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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

This is a much better article: basically these companies are paying for the tax cut Republicans gave the to the top bracket in 2017:

> In 2017, then-President, Donald Trump, signed the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs act, which overhauled tax codes and reduced tax – for example, it reduced the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 37%. To make the bill pass strict budgetary rules, the Senate used a process called reconciliation: adding in tax code changes that delayed tax increases. These delayed increases “balanced out” the tax reduction.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-75

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This is correct. Since it was basically accounting sleight-of-hand to get a better score from the Congressional Budget Office, they knew this would be disastrous if it took effect, and were widely expected to repeal it before it did. That deal, which also paired fixing it with the child tax credit, fell apart in December 2022.

I think of that every time someone proclaims that some time bomb like that will force the Congress to make a deal. That’s the instinct of a bygone era and I no longer feel safe counting on it.

Yeah… that’s why this is still far from a guarantee, even though it’s a very positive development. This could very well still fall apart like last time.

Everyone, call your Reps and ask them to tell leadership to support the tax deal!

You're getting down voted for sounding partisan I suspect, but regardless of the politics, you're absolutely right. That bill was a huge change across the US tax system.

Yeah, it’s an election year so even a literal statement of fact is going to be downvoted by some people. Hopefully at some point they’ll have an epiphany about whether they should self-identify with a party so strongly when an accurate descriptions of its actions feels like an attack, but I’m not as optimistic about that as I used to be.

It’s a partisan statement since you only mention the upper tax bracket and not that it also slashed taxes for the lowest one completely and reduced them for basically everyone while making changes to a ton of other things (like child tax credits) as well.

You’re over simplifying and singling out your pet political issue in an effort to sway opinion to your political leaning. If you had just said it was due to those tax cuts you likely wouldn’t have been downvoted.

The reason the author I quoted said that is that most of the cost comes from the top. If we were taking on a couple trillion in extra debt, that seems like a rather minimal benefit to give ⅔ of it to the richest people.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/distributional-...

Most of the need for the reconciliation was the cut to the top tax bracket, where most of the the tax revenue comes from (e.g., the top 1% of earners pay 42% of the taxes [0]). So focusing on that bracket seems valid in this context.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-fe...

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