Must-read: Josh Barro: “Rubio Tax Cut Got Bigger and Bigger”

Must-Read: Josh Barro: Rubio Tax Cut Got Bigger and Bigger: “If you want an insight into what Senator Marco Rubio’s instincts on policy are…

…just look at what happened when he got his hands on another senator’s tax cut plan: It became about three times larger, and way more tilted toward the rich. Mr. Rubio’s recently announced tax plan is a descendant of the ‘Family Fairness and Opportunity Tax Reform Act,’ introduced in 2013 by Mr. Rubio’s fellow Senate Republican, Mike Lee…. The Lee plan went for a sizable tax cut: $2.4 trillion over 10 years, or about 6 percent of then-projected federal revenues…. The top 1 percent of taxpayers would have gotten a 2.8 percent increase to their after-tax income…. (The top 0.1 percent did better, with a 3.8 percent increase to income.)…

As Mr. Rubio got involved, the price started to soar. The plan was rebranded as the Economic Growth and Family Fairness Tax Plan, and as usual, ‘economic growth’ was code for large tax cuts for owners of capital…. Rich people with capital income weren’t the only big winners under the Rubio-Lee plan; there was also a large new benefit for people with low incomes. The original Lee plan had included a $2,000-per-person tax credit replacing the standard deduction, but you could take the credit only against income tax you actually owed. The Rubio-Lee plan generously revised this credit to be ‘refundable,’ meaning it could lead to a negative income tax bill for people with low incomes. But there’s a catch: It’s not clear the senators had decided exactly how refundable the tax credit would be….

Rubio apparently was not yet done with his Oprah act. In October, now running for president, Mr. Rubio announced his own stand-alone version…. Mr. Rubio’s current plan would cost $6.8 trillion over the 10-year budget window. That is, 16 percent of currently projected federal tax revenues over that period, and nearly three times the size of Mr. Lee’s plan from less than three years ago…. Rubio’s biggest tax cuts, by far, are at the top. His new plan would raise incomes for the top one-thousandth of taxpayers by 8.9 percent — that is, an average tax cut of more than $900,000 per year — because of its sharp cuts in tax rates on business income and capital income. Of course, all that assumes Mr. Rubio could find a way to finance a 16 percent overall cut in federal taxes…