Issue link: http://palletcentral.uberflip.com/i/1099303
palletcentral.com PalletCentral • January-February 2019 11 expenditures be offset with revenue raisers, though Congress could waive the rule. Elsewhere, House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth will examine rolling back the corporate- tax-rate cut from the current 21 percent to as much as 28 percent in his fiscal 2020 budget resolution, as Roll Call reported the first part of January. The resolution, however, is non-binding. New, firebrand House progressives didn't get as many seats on the tax-writing committee as they had angled for, with the extra Democratic seats on the coveted House Ways and Means Committee going to veteran lawmakers instead. Progressive groups had made an online push for Reps. Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to get a seat on the tax writing Ways and Means Committee but were rebuffed. Half of the 10 new Democratic committee members belong to the progressive caucus, but don't have the activist style that Ocasio- Cortez has shown in her first days on Capitol Hill. That could be a blow to a progressive tax platform. Ocasio- Cortez could have drawn public and media attention to the committee, driving members to adopt a more progressive legislative strategy, even if it would have been a dead end in the Senate. Ocasio-Cortez may still get a seat on the Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over banks and other lenders, as well as insurance, public and assisted housing, and real estate. Kumar said Democrats will likely stake out like raising the corporate rate or repealing the doubling of the estate-tax exemption to pay for ambitious policy proposals. But if they take back control of the government in the 2020 elections, they could run into the same trouble as Republicans in their effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. "The risk for Democrats, and this is what Republicans experienced between 2010 and 2017, is it's actually a lot easier to get the votes for these sorts of proposals when everybody knows it has no chance on God's green Earth of becoming law," Kumar said. In that respect, the nascent efforts to roll back portions of the 2017 tax law could end up looking like Republican attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. The GOP-controlled House voted over 50 times to repeal the ACA but struggled to do so in 2017 when a Republican White House would have signed the legislation. The effort ultimately failed in the Senate after John McCain voted down the bill. "I think they would find that whatever consensus they achieved over the last two years might not be as real as it appears because now that you are shooting with live bullets," Kumar said. What does this mean to those involved in the business of pallet manufacturing? There will likely be few major changes in the tax code until at least 2021, as Congress is divided between a majority of Republicans in the Senate and a Democratic-controlled House. The White House is still occupied by a pro-business President. There will be much rhetoric, but cutting through the noise, the landscape shows little change. The division, though, does mean there will be more disruption and instability to the economy and the country. As of the time of the writing of this article we are under the longest furlough and government shut down in our nation's history. PC "The risk for Democrats, and this is what Republicans experienced between 2010 and 2017, is it's actually a lot easier to get the votes for these sorts of proposals when everybody knows it has no chance on God's green Earth of becoming law." –ROHIT KUMAR, A PRINCIPAL AT PWC