#davecamp

Working on new original music with Digital Pocket is always more fun at the museum. #digitalpocketMusic #sammyt303 #shoeboxMoses #axsgroup #dtpevents #djbrianhowe #davecamp (at Denver Museum of Nature & Science)

The tax reform goals set out in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget would be impossible to achieve while maintaining the tax code’s current level of progressivity. But the detailed tax reform instructions in the budget do not require House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp to maintain progressivity. So that looked to be the trick: Republicans would pay for their tax cuts by shifting the burden down toward the middle class. The Camp/Baucus op-ed, however, explicitly disavows that escape hatch: We’ve agreed that tax reform should result in a system that is as progressive as the current one. Tax reform will close special-interest loopholes to help lower rates. We will ensure that low-income and middle-income Americans will pay no more taxes than they do under current law. This seems like a big deal. It would appear to make the tax reform plan in the Ryan budget utterly impossible. I asked Len Burman, the incoming director of the Tax Policy Center, whether he read it the same way. “That statement doesn’t necessarily protect refundable tax credits, which Republicans don’t like very much,” he replied. “I’m sure Baucus is committed to preserving the EITC and refundable child tax credit, or something equivalent, however, and I know that Camp really wants to get tax reform, so I do think it is a big deal.” And yes, he said, “this makes Ryan’s original plan infeasible.” The interesting omission, as I noted in my earlier piece on Baucus, is the word “revenues.” It doesn’t say, as Camp surely wanted, that tax reform will be “revenue-neutral.” But it also does not say that tax reform will raise revenues. As has been Baucus’s publicly expressed preference, that issue has been tabled for later.