If Paul Ryan runs for re-election, this may be the man to beat him

Chip in.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:



UPDATE:

It's even better when you see what Ryan's tweet was responding to:

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

Maybe we start boycotting these companies.

Kimberly-Clark: Kleenex, Huggies, Cottonelle, Scott, KimWipes, Depends, Poise and Kotex

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Framing

I have only one comment:  People with a minimum balance of $1500 are not "low-income".  Or, if they are, the United States is far and away a country of overwhelming poverty.  (Which may be true anyway.)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We don't need no steenkeen charity

GOP death squad will cut entitlements AND charitable contributions.

At the same time, the wealthy will get a still larger share of the tax benefit, even when sacrificing a smaller share of their income.

Indeed, the few concessions by tax writers to promote charitable giving are aimed at the very high end of the income scale. The end result is a law that does more to promote gifts to pay for a grandchild’s private schooling than it does to encourage the same grandparents to go outside their family and give to the local Boys & Girls Club.

[...]

Shared sacrifice by private citizens to complement a limited government is a precious value for this nation as a participatory democracy. But what’s happened here instead is a tax bill that tears at this fabric by denying so many households an important incentive to engage and give more to their communities.

  Politico

I wouldn't call that a "precious value for this nation as a participatory democracy." That's not what participatory democracy means. Participatory democracy is precisely what we don't have. And the GOP - and to a lesser extent, the Democrats - like it that way. You could say, however, that that's a shared value by traditional Republicans, who seem to be a dying breed.

"[T]ax policy is supposed to be helping a healthy democracy — this new bill effectively limits the incentive to just the wealthy.”

If true, this is going to throw more hungry people out on the streets.

Among households in the $75,000 to $100,000 income range, the TPC’s tax model projects that just 10.2 percent will still benefit from charitable deduction under the new law — down from 27.1 percent. For those from $100,000 to $200,000, the drop is from 50.7 percent to 19.6 percent.

[...]

By comparison, among those earning over $1 million a year, more than three-quarters, or 77.6 percent, will still benefit from the charitable tax deduction and their already disproportionate share of the after-tax dollar benefit will go up.

[...]

Many households will surely continue to donate some portion of their income. But without the deduction, the economic “price” for giving goes up. And there is significant empirical evidence —outlined in a May 2017 report by the staff at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy — that that this will dampen future donations both for religious and secular groups.

[...]

Republicans counter that any such loss will be offset by the fact that families will have more cash in their pockets to contribute after the promised tax cuts. [...] “Chairman Brady believes that the biggest encourager of charitable contributions is a strong economy. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act allows people to give more of their own money to spend and contribute as they wish.”

And yet, if they can't take a charitable deduction, their taxes will in effect go up. How stupid does Chairman Brady think people are?

Chairman Brady as he slithers home: "Go suck an egg, people."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

But the pay increase was because of the Trump tax plan, sure

Sam's Club has not said how many employees are losing their jobs. Each Sam's Club warehouse employs about 150 people, meaning close to 10,000 people could be impacted.

In some cases, employees were not told their store had closed before showing up to work on Thursday. Those employees learned their store would be closing when they found the store's doors locked and a notice announcing the closing, according to reports.

  Business Insider

Jesus.  These people.  Will there ever be ANY corporation who actually does take their tax bonus (or other government handout) and do something for their employees with it without cutting out other employees? Or is it always going to be a game of publicity? I'm looking at you, AT&T.  And you, Carrier.

The closings came on the same day Walmart announced plans to raise starting hourly wages to $11, expand employee benefits, and offer workers bonuses of up to $1,000.

 And the story was they were doing it because of the extra money they're getting from Trump's tax breaks to corporations.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Now THAT's the way to support Trump

Get ready for a Trump tweet crowing about this.

Walmart is boosting starting wages, providing a one-time bonus for employees and expanding benefits, the company said in a press release on Thursday, citing the tax cuts signed into law by President Trump last year. The plan benefits more than a million employees, the company told Axios.

The bonus is based on length of service, with those who've worked 20 years eligible for $1,000. The company, which is the largest private employer in the U.S. and employs roughly 2.2 million people worldwide, is also raising its starting wage to $11 an hour. The current starting wage for store associates is $9 an hour.

