McCain reportedly confirmed his opposition – and also that the bill in its current form is DOA – during an interview with Fox Business’s Charlie Gasparino.…
And at this rate, it’s unclear if the plan in its current form will even pass the House....
I honestly don’t get it. I’m sure I’m missing something. I am also sure, 100% sure, that, even if passage of the AHCA were to make it easier for the GOP.Angry Bear
Republican lawmakers warned "that there could be a major obstacle to enacting President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda: the national debt."
“I was disappointed that it wasn’t brought up in the campaign — anybody’s campaign really — it really wasn’t mentioned,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said of deficits and debt. “So I’m very concerned about it. It’s going to be tough to address if there’s no push from outside of the Congress,” he added. “I’m very concerned about it. It’s the biggest problem we face, by far.”
“We did not hear anything about entitlement reform from either of the candidates, and that’s a serious issue,” said Michael Sargent, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation. “You cannot address the growth in spending without addressing entitlement issues.”...
As Bloomberg explains, Trump’s race to enact the biggest tax cuts since the 1980s went under a caution flag Monday when during a news conference, "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned he considers current levels of U.S. debt “dangerous” and said he wants any tax overhaul to avoid adding to the deficit."…
“What I hope we will clearly avoid, and I’m confident we will, is a trillion-dollar stimulus,” he said. “Take you back to 2009. We borrowed $1 trillion and nobody could find that it did much of anything. So we need to do this carefully and correctly and the issue of how to pay for it needs to be dealt with responsibly.”
Then there is the debt limit, which will need to rise next year to avoid defaulting on government obligations; McConnell said he wasn’t sure if that would be paired with any deficit-reduction measures next year as it was in 2011, when Republicans held the debt limit hostage and extracted more than $2 trillion in deficit cuts over a decade from President Barack Obama.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has also said he wants tax changes to be deficit-neutral, indicating that Republicans will assume positive macroeconomic benefits from tax cuts to ease the projected budgetary hit - a process known as dynamic scoring that is popular on the right.…
Finally, even if all the changes are implemented immediately, and the GOP rolls over, virtually none of Trump's stimulus package will generate any impact on the economy until some time in 2018 as Goldman calculated last week.…Trumponimics DOA?
"The big story next year, the showcase issue for the Republicans clearly will be tax reform," Valliere said Tuesday while speaking at the Schwab IMPACT conference in Denver. "I imagine that (House Speaker John) Boehner will say this is their top priority."…
"The big issue for investors will clearly be the repatriation of earnings that would come back to the U.S. at a very, very low tax rate," he said, adding that multinationals storing cash abroad would be the big winners there.CNBC NetNet
