Professor Rebecca Kysar Co-Authors New York Times Op-ed on Republican Tax Bill
Republicans are on the verge of achieving their decades-long goal of a tax overhaul, but the victory will be fleeting, argues Professor Rebecca Kysar in an op-ed she co-authored in the Dec. 20 edition of The New York Times.
Noting that no Democrats supported the legislation, Kysar and Fordham Law Professor Linda Sugin explain how the failure of Republicans to work in a bipartisan manner to develop the bill, along with poor policy choices, has created built-in instability and serious issues that will need to be addressed in the future.
“The deficit-increasing bill that resulted tilts heavily toward the very rich, financing tax cuts on the backs of future generations. These policies not only face the risk of being undone by a future Democratic majority, but also could indeed prove to be so lopsided as to alienate the more centrist of Republicans,” Kysar and Sugin write. “Worse, Republicans now aim to take advantage of the instability they’ve created by cutting so-called entitlements like Medicare down the line, burdening the poor and the middle class.”
Kysar and Sugin also highlight policy choices in the bill that they believe will create uncertainty or have other unfortunate consequences. These include a permanent rate cut for corporations with only “modest and temporary relief for individuals” that will expire in 2025; a deduction for pass-through income “lacking any justification and favoring certain industries over others;” and international tax reforms “that appear to violate World Trade Organization agreements” while seemingly increasing incentives for offshoring assets and income.
They predict the new tax bill ultimately will falter due to its many flaws and will be reversed when rosy GOP predictions do not materialize.
“Republicans could have chosen to work with Democrats to enact more lasting, balanced and thoughtful changes to the tax system,” Kysar and Sugin write. “They didn’t, and now they will have to live with the consequences. Their victory on taxes is likely to prove fleeting. If so, maybe then they will be ready for real reform.”
At the Law School, Kysar teaches and researches in the areas of federal income tax, international tax, and the federal budget and tax legislative processes. She is widely published in top law journals such as Cornell Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Journal of International Law, and sought as a presenter at various forums, including the Columbia Tax Policy Colloquium, the Harvard Law School Seminar on Tax Law, Policy, and Practice, and the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium.
Read Kysar’s analysis of the international tax reforms in this white paper.