Tax Reform News: President’s Remarks; Bill Might be Proposed End of October

On October 11, the President delivered remarks to truckers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on tax reform – watch the full speech here. The speech followed four main themes as the President made the case for tax reform:

• Making the process easy, simple and fair for taxpayers.
• Giving America a pay raise.
• Ensuring that workers and corporations both benefit from reform.
• Bringing back funds from offshore.

On the Congressional front, ANCOR expects to see tax reform legislation that follows the proposal agreed upon by the White House, House GOP and Senate GOP by the end of October or mid-November at the latest. That is because, as mentioned in the previous WICs, Congressional Republicans want to use the 2018 budget reconciliation process as a vehicle for tax reform. This would be similar to how they used the 2017 budget process for health care reform and cuts to Medicaid. This means that both the House and Senate need to complete their budget resolutions before introducing a tax reform bill.

In terms of the budget resolutions, the House passed its resolution the week of October 9, and the Senate is expected to pass its resolution the week of October 16. While resolutions are legally non-binding, they are viewed as governing documents. Because the House budget has no deficit while the Senate budget has a $1.5 trillion deficit over 10 years, both sides will need to come to an agreement before revealing the text of the tax reform bill and introducing it.

ANCOR continues to closely monitor the development of tax reform. That is because the pressure proposed tax cuts could place on the federal budget could lead Congressional Republicans to either include Medicaid cuts and caps in the legislation as a pay-for, or lead to caps and cuts in the years following tax reform. As the contents of the bill become public, we will keep our members informed on opportunities to act.

In the meantime, we continue to urge ANCOR members to educate their Members of Congress on the importance of Medicaid for people with disabilities.