Pelosi, make those tax cuts permanent

Democrats griped about one particular provision in the 2017 tax cut bill, and now they are in a position to fix it. They railed that tax breaks for individuals would expire but those for businesses would not. Now that they run the House, they can help make individual tax cuts permanent.

When Democrats declared the apocalypse a year ago and called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “the worst bill in the history of Congress,” they based half of their argument on the misleading claim that the bill was really a middle-class tax hike.

“I'm concerned, obviously, about this tax bill because it's going to raise taxes on the middle class," Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said during the debate. “The truth is this tax [plan] raises middle-class taxes.”

Actually that wasn't the truth, but Gillibrand’s statement was typical of Democrats in those days and was echoed by much of the major media. Yet the legislation cut taxes for 70 to 80 percent of taxpayers. The median family of four is estimated to save about $2,000 a year. Democrats and their enablers get away with their lie by pointing out that the bill’s individual tax cuts expire in 2026, at which point middle-class taxes will return to where they were before they were cut. The sunset was necessary to keep the headline cost of the legislation below a level at which the Democrats would be able filibuster it to death.

Come 2025, tax rates are scheduled to go up again, and the standard deduction will shrink along with the child tax credit. But the law’s new, less generous formula for calculating inflation would stay in place, leaving many taxpayers in a higher tax bracket than they would have been absent the law.