DC bait and switch: what really happened to your taxes

Just now I downloaded a detailed highly professional review of what REALLY happened to taxes last year:

http://harvardmag.com/pdf/2018/05-pdfs/0518-57.pdf

A few zingers:

p.58: $3.2 trillion in cuts, $2.4 in increases... sizable ... winners and losers.

p. 59: Multinational.. intellectual property [PJW: think Intel, google, Boeing].. face a new world of tax complexity and potentially higher rates...  In contrast,... real estates and ... will be clear winners.

[What was that about Trump wanting to zap Amazon and boost his own stuff? Will innovation improve if we screw the Amazons and Intels and become a real estate turnover society?]

p.60 .. the TCJA's pass-through provisions are enormously complex, create numerous tax-planning opportunities, and will create indfalls for those best positioned..

p.61. Several ideas that take aim at... universities... came to fruition... relatively small in the scope of the overall legislation... first step in a continuing effort to challenge the tax-exempt status of elite universities... go to the core of the universities...

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In general, I tend to worry a lot when armies of lobbyists work hard on the bill of the year, because if what they do in the dark when they are set loose. I saw it from the very center in 2009, when I was the only senior staffer with access to BOTH the Republican AND Democratic senior staffers and strategy working the Senate climate bills of 2009 (the last year they seemed to have a real chance).

Even in the office of Senator Specter, perhaps the highest integrity Senator in the whole place, there was an interesting split between the PR people and the substantive policy people. When word came through that the workers in Pennsylvania wanted more focused attention to a certain issue (steel jobs), the PR office would naturally ask: "What can we do to show that we are already on the job?" (We were to SOME extent.) We would ask (with some encouragement from the Senator): What new could we do to help more, more effectively, in reality? Many other places in DC seem to be almost all PR, especially the bigger and bigger paid lobbies. More and more, groups will survey the public in depth to refine the public PR message, while other groups in parallel, largely in the dark, decide how to dish out the loot, sometimes as far from the message as you could possibly imagine, maximizing the political spoils and PAC support. Voters get the words, PACmen get the loot. Probably the new tax bill is not as bad as many other things (like the current NASA budget especially, or like Bannon's "drain the swamp" message), but it just might be true that people like the author of this piece in Harvard Magazine could have made it better in living up to the original message. Hell, secure financial transactions and attention to the Panama papers issues, on an international basis, could have done better in bringing back money to the US and other popular enterprises, away from criminals and from the specific types of rogue international billionnaires threatening all the major popular governments on earth.

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By the way, this year we went to H&R Block for the first time, as the complexities and inherent fuzziness of tax laws became a bit too much for me. (I imagine Einstein saying: "No, I have to skip the unified field theory this year. I am forced by the government do spend "my" time instead this year on a harder task, figuring out how to pay my taxes.") As a final, unpaid gesture, they showed me actual tax liability to the US government, versus what it would be a year later under the new law. Under the new law, it would be more than 50% higher. The article shows I would not be alone.