Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Pat Toomey made the case Monday for tax reform legislation that lowers taxes, arguing that President Trump should not have to accept the higher levels of taxes instituted under President Obama.
“[O]ur economy is still laboring under the weight of more than $2 trillion in Obama tax increases,” the Republican wrote in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Accepting a net tax cut of this magnitude would simply restore us to the pre-Obama levels.”
Toomey, a member of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, is a leading advocate of advancing tax reform legislation with Republican votes only, using the legislative procedure known as budget reconciliation to avoid a Democratic filibuster.
To pass permanent tax reform through reconciliation, the bill would be required not to add to the deficit beyond the budget window. Typically, budgets are written with at 10-year budget window, but Toomey has advocated writing the budget with a 20-year or 30-year window, meaning that a net tax cut could last for that long. That would be “as close to permanent as we can get” he wrote in Monday’s piece.
The Toomey strategy would allow Republicans to pass functionally permanent, revenue-losing tax reform without involving Democrats. In contrast, House Republican tax legislators have called for tax reform that does not add to the deficit, in order to make it permanent through reconciliation.
“A Republican Congress and White House should neither entrench the higher tax levels that have contributed to dismal economic results nor sacrifice action to pay for what is clearly a problem caused by entitlement spending,” Toomey wrote Monday, saying that the tax hikes of the Obama era should be reversed.
The tax cuts passed under the George W. Bush administration in 2001 and 2003 were enacted through reconciliation. As a result, some of the tax cuts for high-income earners expired at the end of 2012, constituting one of the major Obama-era tax increases. The Obama administration also raised taxes to finance the health insurance subsidies and Medicaid expansions in Obamacare. Last week, House Republicans passed legislation that would undo many of those taxes.
