National Review Online
Monday, February 05, 2024
A modest set of tax cuts for businesses and families
won a large bipartisan majority in the House. While many conservative
congressmen joined that majority, others on the right have subjected the bill
to many criticisms, some of them reasonable and some of them wrongheaded. The
Senate has room to make improvements, but it should pass the bill.
The business-tax cuts are not, in the main, any kind of
“corporate welfare,” as critics have said, but rather a small step toward the
right model of taxation. Thus, for example, research expenses, like all
investment expenses, should be fully deductible at the time the expenses are
incurred. Congress let that deductibility expire, and the legislation would
temporarily restore it.
Some of the critics are complaining that the bill
restores business-tax cuts retroactively, rewarding investments that have
already been made rather than spurring new ones. That myopic view ignores the
fact that businesses made investments in the expectation that Congress would do
the right thing. As long as Congress is going to keep legislating time-limited
tax laws — which is not our preference — it can limit the damage by extending
them in predictable ways.
The bill also makes several temporary changes to the
child credit, which has usually had popular support but always elicited heated
objections from the more libertarian quarters of the right. The credit, though,
has multiple justifications. For one thing, it makes up for the fact that the
standard deduction increases with the number of adults but not the number of
children in a household, even though the cost of basic necessities is higher
with more dependents. It also partly makes up for the way that the federal
government taxes the return on parental investments in children.
The Republican tax reform of 2017 increased the tax
benefit per child by about a quarter, but the last few years of high inflation
have undone that increase. The new tax bill protects the child credit from
inflation during the next two years. That’s its best feature, although previous
inflation should have been countered as well.
Other changes to the credit affect households with too
few earnings to pay the income tax. But those households pay the payroll tax —
they can’t qualify for the child credit without any earnings — and the
rationales for cutting the tax bills of parents apply to them too. For these
lower-income households, the credit increases as earnings do, rewarding work.
The strongest argument the critics have made is that certain provisions of the
bill will weaken this work incentive for some households (although they will strengthen it for others). That’s something that the Senate
could address in negotiations over the bill.
Those conservative congressmen who voted no generally
cited the fact that the credit goes to illegal immigrants if their children are
U.S. citizens. In a country with porous borders, a lot of otherwise worthwhile
laws will have incidental benefits for illegal immigrants and even make illegal
immigration more attractive. (Any law that boosts the U.S. economy will have
some such effect.) That’s not a good reason to refrain from enacting worthwhile
laws — although we should, of course, take steps to block illegal immigrants
from coming and staying here, such as enabling and requiring employers to vet
new hires.
Congressmen in high-tax states did not succeed in having
the bill include one of their top priorities: an increase in the deductibility
of state and local taxes, currently capped at $10,000 per household. The effect
of raising the cap would be to reward states for having bigger governments.
Proponents say that it’s unfair to set the cap at the same level for singles
and married couples, and got the promise of a separate vote on raising it to
$20,000 for the latter. Better to lower it to $5,000 for the former.
The bill is in broad outline worth supporting. Senators
should improve it, if possible, but pass it.
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