Senate Republicans released their budget resolution for the next fiscal year. In it, they abandon—to a degree—the idea of repealing Obamacare and finally admit to the world that they don't care about deficits. At all.
The 89-page plan, which the Senate Budget Committee spent months drafting, sets up the special power of budget reconciliation GOP leaders can use to advance tax reform with just a 50-vote threshold in the Senate. Nov. 13 is the tentative deadline for tax writers to submit their plans for an overhaul to the budget panel.
Under the budget proposal, Republican tax writers can add up to $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, giving lawmakers more flexibility as they attempt a once-in-a-generation revamp of the U.S. tax code. With more wiggle room to slash revenue, GOP legislators hope they will be able to go even lower on tax rates for individuals and corporations.
They can do tax cuts with just 50 votes in these new instructions, but didn't include Obamacare repeal—not directly anyway. The instructions it includes for the Senate Finance committee allows that $1.5 trillion in added deficits between both revenues and outlays—it doesn't rule out changes to the subsidies for Obamacare, the various taxes included in it, or changes to Medicaid expansion or Medicaid itself. So while "repeal" isn't allowed with 50 votes in the new instructions, a partial repeal is definitely in there.
Here's another tricky thing it does, as discovered by David Kamin, a former staff adviser on economic policy to President Obama: it gets rid of the Senate rule requiring a Congressional Budget Office score for votes under budget reconciliation. Without the CBO score, the old rules say, a budget resolution bill—like the one they'll have for tax cuts—would have to get a supermajority vote. Their excuse is that requiring the accountability of a CBO score is "unnecessarily restrictive to the deliberative nature of the institution."
That's a blow to both accountability and transparency. They don't want the public to know how damaging their proposals are. Period.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2fwvJqA
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