  Axios

A whole $11/hr. My god! Can Walmart afford that?

I wonder if they'll be providing some full-time positions with benefits. Okay, that's over the top.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

They're shutting down a bunch of Sam's Stores, too. That should help offset those pay raises.

Jesus. These people.

How Bob Corker was outed on the tax scheme

As the House and Senate moved toward approving the final version of the GOP tax bill, the International Business Times (IBT) revealed in an explosive story Friday that a loophole slipped into the bill in the final minutes will directly enrich President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as wealthy senators and key members of Congress, including the provision’s writers.

[...]

Controversy swirled around the timing of the measure and the fact that deficit hawk Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee abruptly switched his vote in favor of the bill, whose tax cuts the Congressional Budget Office estimated will add $1.4 trillion to the deficit by 2027. Corker had been the lone Republican holdout in the Senate and had previously voted with Democrats against the bill. [...] [Reporter] David Sirota’s IBT reporting quickly went viral as Corker’s apparent cushy accommodation was splashed across social media under the hashtag #CorkerKickback.

[...]

IBT had been closely following the debate over how the tax measure would treat income passed through a tax shelter known as an LLC, a “pass-through” tax entity because profits pass through to its owners who report them on their personal tax returns.

[...]

Which version of the pass through would end up in the final tax bill would be determined by the joint House and Senate conference committee. At 5:30 p.m. on Friday, the committee released a final version that appeared to follow the Senate approach, the more rational version, according to tax experts Sirota spoke to. “At 5:45 we were sort of like, ‘Okay, I don’t think there’s much to really write,’” Sirota said. “‘It looks like they kind of got it out.’ But I said, ‘I’ll talk to a couple of tax lawyers who have been following this.’ And what do you know? One of them comes back to me at 6:15 and is like, ‘You know, they added this one extra line that’s not in either of the bills. It talks about depreciable assets. This is the loophole.’ He said something along the lines of, ‘It’s narrow enough that it shows intent for a specific kind of investment vehicle.’”

[...]

The original House tax cut on pass-throughs, Sirota explained, was broad enough to argue that it was merely an ideological, across-the-board tax cut rather than something that picked specific winners and losers. But the additional line was included with one intent in mind. That line carved out a particular tax windfall for owners of rental-income generators like apartment buildings or commercial office complexes, depreciable property with few or no employees.

“That’s when we realized this is an absolutely enormous story,” Sirota said.

[...]

When asked to comment on the pass-through for a followup story, Corker didn’t seem to be familiar with it, Sirota said. “He called it ‘ridiculous,’” Sirota said. “But then he called back — he must have talked to somebody — and he said, ‘You know, I’m not sure I want to criticize it that way. You know, I need more information. I haven’t really read it. I’ve only read a summary of the bill. I haven’t read the bill.’ Which is, of course, another story: You’re the key vote on a $1.5 trillion [deficit] bill, and you’re announcing your support for it, admitting that you didn’t even read it. So your defense is, ‘I didn’t know about the provision because I didn’t read the bill that I’m voting for.’

[...]

To take the heat off Corker, [Utah Republican Orin] Hatch replied on Monday, insisting that he had authored the loophole.

[...]

However, the Hatch alibi could not withstand new reporting that revealed Corker’s chief of staff, Todd Womack, had been investing heavily in a real estate LLC in the run-up to the bill and also stood to profit from the provision. Worse, Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn, in a Sunday appearance on ABC’s This Week, admitted that the decision to include the pass-through came from an effort to “cobble together the votes we need to get this bill passed.”

[...]

Republicans have been redistributing the country’s wealth upwards since the days of Ronald Reagan. What actually is precedent-setting about this tax bill, [Sirota] said, is how explicit it is.

“There’s no pretense in this bill,” Sirota said. “There was a thing the Republicans put out in their summary when the bill came out. I tweeted out the graphic. It was sort of in a section about trying to prevent people from using their LLCs to put their wage income into their LLCs. They called it ‘safeguards’ — and I’m paraphrasing here — ‘We have put safeguards in to make sure that the business income taxes not go to wage earners.’ They are very crystal-clear that this is a tax bill not for workers. This is a tax bill for corporations and business owners."

  Capital and Main

A big fuck you to the people they supposedly represent. Of course we all know who they actually represent, and they don't give a shit if we do.

