See the table below, from The Wall Street Journal.  While the Left and its NLMSM emphasize the differences, and the Progressive-Democratic Party denizens rail at the claimed iniquities in their manufactured dudgeon, the tax reform bills on offer from the House and the Senate are remarkably similar.  The agree right down the line on the goals of tax reform, and they agree right down that same line on the means of achieving those goals.  The differences between the two bills are matters of degree, details bordering on trivial.

Tax rates and brackets differ only slightly, even the Senate’s seven brackets only amount to a finer parsing of income.  In both bills, the death tax disappears for at least eight years—four House election cycles, a Senate election cycle, and two Presidential election cycles.  It’ll be tough, even for the Progressive-Democratic Party, to let the death tax reappear after that amount of time, and the same difficulty will exist for letting the individual tax cuts disappear.

The biggest difference is with the Medical Expense deduction, but that effect on our general taxes or on Federal revenues flowing from the tax code reform is minor; settling it entirely in favor of one house or the other, without compromise, should be easily doable.

The House-Senate Conference should be able to settle these minor differences quickly.  Whether the Conference Bill passes both houses then will depend in large part on the egos of a very few snowflake Republican Senators.  Keep their votes in mind come primary season.

The Wall Street Journal Friday opined that a House-Senate conference on the tax reform bills passed by the House and then-on offer by the Senate (since passed, with some changes to the on-offer version) could improve on the two bills and produce a better one for final passage and President’s signature.  The Editorial Board is right as far as it goes.

Notably in the context of their piece and this post, one of those changes to the Senate’s version that was included in what finally was passed was a change to their complete removal of State and local taxes: the Senate-passed version now includes the House’s deductibility of up to $10,000 in property taxes paid.

But the Editorial Board included this in their piece:

…the bill’s biggest flaw, which is a lousy individual tax reform that raises taxes on many Americans in high-tax states. Eliminating the state-and-local income tax deduction, as both bills do, is sound policy. But the bills don’t offset that with a corresponding reduction in the top marginal tax rate.

This is disingenuous because the editorialists know better. It’s certainly true that, with SALT deductions severely restricted (only that $10k max deduction), citizens of Progressive-Democratic Party-run States likely will pay more in State and local taxes. But to call this a raise in taxes on those Americans is obviously false. Those (excessively) high State and local taxes were already in place, and the House and Senate tax reform bills do not, cannot, touch them.

The “offset” needed is not a “reduction in the top [Federal] marginal tax rate;” although such a reduction would be optimal in its own right.  No, the offset actually needed is for State and local politicians, with encouragement from those States’ Congressional delegations, to reform their own tax codes and reduce their own States’ spending.

It would seem that some members of the “Editorial Board” reside in New York and New Jersey while others phone it in from California.