The following article by Nancy Altman and Linda Benesch was posted on the AlterNet website November 20, 2017:
Credit: www.speaker.gov/blog
Do you trust Paul Ryan to protect your Medicare benefits? How about White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, a former member of the House Freedom Caucus, and like Ryan, a longstanding foe of Medicare?
If the just-passed House tax bill, its Senate counterpart or some compromise of the two is signed into law, the enactment will put Medicare’s future in the hands of Ryan and Mulvaney.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the GOP tax bill will instantly trigger $400 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare in the next 10 years, including $25 billion in the first year after enactment alone.
The following article by Alan Cohen and Sam Berger was posted on the Center for American Progress website November 21, 2017:
The U.S. flag flies in front of the Capitol Dome, May 2017. Credit: AP/Susan Walsh.
The Senate is rushing forward with a tax bill that would primarily benefit corporations and the wealthy. Recent changes to the bill will result in middle-class tax increases; virtually everyone will see an increase in their individual income taxes in 2027. But these are not the only negative effects of the bill. Thanks to a little-known law, the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act, the Senate tax bill would automatically result in the complete elimination of many important programs.
Republicans are seeking to roll back a tax credit for drugs that treat rare diseases, alarming patient groups who fear the move would slow the development of new treatments.
The so-called orphan drug tax credit would be repealed in the tax-reform bill that passed the House last week. Patient groups are lobbying to preserve the credit, as are some drug companies.
The credit, first enacted in 1983, is intended to spur the development of treatments for rare, or “orphan,” diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 people. Patient groups fear that without the tax credit for 50 percent of the costs of research and testing, drug companies will cut back on developing drugs for rare diseases and focus on more common ailments.
“The Orphan Drug Tax Credit gives hope to the nearly 95 percent of individuals with rare diseases without a treatment that one day they too will have a treatment, or even cure,” more than 200 patient groups wrote in a letter to congressional leadership this month. “We cannot afford to move backwards.”
If the credit is rolled back, “we think we’re going to see a slowdown in the number of approved therapies,” said Peter Saltonstall, president of the National Organization for Rare Disorders, which is leading the charge to keep the tax credit.
The group points to a study it commissioned from Ernst and Young in 2015 that found that without the credit, 33 percent fewer orphan drugs would have been developed over the last 30 years.
Eliminating the tax credit would save the government a projected $54 billion over the next decade. Congressional Republicans are using that revenue to help pay for tax cuts.
A spokesperson for Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee argued that the corporate tax cuts in the legislation would allow drug companies to invest more in research.
“The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act recognizes the importance of medical innovation and competition in helping more Americans access lifesaving treatments,” the spokesperson said. “The bill preserves the R&D credit and lowers the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent — so pharmaceutical manufacturers can invest more of what they earn in new solutions for patients.”
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, noted that the Senate’s tax-reform bill does not completely eliminate the orphan drug credit. Instead, it reduces it from 50 percent to 27.5 percent.
“We’re talking about drugs for cancer kids,” Roberts said at a Finance Committee session on Thursday. “The House completely repealed the orphan drug credit. We took care of a limitation and then restored at least a 27.5 percent credit.”
Still, patient groups are concerned with the Senate bill, saying it would still be a significant cut. Advocates have also noted that Sen. Orrin Hatch(R-Utah), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was one of the primary sponsors of the Orphan Drug Act in 1983.
“Chairman Hatch has been a strong advocate of this initiative, which is why the mark does not repeal the orphan drug tax credit, but rather makes modifications to it,” said a spokesperson for Senate Finance Committee Republicans. “However, as with any major reform, tough choices have to be made.”
The spokesperson said Hatch would continue working with lawmakers on the bill.
While some drug companies are pushing to restore the credit, the full lobbying weight of the industry has not been deployed on the issue. A pharmaceutical lobbyist said the tax credit is more of an issue for some smaller companies represented by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), rather than the large companies that tend to be in the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
In a statement, BIO largely held its fire on the issue, praising the Senate for partially retaining the credit in its bill.
“We are pleased that the Senate retained the Orphan Drug Tax Credit and plan to continue working with both Chambers to preserve the credit,” a BIO spokesman said.
A PhRMA spokesperson said the group “encourage[s] policymakers to maintain incentivizes for the research and development of therapies to treat rare diseases in this process.”
The orphan drug tax credit is not universally beloved. Some on the left argue that drug companies abuse the credit by finding loopholes to claim it for drugs that are not really new treatments for rare diseases.
Steven Knievel, an access to medicines advocate at the advocacy group Public Citizen, argued that the orphan drug tax credit is a way for drug companies to “get goodies from the government without really doing what the intent of the law was.”
But instead of abolishing the tax credit, Knievel argued for exploring alternative ways to spur drug development, such as increased public funding of research at the National Institutes of Health.
The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, though, said the credit is a priority and that there are many variations of cancer that are classified as rare diseases.
“The overwhelming majority of the individual cancers themselves are classified as rare diseases,” said Mark Fleury, policy principal at the cancer society. “For us it hits really close to home.”