In all, 14 Republican senators (see list below) hold financial interests in 26 income-generating real-estate partnerships — worth as much as $105 million in total.

[...]

While Republicans have argued the House version of the bill contained the controversial provision, experts have told IBT the provision appeared in the legislation only after the bill was finalized during House-Senate Conference Committee deliberations.

[...]

Beyond Republican senators, other major beneficiaries of the provision could be President Donald Trump, who owns or directs over 560 companies, most of which are LLCs or LPs. Democrats in recent days have seized on the provision — and its potential benefits to Republican lawmakers.

  Zero Hedge

Come on. NO Democrats stand to benefit? I find that hard to believe.

Anyway...here are the Republicans:

I can see how that provision might be a game changer for Corker.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Christmas at Mar-A-Lago

President Trump kicked off his holiday weekend at Mar-a-Lago Friday night at a dinner where he told friends, "You all just got a lot richer," referencing the sweeping tax overhaul he signed into law hours earlier. Mr. Trump directed those comments to friends dining nearby at the exclusive club -- including to two friends at a table near the president's who described the remark to CBS News -- as he began his final days of his first year in office in what has become known as the "Winter White House."

  CBS

So these "friends" told CBS what he said? I was going to say, "With friends like that...", but then I realized: what other kind would someone like Trump have?

The president himself on Sept. 13 -- long before the bill was finalized -- said the wealthy would not benefit from the GOP tax overhaul.

"The rich will not be gaining at all with this plan. We are looking for the middle class and we are looking for jobs -- jobs being the economy," Mr. Trump said.

That's what he tells the rest of the world outside of Mar-A-Lago.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

About those AT&T bonus checks

They'll be covered by higher costs for AT&T service.  You knew there was a catch.



Merry Christmas from AT&T.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

h/t Jean

UPDATE:

Also...

How the GOP won the tax game and what you get in return

Only last Friday, when the legislation came out of conference committee and was no longer subject to amendment — and when decisive majorities of House and Senate Republicans had publicly committed to vote for the legislation — did experts and journalists begin to fully catch up with its defects.

[...]

This full-speed-ahead strategy simultaneously constrained the ability of the press to explore the special interest provisions buried in the legislation.

[...]

Not only are many senators direct beneficiaries of the legislation, but 15 of the top 20 Senate recipients of contributions from the real estate industry are Republicans.

[...]

Two days before Congress gave final approval, a group of 13 tax law experts released the most incisive critique of the tax bill to date, a 30-page document called “The Games They Will Play: An Update on the Conference Committee Tax Bill.”

The primary authors of the report — Ari Glogower, David Kamin, Rebecca Kysar, and Darien Shanske — describe the legislation as “a substantial blow to the basic integrity of the income tax” that will “advantage the well-advised in ways that are both deliberate and inadvertent.”

  NYT

I think the bottom line is you should turn yourself into a corporation. I'm pretty sure this can be done

The corporate rate reduction is permanent, for individuals only temporary.

[...]

Mitchell Kane, a law professor at N.Y.U., wrote in response that the bill will

create new incentives to shift tangible assets (and jobs) abroad. Given President Trump’s relentless message about U.S. jobs, it is incomprehensible to me that we are about to pass something that has this effect without any kind of meaningful discussion of the issue.

[...]

In the first year, 2018, the changed inflation rate raises a relatively modest $31.5 billion but it grows every year, reaching $37 billion in 2027. “To be sure,” Hemel wrote, “this affects everyone to some degree, but most of the burden is paid for by families in the bottom four quintiles.”

What may prove even more significant is that the shift to chained CPI — a less generous, slower-growing measure of inflation than the one currently in use — would not only result in a tax increase over time, it would set a precedent for Republicans who would like to use the same method to pare back so-called entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. It is, in effect, a backdoor method of reducing benefits for the elderly and the disadvantaged without public scrutiny or debate.

[...]

A recent story disclosed that a provision inserted at the last minute into the bill stands to lower taxes on the income of 14 Republican Senators.

And what do you get for all this?

Restriction on state and C local tax deduction — consciously vindictive imposition of double taxation on citizens of certain Democratic states; corporations and pass through businesses, the darlings of the Republicans, still get to deduct those very same taxes in full.

[...]

Expanding the standard deduction but financing the cost of so doing by repealing the personal exemptions is a bit of a bait and switch maneuver. Some people might be worse off.

[...]

Deduction for extraordinary medical expenses — retention of this deduction did not even get the five-year sunset window applied to all the other individual tax provisions, two years only.

[...]

In a bill in which 100s of billions of dollars were sloshing around to provide steep tax cuts for already wealthy and highly prosperous corporations and pass through businesses, the Republicans could only find the will to raise the refundable portion of the child care tax credit from $1000 to $1400. Rubio wanted it to be raised to $2000 and his Republican brethren refused to even meet him halfway.

But he voted for it, didn't he?

So how soon will you change your party affiliation from Republican?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

P.S.
That carried interest provision that Trump benefits from and famously said he'd end while he was campaining? Not gone.

In your face

Your education and health benefits can no longer be afforded.  We had to give the tax breaks to corporations and "defense".

But, he's back to writing his own tweets.  How can you tell?

He has the biggest letters.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's looting time in the Congress

Specific provisions in the bill ranging from tax reductions on pass-through real estate LLCs to flat tax deductions for oil and gas master limited partnerships are likely to have a significant impact on some legislators’ tax bills.

[...]

The Senate and House have similar ethics rules governing using the legislative process for personal financial gain. The section on conflicts of interest in the Senate Ethics Manual states: ‘‘No Member, officer, or employee shall knowingly use his official position to introduce or aid the progress or passage of legislation, a principal purpose of which is to further only his pecuniary interest.”

[...]

The Senate and House have similar ethics rules governing using the legislative process for personal financial gain. The section on conflicts of interest in the Senate Ethics Manual states: ‘‘No Member, officer, or employee shall knowingly use his official position to introduce or aid the progress or passage of legislation, a principal purpose of which is to further only his pecuniary interest.”

[...]

The House Ethics Manual says that “House precedents establish the rule that — where the subject matter before the House affects a class rather than individuals, the personal interest of Members who belong to the class is not such as to disqualify them from voting.”

  IB Times

Isn't that handy?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

On what planet?

ROFL.  "Very popular".  Not with American workers.

Poll after poll shows that more voters than not are opposed to their efforts. In fact, the GOP bill is one of the least popular tax plans since Ronald Reagan’s day.

About a third of voters currently support the Republican tax reform package, according to an average of five surveys released1 this month. In a Quinnipiac University survey, just 25 percent of voters approved of the plan. Surveys from ABC News/Washington Post, CNN, Morning Consult and YouGov put approval of the plan slightly higher, but all are still at 36 percent or lower.

  FiveThirtyEight

"A phenomenon that nobody even thought of."  There could be only two reasons to make that statement true:  1) Everybody was born yesterday with no clue about cause and effect; or 2) Everybody is shocked that corporations would give away money, because, guess what...they don't.

"The rage."  All those Scrooges got a visit from the Christmas ghosts, I guess.

"An unexpected new source of "love"."  Cue Tiny Tim.

This strikes me as a dangerous approach for The Most Notable Loser.  When his base begins to question whose workers are getting bonuses, because they're sure not, they won't be very happy. What? You don't work for AT&T or Comcast? Loser.

On Wednesday afternoon, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson announced his employees would get a Christmas bonus of $1,000. Now that the tax bill lowering the corporate tax rate to 21 percent had passed Congress, Stephenson wrote, the world’s largest telecom would, as promised, increase its investment in the United States by $1 billion next year—starting with a nice holiday bonus for all the company’s 200,000 employees

By nightfall, the company had been joined by Comcast, which offered a $1,000 Christmas bonus to non-executive employees. Two banks, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bancorp, announced they would raise their base pay to $15 an hour.

[...]

Even as corporate earnings have ascended to their largest share of GDP since the postwar boom, and corporations get better and better at dodging the taxman, wages and salaries now occupy their lowest share of GDP since the second world war. Real wages have barely budged upward since 1980—and have fallen for the lowest-paid workers. Wall Street actively cheers against pay bumps: When American Airlines announced raises for pilots and flight attendants, the company’s stock fell 5 percent.

[...]

Kevin Hassett, the chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, predicted earlier this year that the average household would receive a $4,000 to $9,000 raise from reducing business taxes alone. In October, the president himself promised $4,000 raises to truckers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Communications Workers of America, a union whose members are employed at big telecoms like AT&T and Verizon, asked bosses to put that figure in writing. They did not.

[...]

In fact, AT&T’s assurance that it would invest $1 billion in the U.S. was a bit of an outlier.

It’s not that they won’t be making more money: They are. Delta CEO Ed Bastian told analysts the corporate rate drop will give the company an extra $800 million next year. Wells Fargo estimated that AT&T and Verizon could make more than a billion dollars each just on “bonus depreciation,” which allows the companies to make deductions for capital costs like cell towers up front.

So far, though, most companies have said they’ll use the impending cash glut on stock buybacks and rising dividends, both rewards for shareholders who have sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average up by 25 percent this year in preparation for this moment.

[...]

Here are some highlights of corporate responses to the tax bill, courtesy of Thomson-Reuters: Boeing added $4 billion to an existing $14 billion repurchase program. Honeywell expanded its share buyback to $8 billion. Anthem put $5 billion into share buybacks. Home Depot $15 billion. Bank of America $5 billion. MasterCard $4 billion. T-Mobile USA $1.5 billion. According to a report released by Senate Democrats, companies announced $70 billion in buybacks just in the 10 days following the Senate tax bill’s first passage on Dec. 2.

[...]

[A] Boeing statement on Wednesday that announced “employee-related and charitable investments to spur innovation and growth.” The company would commit to $300 million in investments, including corporate giving, workforce development, and infrastructure enhancements for employees. No mention of wages. Southwest CEO Gary Kelly said his company would get a windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars, which he might use to modernize the company’s planes.

[...]

[A]t a conference in November, Trump’s chief economic advisor Gary Cohn asked a room full of CEOs who was planning to invest more if the tax bill passed. Almost no one raised a hand. “Why aren’t the other hands up?” Cohn asked.

  Slate

Now there's a first. Honesty among CEOs.

So if the trickle has begun, it’s not thanks to economics but to PR—and perhaps a little bit of human guilt that a bank or telecom company could, in 2017, pay workers less than $25,000 a year. (AT&T has a merger pending before Trump’s Department of Justice; it can’t hurt that the company was the first to vindicate, in a roundabout way, the president’s claims.)

Merry Christmas indeed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Those AT&T bonus checks will be covered by higher costs for AT&T service.  You knew there was a catch.



Merry Christmas from AT&T.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

h/t Jean

Something about the apple and the tree

Only more disgusting.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Free to tell the truth now - or something closer to it

November: This tax plan will pay for itself.

In an interview on Friday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said that “we’re confident that the $1.5 trillion gap would be filled” by economic growth.

[...]

Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin insisted last week that the House bill would not add to the deficit, even after an analysis by the independent Tax Foundation, which uses a model that tends to find large growth effects from tax cuts, found that the bill would add $1 trillion to deficits over a decade.

“We believe that we’re going to be fine on that,” Mr. Ryan said. “We believe that when you look at other analysis, whether it’s going to be Treasury or the rest, that we’re right there in the sweet spot, with economic growth that gives us more revenue with where we need to be.”

  NYT

December: Nobody knows if this bill will pay for itself.

“Are you saying that the growth you’re going to get from this tax cut will equal the amount it would cost on the deficit side, so that it’s a wash?” Savannah Guthrie asked Ryan in an interview Wednesday.

“Nobody knows the answer to that question, because that’s in the future,” Ryan said. “But what we do know is that this will increase economic growth.”

  TPM

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The end is near

Over the course of 2017, both in Congress and in the executive branch, we have watched the task of government devolve into the full-scale looting of America.

Politicians are making decisions to enrich their donors — and at times themselves personally — with a reckless disregard for any kind of objective policy analysis or consideration of public opinion.

[...]

Members of Congress who under other circumstances might be constrained by shame, custom, or the will of their constituents have learned from Trump’s election that you can get away with more than we used to think.

[...]

The sheer quantity of bad acts makes it impossible for anyone to hold anyone accountable.

[...]

