactions controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) of the Republic of Cuba.

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5 tax reform issues dividing Republicans | Business urges Trump to stick with Paris climate accord - MarketWatch

Begin Slideshow 6

Just a little lick of love, every day

Just a little lick of love, every day

Jesus' favorite

Jesus' favorite

Just a few drops under the tongue every morning before session, senator

Just a few drops under the tongue every morning before session, senator

The world, after all, isn't black and white, good and bad, dumb bifurcation. It's a madly, endlessly cascading swirl and swoon, scream and sigh.

The world, after all, isn't black and white, good and bad, dumb bifurcation. It's a madly, endlessly cascading swirl and swoon, scream and sigh.

Microdosing for Republicans

I used to think it was so simple, that the most obvious, overarching problem facing fundamentalist Christian Americans, pseudo-macho politicians andpuny, big-stick dictators alike was largely one of gross sexual ineptitude, all that angry old-male megalomania and grim saber-rattling stemming merely from gloomy carnal repression and warped Puritanical anxiety, all resulting in a desperate need to compensate, to prove their value and their sad macho mettle in pretty much any way possible.

Buy some guns, get a Hummer, forsake your soul to a megachurch, start a war with Iraq, worship Fox News, whine about female empowerment, never think for yourself, turn Republican and fear and hate upon just about everything that doesnt conform? Just for starters.

To be sure, all those were certainly hallmarks of the Bush era, and it led to the concomitant trope that if only the repressed conservatives of America would free themselves from the tepid chains of fundamentalist Christian panic and, you know, get well and happily laid once in a while, theyd surely calm the hell down and the world would might survive a few more generations.

Ah, youth.

I dont quite believe that anymore, and not only because my understanding of the world has become more sophisticated, or because all those brittle conservative males have become any less oppressed, or any less ignorant of god.

Exactly the contrary. Its because the modern political world white conservative males in particular have taken a turn for the worse, the darker, the more spiritually hostile. As the world these men inhabit contacts and shrivels, as their influence decreases, their actions only turn more ruthless, their souls more dim.

Translation: There is no longer any room for quaint notions about sexual oppression and getting laid. No more jokes about furtive gay hookups in the bathroom, senator. The tepid sexual anxiety that was at the root of so much damning scandal for the GOP and fundamentalist Christianity in the 90s and 00s has given way to something far more gruesome, and far more devastating. And Trump is leading the charge.

So, what now? If vile Trumpism is no longer only about old white guys compensating for raging feelings of inadequacy, if all their hateful trolling not just pushback against their own increased cultural irrelevancy, then surely they are on the verge of true and violent collapse, threatening to take us all down with them. And so maybe what these lost boys really need, is a far more intense sort of... cracking open, before its too late.

They need to see Earth from space. They need to volunteer in a slum in India. They need to imbibe large amounts of peyote and spend a week in a sweat lodge in the desert, crying out to the ancestors. They need to drop ayahuasca with master shamans in a Brazilian jungle, and have a personal reckoning with the One True Mother. They need to witness their own bloated egos explode into a million fractal shards and reassemble into the shape of a giant, undulating butterfly with wings of blood. Hey, its a start.

Too much to ask? Of course it is. So maybe they could just dive into the latest trend of, say, microdosing. Maybe some intrepid D.C. interns could, I dont know, spike the congressional coffee with sufficient micrograms of LSD, psilocybin or MDMA, just a little bit, every single day, for the next few years. And the entire White House, too. And see what happens.

After all, microdosing is in. Its the freshest, most viral pathway to heightened awareness. It reportedly reduces depression, aids creativity, tickles the animas synapses just so; it just might be the magic elixir, the thing mystics have known for millennia and science is now beginning to understand, the idea that hallucinogens (and, increasingly, various strains of THC), even in tiny, barely perceptible doses, can soften the egos roughest edges, aid in perception and generate feelings of delight and ease. Whats not to like?

Of course it makes sense. Of course millennia of deep hallucinogenic experience across myriad cultures and millions of humans would translate directly to the notion that a small bit of same, every few days, could help a person, you know, reconnect. With spirit. With nature. With the planet. With his or her fellow man.

Could it maybe, just maybe, help the viciously maladjusted, spite-filled modern GOP relocate the one human quality thats most lacking in Trumpland today: empathy? Of course it could.

Longshot, I realize. And of course, Trump himself is way too far gone for any such transformation. Never has an American president been so sadistically, so enthusiastically lacking in basic concern for humanitys well-being. Never has an American leader been so entirely bereft of warmth, fundamental decency or moral literacy. And never have so many Republicans gleefully followed him right into the bleak abyss.

But then again, who knows? Its worked for anxious moms. Its worked for business types, yogis, teachers, mechanics, doctors, writers, students, athletes and authors, ancient masters and modern intellectuals, gurus and saints and gods.

Jesus almost certainly enjoyed a great deal of hallucinogens, if he wasn't one himself. Buddha was a walking indica cookie. The gurus who channeled the Vedas, the most ancient, most mystical spiritual literature on human record? Come on.

