The current state of the tax bill: fundamental principle is completely absent

Jibran Khan at NRO examines the current state of Congress's attempt to score a win before the year is over.

Having utterly failed at repealing and replacing the "A"CA, Capitol Hill Republicans put on a big dog-and-pony show for the public about the earnestness of their intent to drastically revamp the tax code, make it simpler and ease the burden on the middle class.

What a load of jive:

he Senate GOP’s tax bill was passed in the middle of the night last Friday. By the end of the process, the bill had changed considerably from the one that had been approved in committee before the Thanksgiving recess — and even from what had been imagined over the course of the week’s discussions. It also seems that the rushed late-night calculations of the amendments’ fiscal effects were off the mark, on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. And developments this week suggest that the deal-making process was not as stable as assumed.

Senate leadership made last-minute arrangements with seemingly every group of dissenters except for fiscal and family-oriented conservatives. From a political perspective, perhaps this made sense: All the deficit hawks but Bob Corker backtracked on their skeptical statements, with some — James Lankford, for example — dropping back into the delusion of “self-funding tax cuts.” Meanwhile, Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, perhaps because they had won an earlier concession on the child tax credit, did not threaten to vote against the bill; leadership could safely ignore their amendment boosting the credit further, and did.

We still don't have a firm answer on whether states with high state and local tax rates are going to get their subsidization by the rest of the country cut off. The alternative minimum tax has not been killed.  Apparently, Susan Collins is willing to kill the "A"CA individual mandate in exchange for the passage of two bills that will continue to "fund" the "A"CA. Jeff Flake apparently insisting on a quid pro quo: his support for the tax bill in exchange for a path to amnesty for illegal aliens.

There's still lots of talk about how tax cuts to any particular income bracket might "pay for themselves," but no one seems too alarmed anymore about the $20 trillion-plus debt that is going to cause an economic train wreck in the not-all-that-distant future.

I'm not nearly so interested in any of these pet causes of Senators or interest groups individually considered as I am the sum total of them.

Damn it, basic human freedom, such as the right to keep what is yours, ought to be driving this whole process. 

The dismaying irony of post-American legislating is that it is actually easier to come up with huge and convoluted bills than it is to be driven by principle and come up with something short, elegantly simple, and uniformly applicable to all citizens.

Those who want to cut deals to protect their pet concerns, and those who pay heed to the clamoring of interest groups because they see and hear dollars and votes when they meet with them have the "you-don't-understand-what-we-have-to-consider" argument on their side.

There's no point in "throwing all the bums out" until an understanding of the basic relationship between the individual and the state takes root in our society. You can't count on post-America's educational system to be of any help on that score.

It starts with effectively arguing the case for liberty on the one-on-one level. Any of us who cherish freedom must never pass up an opportunity to clarify what a right is, and what a right is not. The current state of the tax effort is such a mess because there are people - legislators, their staffers, think-tank wonks, foundations and activists - who insist on policy skewed in favor of things to which there is no right.

The American story tells us one thing: It requires courage to defend freedom. Those with excuses for compromising freedom do not take kindly to challenge.

We can't expect to see demonstrations of spine in the halls of Congress if we don't exhibit spine in any and every conversation amongst ourselves in which the subject of freedom arises.

And any position along the lines of "the two chambers might be able to get together on a conference-committee hammering-out of a final version if a little more is trimmed here, or boosted there" is not only useless but harmful. If some final product has nothing to do with what the ostensible original intent was, there will have been no point to any of this.

Currently, we are paying these people to waste their time.