Trump and Ryan have completely dissolved the norm against dishonesty to the point where there are no longer any whistleblowers in the Republican caucus or the world of conservative media. You just say whatever you want, and dole out favors to your friends — moving at such a rapid pace that the country’s ability to process what’s happening gets overwhelmed.

[...]

While Americans are fascinated by major legislative drama, endless sexual abuse scandals, endless Trump-Russia scandals, and countless inappropriate presidential Twitter outbursts, key regulators — almost uniformly drawn from the ranks of corporate America — are doling out favors at a pace that boggles the mind.

[...]

The swamp is running wild.

[...]

Moral and political responsibility for the looting ultimately rests on the shoulders of the GOP members of Congress who decided that the appropriate reaction to Trump’s inauguration was to start smashing and grabbing as much as possible for themselves and their donors rather than uphold their constitutional obligations.

  Vox

Greed is rampant in America. And the people at the top of the list know that there is another devastating financial crash on the way. They've been looting since before the 2008 crash. They're causing the crash. And they're looting everything they can before the final blow that takes the country down for the count.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The stupid

Not to mention that accountant fees and tax-filing software are tax deductible expenses.

Jesus.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

About that tax bill

[W]hen you’ve got a bill being compared to the Fugitive Slave Act, you’ve got a really dead fish on your hands—and the Republicans are now looking like such big fools in the gyrations they’re doing trying to pass it that they’re pretty much writing the Democratic commercials for 2018 every time they get in front of a microphone. Monday’s carnival act was Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, who’s retiring after this term and who, apparently, would like us to believe that he’s already checked out.

Corker, you may recall, opposed the original Senate tax bill because it will send the deficit spiraling into the Van Alen Belt, and he is what the pundits like to call a “deficit hawk.” Late last week, though, he came around and announced that he would be voting for the bill, which pretty much put paid to any Democratic attempt to jam things up, Lisa Murkowski having already been swayed by the vision of oil derricks against the Arctic sky and Susan Collins being god knows where from one moment to the next. However, at the last minute, a number of people—most notably, David Sirota and the crew at the International Business Times—noticed that a late revision in the bill would stand to make both Corker and the president* a pile of dough.

  Charles P Pierce

A last-minute addition to the tax plan will benefit people invested in real estate.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn then went on This Week [...]

STEPHANOPOULOS: [This provision] apparently was added at the last minute. Why was that done? Why was it necessary to include that provision?

CORNYN: Well, we were working very hard. It was a very intense process. As I said, the Democrats refused to participate. And what we’ve tried to do is cobble together the votes we needed to get this bill passed.

OK, so Cornyn didn’t say flat-out that they were trying to tempt Corker off his perch but, as I always say, a nod is as good as a wink to a blind trust. Naturally, on Monday, Corker pronounced himself shocked—SHOCKED!—at the suggestion that he might have changed his position because he stood to profit handsomely from doing so.

He also claimed he hadn't even read the new provision.

“I never saw the actual text.” Despite not reading the bill -- and having time to read it before the final vote scheduled for this week -- he reiterated his support for the bill...

Looked at in the best possible light, Corker’s conundrum illustrates the unseemly haste with which this transformational adjustment of the tax code was cobbled together in order to get the president* and the congressional Republicans a “win” before Christmas. At worst, it looks like Corker got bought off.

Call me jaded, but I suspect it's the latter. Collins, Rubio/Lee and Murkowski were both bought off with their own special deals.

Looked at in the best possible light, Corker’s conundrum illustrates the unseemly haste with which this transformational adjustment of the tax code was cobbled together in order to get the president* and the congressional Republicans a “win” before Christmas. At worst, it looks like Corker got bought off.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I think I know the answer to this one, too

They don't see that, Max.  They SAY that.  That's only for public consumption.  They could give a shit about democracy here or abroad either one.  When they look in the mirror, they see cunning power.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Color us stunned

As Congress races to finalize a landmark $1.4 trillion tax bill, key Republicans legislators directly overseeing the initiative could reap a personal windfall from provisions designed to reduce levies on so-called “pass-through” income, according to federal records reviewed by International Business Times. Those lawmakers — including U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan — together have tens of millions of dollars invested in scores of real-estate related pass-through corporations and partnerships, collectively earning them millions of dollars of annual income that could be partially exempted from taxes, depending on how the final legislation is structured.

  IB Times

Who could have imagined?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.