From THE HILL:
The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) said that scrapping all itemized deductions and taxing capital gains as ordinary income, among other policy changes, would only cover the cost of a 4 percent across-the-board reduction in rates…
Thomas Barthold, JCT’s chief of staff, stressed in a letter to congressional tax writers this week that his estimate was an “experiment” and listed a number of tax breaks that were not assumed to be on the table for elimination…
But at the same time, the tax committee’s findings are the latest in a string of analyses that cast a skeptical eye toward GOP plans to slash tax rates without adding to the deficit. Democrats and some think tanks have said it’s not possible to cut rates to the level that Republicans are advocating without shifting the tax burden toward the middle-class…
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Mr. Barthold’s report, and the political static it is sure to evoke, should be significantly depreciated by the word experiment; a “what if”. Many possibilities were not factored into his analysis.
It looks like the Republicans and the Democrats are both prone to giving us a “you can’t see the bill until we pass it” moment. There is no doubt we need a vastly simpler tax code.