What the tax cut means

Well they passed it. What now? For most of us, it means that, in February, we're going to get a little bump in our paychecks. Of course, there is a huge catch.

An average American family of four will get keep an extra $2,059 of their income, House Speaker Paul Ryan has said in a tweet pinned to his Twitter feed.

While that’s true in the first year, the tax cut diminishes over time and ultimately disappears altogether in 2025, when Republicans sunset almost all the individual tax relief provisions. According to a new analysis from the Tax Policy Center, even when the bill offers an across-the-board tax cut, in the first years of its implementation upper-middle- and upper-class Americans would receive most of the benefits. Nearly two-thirds of the benefits go to the richest fifth of Americans in 2018, as Vox’s Dylan Matthews explained.

So for the first few years you get a bit more money in your check.  Much of that will be immediately swallowed up by your ISP as they start to charge you more money for a shittier internet.  Also, of course, you will never be allowed to retire.

But that's just the stuff that's going to happen to you. And, in the dawning century, unless your name is Wyatt Koch or some such, what happens to you probably doesn't matter all that much.  What really matters now is what happens to the Republicans who voted for this thing.  And, in that case, I have some bad news.  I think they're gonna be just fine.

One of the key political difficulties the Democrats had with regard to Obamacare was the slow roll out of benefits. Key provisions of the law were scheduled to phase in over a period of years. And the overall aim of reducing insurance premiums for average people, always a dubious prospect, was itself not expected to take effect until years down the road.  All of this meant that the tangible benefits of the law wouldn't be immediately evident to most voters in time for it to affect the midterms.

The tax cut bill works in exactly the opposite way.  In a few short months, it will look for a moment as if everybody got a tax break. Now, we know that's not really what's happening. But for the period of time that concerns the 2018 midterms any counterargument to "We just made your paycheck bigger!" will be a tough sell at best.

Democrats who are hoping to turn anger at the rightfully unpopular tax law into wins next fall will have to be wary of this.  It may not go the way they think it's going to.