A modest set of tax cuts for businesses and families won a large bipartisan majority in the House. While many conservative congressmen joined that majority, others on the right have subjected the bill to many criticisms, some of them reasonable and some of them wrongheaded. The Senate has room to make improvements, but it should pass the bill.
The business-tax cuts are not, in the main, any kind of “corporate welfare,” as critics have said, but rather a small step toward the right model of taxation. Thus, for example, research expenses, like all investment expenses, should be fully deductible at the time the expenses are incurred. Congress let that deductibility expire, and the legislation would temporarily restore it.
Some of the critics are complaining that the bill restores business-tax cuts retroactively, rewarding investments that have already been made rather than spurring new ones. That myopic view ignores the fact that businesses made investments in the expectation that Congress would do the right thing. As long as Congress is going to keep legislating time-limited tax laws — which is not our preference — it can limit the damage by extending them in predictable ways.
The bill also makes several temporary changes to the child credit, which has usually had popular support but always elicited heated objections from the more libertarian quarters of the right. The credit, though, has multiple justifications. For one thing, it makes up for the fact that the standard deduction increases with the number of adults but not the number of children in a household, even though the cost of basic necessities is higher with more dependents. It also partly makes up for the way that the federal government taxes the return on parental investments in children.
The Republican tax reform of 2017 increased the tax benefit per child by about a quarter, but the last few years of high inflation have undone that increase. The new tax bill protects the child credit from inflation during the next two years. That’s its best feature, although previous inflation should have been countered as well.
Other changes to the credit affect households with too few earnings to pay the income tax. But those households pay the payroll tax — they can’t qualify for the child credit without any earnings — and the rationales for cutting the tax bills of parents apply to them too. For these lower-income households, the credit increases as earnings do, rewarding work. The strongest argument the critics have made is that certain provisions of the bill will weaken this work incentive for some households (although they will strengthen it for others). That’s something that the Senate could address in negotiations over the bill.
Those conservative congressmen who voted no generally cited the fact that the credit goes to illegal immigrants if their children are U.S. citizens. In a country with porous borders, a lot of otherwise worthwhile laws will have incidental benefits for illegal immigrants and even make illegal immigration more attractive. (Any law that boosts the U.S. economy will have some such effect.) That’s not a good reason to refrain from enacting worthwhile laws — although we should, of course, take steps to block illegal immigrants from coming and staying here, such as enabling and requiring employers to vet new hires.
Congressmen in high-tax states did not succeed in having the bill include one of their top priorities: an increase in the deductibility of state and local taxes, currently capped at $10,000 per household. The effect of raising the cap would be to reward states for having bigger governments. Proponents say that it’s unfair to set the cap at the same level for singles and married couples, and got the promise of a separate vote on raising it to $20,000 for the latter. Better to lower it to $5,000 for the former.
The bill is in broad outline worth supporting. Senators should improve it, if possible, but pass it.