The House Ways and Means Committee finally released its tax reform package yesterday, to which it gave the official title of “One, Big, Beautiful Bill.” This fulfills Trump’s promise to the American people to do comprehensive tax reform, rather than piecemeal reform. In addition to extending the almost-expired tax cuts that helped supercharge the economy during Trump’s first term, the bill includes numerous other provisions that will benefit the economy and ordinary working- and middle-class Americans.

The bill is 389 pages long, and today’s been a busy day, so let me say straight out that I haven’t read it. Instead, I’ve looked at secondary sources, although, sadly, the House Ways and Means Committee does not have a helpful list of what’s in it. Thankfully, the good people at the Tax Foundation reviewed the bill and summarized its probable effects on the economy:

Our preliminary analysis finds the tax provisions included in the May 12 text would increase long-run GDP by 0.6 percent and reduce federal tax revenue by $4.0 trillion from 2025 through 2034 on a conventional basis before added interest costs. On a dynamic basis, accounting for economic growth, the revenue reduction would fall by 18.8 percent to $3.3 trillion over 10 years before added interest costs.

Overall, the bill would prevent tax increases on 62 percent of taxpayers that would occur if the TCJA expired as scheduled. However, by introducing narrowly targeted new provisions and sunsetting the most pro-growth provisions, like bonus depreciation and research and development (R&D) expensing, it leaves economic growth on the table and complicates the structure of the tax code.

The Gateway Pundit also has helpful information on how the bill affects ordinary people. I suggest you read the whole article, but some of the top lines are that it:

If it were up to me, we’d have a national 10% sales tax on everything except core items, such as nutritious food, baby care products, etc. And that would be it. Rich people would pay more because they’d buy more, but nobody’s tax rate would exceed 10% of their annual income—that is, be greater than 10% of their gross income unless they routinely spent more than they earned. That’s it.

Still, because that’s not how our government will ever handle taxes, I should be grateful that we may yet see a renewal of the Trump tax cuts, along with other beneficial cuts that take pressure off American people beleaguered by the damage from the Biden economy.

Now it remains to be seen whether Speaker Mike Johnson can get the bill out of the House and into the Senate. I know that the horse trading is going to be ferocious, and that Republicans will be hampered by hard-line Congresscritters who are so invested in the perfect that they let the good slip through their fingers, leaving Americans with a disaster.

Image by Andrea Widburg