US Senate passes sweeping tax changes News
US Senate passes sweeping tax changes

The US Senate [official website] approved some version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act [official materials] by a vote of 51-49 [roll call] early Saturday morning.

The Senate’s consideration of the proposed legislation began at 10:00 am Friday, and more than 200 amendments [official materials] were considered as part of the final bill, some of which are surely part of what the Senate now must take to conference with the House of Representatives.

As of late Friday evening, the bill being considered contained numerous handwritten revisions [text, PDF], indicating that the legislation was evolving until quite close to the time of final approval. As such, it’s going to take a minute to process what’s actually in the bill that passed.

What we can say is that it reduces the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 20%, and compresses the previous seven marginal tax brackets for individual incomes to four, at 12%, 25%, 35%, and 39.6%. Notably, the highest bracket rate remains unchanged, although it’s not entirely clear what incomes those rates apply to.

One late addition was the reconsideration of eliminating the deductibility of state and local taxes (SALT) in favor of a $10,000 cap on such deductions.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) [official website] estimates that the bill would add $1.47 trillion [report, PDF] to the deficit, largely in line with an earlier estimate [report, PDF] provided by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) [official website].

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