The Senate GOP Accidentally Undermined $300 Billion of Corporate Tax Cuts

In their mad dash to pass their ludicrously awful tax bill, Senate Republicans appear to have inadvertently erased some of their own proposed tax cuts.

The Senate passed its version of the tax reform bill late Friday night. Not caring that the bill was deeply unpopular with other lawmakers and the overwhelming majority of the nation, the GOP was so desperate for some kind of legislative victory that senators were adding new provisions and canceling old ones in handwritten notes on the margins of the bill’s pages. One of these handwritten changes involved the alternative minimum tax.

Slate reports that the GOP had originally planned to repeal the AMT. Their explanation for how the provision works is that it’s “basically a parallel tax code meant to prevent companies from zeroing out their IRS bills. It doesn’t allow businesses to take as many tax breaks but, in theory, is also supposed to have a lower rate.”

Here’s where the GOP got itself into trouble. See, the whole idea of their tax reform bill is to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (it has been estimated that 80% of their reform will benefit no one but the top one percent of Americans). So anything in the bill that doesn’t favor their corporate overlords is a big, fat no-no. But when Republicans added the AMT back in, they left the minimum rate at 20%. The problem was, they had also just lowered the overall corporate tax rate to 20%, so the AMT wouldn’t give corporations a lower tax rate—it would only prevent them from getting certain tax breaks, like the research and development break and the participation exemption.