How GOP won Jeff Flake’s vote on tax bill: Phasing out business investment break

The bill previously called for ending the tax break after five years. That cliff was written into the bill to lower the size of the cost only on paper, though — Republicans had said that they hoped future Congresses would reinstate the cut.

Related: How Senate GOP got to ‘yes’

“That was the biggest gimmick in the bill, as I saw it,” Flake told reporters at the Capitol Friday. In effect, he said, the bill was putting future Congresses on the hook for about $500 billion of tax cuts, without acknowledging them on paper.

The change he got added to the bill would gradually phase out the provision, known as “expensing,” rather than eliminate it altogether, he said.

It “steps down in a way that we can hold and businesses have some surety,” he said. He argued that the phase-out would allow Congress to resist entreaties of corporate lobbyists to re-up expensing, because the break would disappear slowly and predictably rather than all at once.

Related: Susan Collins will vote for the GOP tax bill

In effect, in Flake’s logic, the change makes it so that the tax bill no longer includes an unacknowledged obligation for a business tax cut that could lose hundreds of billions in revenue.

Under current law, companies must deduct the cost of new equipment over a course of years, according to a complicated set of schedules. Expensing would allow businesses to write off such purchases in the year they are made.

The measure was enough to get Flake to declare that he would vote for the bill. In doing so, that left Tennessee’s Bob Corker isolated as the only senator holding out on the bill because of its deficit impact.

Flake said tax-writers had to come up with $34 billion in offsets to pay for the phase-out in expensing. But he couldn’t say what those offsets were.

To get Flake’s vote, leaders also promised to include him in discussions related to the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy.