Should-Read: Josh Barro: Something very stupid is happening in the Senate right now

Should-Read: And now the frat boys who haven’t done the reading for their Model Budget Simulation course are are winging it have decided to fix things by pulling all-nighters: Josh Barro: Something very stupid is happening in the Senate right now : “The Joint Committee on Taxation’s report on the Senate Republican tax bill was unsurprising…

…Tax cuts outlined in the bill come nowhere close to paying for themselves. Sen. Bob Corker’s proposed solution—a trigger that would roll back some of the tax cuts if economic projections were not met after several years—is fundamentally flawed. If the bill is adjusted to win Corker’s vote, it may actually discourage business investment over the next few years.

Nobody should have been surprised about the Joint Committee on Taxation’s analysis of the Senate Republican tax bill, which was released Thursday…. Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, for one, noted that the report says what he was expecting it to say…. Yet Sen. Bob Corker, who has said he wouldn’t vote to add “one penny” to the federal debt, seems to have been under the impression, until Thursday afternoon, that the Senate bill might come within the ballpark of meeting that pledge…. Adding to the mess, the Senate parliamentarian informed Republicans that Corker’s idea for a “trigger”—a mechanism that would roll back some of the tax cuts if economic projections were not met after several years—violates Senate rules. So now Corker is apparently demanding a reduction of the tax cuts….

This is not a very smart way to reduce the cost of the bill, for a couple of reasons: One is that, if you shrink the corporate tax cuts, you’ll reduce the revenue loss—but you’ll also reduce the positive economic effects, so you’ll still have a big deficit problem. This is kind of like trying to crawl out of a sand trap; you’ll keep falling back in. Another is that making the corporate tax-rate cut temporary is an especially bad idea when combined with another provision of the Republican bill, which temporarily allows businesses to write off capital expenses in the year of purchase…. IAll of which is to say, if the bill is adjusted in this manner to win Corker’s vote, it may actually have the effect of discouraging business investment over the next few years, reducing economic growth…