The following article by Damian Paletta was posted on the Washington Post website November 20, 2017:
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
The House Republican tax plan would add $1.3 trillion to the national debt over a decade, even after accounting for new economic growth from the bill, according to a nonpartisan study released Monday.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center is the third outside group to conclude that the bill would add to the deficit, contradicting Republicans’ claim that the bill would effectively pay for itself via a surge in economic growth.
The following article by Melanie Schmitz was posted on the ThinkProgress website November 20, 2017:
Kellyanne Conway on “Fox & Friends”, Monday, November 20, 2017. (Credit: Fox & Friends)
During an interview with Fox & Friends on Monday morning, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway urged Alabamans to vote for Republican Roy Moore, who is facing multiple allegations of child sex abuse, in the upcoming special election. Her reasoning: congressional GOP members needed a win on tax reform.
“Doug Jones in Alabama, folks, don’t be fooled,” she said. “He will be a vote against tax cuts. He is weak on crime. Weak on borders. He’s strong on raising your taxes. He is terrible for property owners. And Doug Jones is a doctrinaire liberal, which is why he’s not saying anything and why the media are trying to boost him.”Continue reading “The White House has finally acknowledged its position on Roy Moore and it’s repulsive”
The following article by David Cay Johnston was posted on the DCReport.org website November 17, 2017:
The House tax bill is an all-out attack on the future prosperity of America, not that any of the major news organizations are telling you that in plain English. Lost in the dense bureaucratic language of modern news reports is the simple fact that the House bill takes from striving students so that the already rich and major corporations can have more.
This bill is a long-term disaster in terms of what economists call opportunity costs. That term refers to a benefit that a person could have received, but gave up, to take another course of action. This tax bill gives up the future wealth from investing in brainpower in favor of permanent tax cuts for the already rich and corporations. Continue reading “Why This House Tax Scheme Is For IDIOTS”
The following article by Prof. Steven Pressman of the Economics Department at Colorado State University was posted on the Conversation website November 17, 2017:
Many children have played hot potato, a game in which they pass a spud to other children quickly so they don’t get stuck with it when the music stops.
Taxes are like that potato. No one likes paying them; everyone tries to pass them to others. The game of hot potato sheds some light on the debate over Republican tax cutting plans, particularly when it comes to companies.
The House just passed its tax cut bill. It would give about two-thirds of roughly US$1.5 trillion in net tax cuts over the next decade to businesses, mainly by lowering the corporate income tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent. That puts a lot of money on the table. About $100 billion in U.S. corporate profits would be retained by companies rather than paid to the government each year. Continue reading “‘Hot potato’ shows why workers won’t benefit from Trump’s corporate tax cut”
The following article by Brett Samuels was posted on the Hill website November 19, 2017:
Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said Sunday that permanent corporate tax cuts are necessary to spur economic growth before making individual tax cuts permanent.
Host Chris Wallace challenged Mnuchin, saying he doesn’t know what factors will be at play in 2025 or whether Congress would extend the tax cuts at that point.
“I don’t know that. Maybe I’ll be working for President Pence at the time, but I don’t know that,” Mnuchin said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We’ll know by then whether this creates growth or not. If it does, we’ll have an incredible economy… if it doesn’t, Congress will deal with it at the time.” Continue reading “Mnuchin: ‘I don’t know’ if individual tax cuts will extend”
The following article by Tanya Basu was posted on the Daily Beast website November 19, 2017:
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ELIZABETH BROCKWAY/THE DAILY BEAST
Emily Slonecker is a second year PhD student student at the University of California, Irvine studying developmental cognitive research. She currently earns about $19,000 per year after taxes. The new tax plan, however, would drop her income from her work at the lab to about $16,000 a year in one of the most expensive places to live in America, or about $1300 a month. With her fixed monthly expenses ringing in at $1680, however, Slonecker is nowhere close to making the money she needs to live—and that doesn’t even begin to cover the loans she’s accumulated from her undergraduate years. “But that’s a whole other can of worms,” she brushed off. “If this thing passes and the school is unable to find a loophole, I will have to walk away from the path I have dreamed about my entire life, as will many students. I don’t know anyone who can survive on a negative net income for six years.”
Slonecker’s dire situation worries of her living costs might be the classic story of the poor graduate student: making ends meet with a patchwork of teaching jobs, grants, and, most importantly, scholarships waiving tuition that make spending long hours in the lab a fair tradeoff. Continue reading “The Government Just Stomped on Science—Right When We Needed It Most”
The following article by Renae Merle and Peter Jamison was posted on the Washington Post website November 17, 2017:
The Trump administration says its tax plan will help ordinary Americans, but some GOP figures have acknowledged big business and political donors will benefit. (Taylor Turner/The Washington Post)
It took the city of Pataskala, Ohio, nine ballot measures before its 15,000 residents agreed to a new 1 percent tax to pay for repairs to its crumbling roads and to buy new police cruisers. The mostly rural community was finally won over by a century-old hallmark of the tax code: The $5 million local levy could be deducted from their federal taxes.