So then, a humble call-out to the D.C. interns, the disgruntled White House staffers, the furious FBI agents, the beleaguered reporters, the miserable wives and daughters of congressional Republicans, et al. Let us happily conspire to perhaps start dosing the most hateful and morally egregious among you with various (increasingly legal) compounds of wow, and see what transpires.

And of course, save a good amount for yourself, too. We're all in this together. That's what the mushrooms tell me, anyway.

The rest is here:
Microdosing for Republicans - SFGate

But the complete argument for revoking Kushners clearance is actually much broader.

Kushner and the White House would have had little credibility if theyd denied the claims in the Washington Post and Reuters reports, but the fact that they havent seriously challenged them should be read as confirmation. If Kushner had not requested illegal access to secure Russian communication facilities he would have every interest in refuting reporting to the contrary. That he has not done so suggests an awareness that such an explicit denial might ultimately be contradicted by evidencea secret recording of the meeting, or the testimony of ousted National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who is the target of an FBI investigation.

So the intelligence end-run reporting is almost certainly true, and it is thus also almost certainly true that Kushner lied on his clearance form. That these contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak didnt simply slip his mind. And that, knowing all this, he nevertheless encouraged his father-in-law to fire the FBI director.

The threat to security is at least twofold. First, by seeking the channel in this way, Kushner implicitly revealed that there are things he was happy telling the Russian government that he didnt want the U.S. government, then under Barack Obamas control, knowing. Nobody with such motives, if they were known to the government, would ever have received a clearance. Second, by telling lies to the U.S. government that the Russian government may have had the capacity to expose, Kushnerjust like Flynnwas vulnerable to blackmail.

Again, Paul Ryan seems not to care about any of this, much as he and other leading Republicans, like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, dont care that Trump went to Europe and vandalized the Western alliance. This kind of enabling behavior defines the Republican Party today, and is often and correctly interpreted as part of the endless collateral damage Republicans will tolerate in pursuit of tax cuts. But the focus on Ryans motives, rather than his actions, reduces his abdication of duty to a partisan or ideological calculation. Something appropriately left in the realm of politics.

But its much more severe than that. Trumps election was a catastrophically destabilizing event in and of itself, and people like Ryan were complicit in it. But to an under-appreciated extent, the amount of damage Trump would ultimately be capable of inflicting was a question for Congress as much as Trump himself. America cant unelect Trump, or annul his presidency, but it would be straightforward for the countrys other political branch of government to signal to the world that it would never allow a U.S. president to permanently upend the foundation of trust underlying the post-war global order without good reason. If a presidents advisers have malign intent with state secretsin many cases secrets shared between nationsnothing says Congress has to tolerate it. If the president himself is reckless with those secrets, or with his foreign policy in general, nothing in the Constitution says Congress must sit on its hands. Quite the contrary.

Instead, Trump returned to the U.S. in a wake of outraged howls from allied countries, and amid news reports that his top adviser tried to subvert U.S. intelligence agencies with the help of a Russian spy, and the top Republican foreign policy guy in Congress said the presidents first trip abroad was executed to near perfection, while GOP leaders shrugged off Kushners mind-boggling improprieties.

What theyre telling the world is that if another figure like Trump emerges promising to upend U.S. alliances and run a rogue, untrustworthy administration, one of Americas two political parties will welcome him, and help him get away with it.

Read more:
How Republicans Are Helping Trump Destroy the U.S.'s Global Credibility - New Republic

Robert E. Moffit 4:25 p.m. ET May 29, 2017

Congressional Budget Office(Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo, epa)

Obamacare is wrecking individual and small group markets. This year, premium cost increases in the individual markets are averaging 25%, and the thousands of dollars in deductibles are breathtaking. Many middle-class folks in these markets are stuck paying the equivalent of a second mortgage.

Washingtons inflexible regulations are also helping to jack up health care costs, pricing younger and healthier persons out of the market, and thus driving costs even higher. This costly experiment in government central planning has resulted in shrinking enrollment, sharply declining competition and narrow medical networks.

Theres nothing new here. In the 39 states with federal exchanges, HHS reports, average monthly premiums rose from $232 to $476 from 2013 to 2017.

Congressional Republicans promised to fix this mess, and the Congressional Budget Office has given their bill a mixed review. The fiscal news is positive, with CBO estimating the legislation would cut the deficit by $119 billion over 10 years. But the insurance coverage news is negative, with CBO estimating that 23 million fewer persons would have health insurance in 2026.

The GOP should be skeptical of CBOs coverage estimates. It has been an abysmal performance. For example, CBO projected initially that 21 million persons would enroll in exchange plans in 2016. The actual enrollment: 11.5 million.

OUR VIEW:

Republican health care bill indicted, again

To be fair, the CBO admits the uncertainty of its own estimates: Such estimates are inherently uncertain because of the ways in which federal agencies, states, insurers, employers, individuals, doctors, hospitals and other affected parties would respond to the changes made by the legislation are all difficult to predict.

Congressional Republicans should take a deep breath. While they should take CBOs report seriously, they must not treat CBO projections as Holy Writ. They should use the Senate version of their bill to fashion good policy that will further reduce costs and protect the vulnerable. They need to fulfill their promises and press ahead.

Robert E. Moffit is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

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Republicans, on CBO estimates, be skeptical - USA TODAY