The House has one, and the Senate has one.  The Wall Street Journal, oddly, is making out like the differences between the two are enormous.  Yet, here’s the WSJ‘s own chart illustrating these humongous differences.

The big differences the WSJ singles out are these:

The big ways the Senate version breaks with the House plan: the level of top individual tax rates, the number of individual tax brackets, the timing of a corporate tax-rate cut and the particulars of estate tax changes[.]

How big are these differences, really?  The top level doesn’t even differ by a per centage point, and the number of brackets only differ in how finely income should be subdivided.  The timing of the corporate tax-rate is a matter of a year, again a small difference: put it in place in 6 months, rather than immediately; cut the rate to 27% this year and 20% next; and on and on—even trading this year vs next for something else.  Estate tax changes differ only in repeal or not—in 6 years, a lifetime in politics, a complete Senate election cycle.

Even the differences the paper elides, keeping or eliminating deductions for SALT, medical expenses, and student loan interest, is tiny.  Most folks don’t itemize, which is the only place these deductions even exist, and with the standard deduction doubled all around (personally, rather than a single/married standard deduction, I’d rather see the standard deduction keyed to the then-current year Federal Poverty Guideline, but that’s a trivial difference at present, too) and lowered personal income tax rates, the value of those deductions shrinks even further, especially for those who still would itemize.

No, the two versions blatantly, firmly, agree on the principles and the degree to which those principles should be satisfied in the tax reform effort underway.  They differ on numbers and timing—all small things that are easily resolved, except to the extent the Republican Snowflake Three in the Senate get in the way and to the extent the My Way of the Highway collection of House members let their egos get in the way.

There are, unfortunately, some Republican Congressmen who don’t get it.  One such is Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R, NY).

I worry about the way this bill erodes the deduction for state and local taxes, which has been in place since 1913.  …  This would compound the already excruciating financial burden that my state’s lawmakers have placed on New Yorkers.

How long the deduction has been in place is only an indication of the age of the error, nothing else.

More importantly, the decision of New York’s politicians to have such a usurious State tax code in no way obligates the rest of us to support the foolishness of SALT. If New York politicians—including Tenney—and those of other high-tax States truly are worried about the fiscal welfare of their citizens, they’d work to reform their State’s tax code and reduce their State’s tax rates and thereby allow their State’s citizens to keep more of their money.

At the Federal level, politicians like Tenney would work to reduce—even eliminate—Federal transfers of the hard-earned funds of one State’s citizens to another State absent a regional or national emergency. New York, for instance, sends more of its citizens’ money to other States than it receives from other States’ citizens; such a reform would seem highly attractive to the State’s politicians.

Included in the Federal tax reform plan now on offer is the elimination of the deduction for State And Local Taxes (primarily income and sales taxes; property taxes would remain deductible up to a cap).  Republican Congressmen from high-SALT States object to that elimination, and they base their objection on the premise that these high-tax States actually send more of their States’ citizens’ money to DC than they get back from DC in other funds.

That seems a fair beef to the extent that it’s accurate, which raises a question in my pea brain.

What are these Congressmen proposing in the way of tax reform and spending reform to reduce the amount of their constituents’ money—and the money of all States’ citizens—that gets sent to DC?  Surely, they can think of ways to reduce such regional redistributions (they are Republicans, after all), or even eliminate them absent a national or regional emergency.

These Congressmen’s silence on that bit strongly suggests that their objections are not principled, but simply personal power and ego stroking.