Yesterday, we highlighted a one-page report prepared by the Treasury Department which claimed that – in what was perhaps one of the most unrealistically optimistic budget projections to ever be produced by the US government agency - the Senate’s version of the Republican tax plan would, somehow, bolster GDP to a 2.9% real growth rate over 10 years.
House Republicans successfully managed to kick the can down the road (if only for two weeks) when they managed to pass a two-week extension last week of the continuing resolution that had been funding the government since September.
As the House and Senate continue to try to reconcile their two versions of a tax plan, the taxing structure for pass-through entities (s-corps, LLC's, etc.) continues to be somewhat controversial, if not completely nonsensical. As we pointed out last week, the Senate bill somewhat randomly chose to exclude pass-through entities organized as family trusts from tax cuts which would ultimately leave them on the hook for much larger tax bills due to the elimination of other deductions.
According to an analysis from the Tax Policy Center, the Senate's recently passed tax plan will increase the after-tax income of folks in every income bracket. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and plenty of arguments to be had between the Left and Right over how the tax savings scraps should be divvied up, but in the aggregate individual tax payers should see their net incomes increase in 2019.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) blasted the FBI and Senate Democrats on Wednesday for their unwillingness to fairly investigate Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration, stating that the Democrats on the committee he oversees "only want to talk about [President] Trump."
In a fiery speech to the Senate, Grassley lambasted Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other Democrats for "a double standard here in the way that they desperately want to go after the president but ignore all other potential wrongdoing in the previous administration."