Today (11/16/2017) the floor of the House passed the House tax reform bill. The earlier version is here .
Today also the Senate Finance committee passed the Senate tax reform bill. See link
Do not yet have the final versions of either bill but suspect that we are not helped in the bills. Will post here final versions when they become available.
Listen to the C-span clip found by BB in which Residence-based taxation is mentioned by Golding and Brady in the House tax bill debate — none of this however, appears to have been incorporated into the House or Senate bills passed on 11/16/2017
Republicans Overseas (RO) continues to press on, to make changes in the final tax package that will help us. The fight is not yet over, but it continues, right from the beginning, to be an uphill battle — and the odds don’t seem very good right now. RO says: “Again we need to focus on the Senate side since this fight is far from over.”
Personally, it makes no sense to me to blame Solomon and the handful of people at Republicans Overseas for trying to make a change and, so far, failing. Yesterday a friend reminded me that there was this Ismene, who kept telling her sister Antigone that it was pointless to even “try”: “…but you’re bound to fail…No sense in starting a hopeless task…Go then, if you are determined, to your folly, etc. etc.” Antigone responded: “When I have tried and failed, [then] I shall have failed.”
It HARMS us. There will never be another opportunity like we thought we had this time. However, I commend all the efforts made to try to make things right via tax reform. All I can hope for now is that as few expats as possible DO NOT FEED THE CONDORS!
@All….well you can see I have vented the steam off.
I now consider this hopelss and we have been lied to by the GOP and then Candidate Trump but all that said……
There is still going to be a lot of adding and subtracting as happens with all Bills in BOTH Chambers.
Amendments will be voted on in the House.
There will be a Senate Bill with Amendments.
That said a liar must be called what they are…..a liar. And that just might be what tips the balance to us……they do not care about us but they do care about themselves and probably do not want to affirm they are a liars.
Oh one other point…….it does not take a major amendment to bring great change.
A very small tiny amendment can do great things if worded or punctuated carefully.
Hope is not lost……just the barn door has fallen off the hinges….
Damn. I was thinking I’d start voting GOP.
Now I don’t know how to vote!
Vote with your feet.
@ FredB
Time for you to start singing La Marseillaise instead of the star spangled banner.
Plaxy:
Funny, my dad always said that. He said it when he left France for the US and again when he moved back.
You and he are right.
Best thing I ever did.
Well – second best. Best was leaving the US, years ago, and living my life in a free country.
Some discussion is beginning here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/AmericanExpatriates/
But nothing here yet:
https://www.facebook.com/republicansoverseas
@Embee……trying to find a shred of goodness……
It might be better that we hope we are an add on later as that will be less controversial than being in the front end?
Hey, lets say you live in an apartment that has a no cat rule. Better to bring the cat home under cover of darkness instead of in the daylight by the front door.
Watching cspan3
Pelosi is slamming the HW&M tax reform bill, with Schumer at her side/to follow.
Neal & Wyden are also standing there…………’
Schumer – “We will fight this tooth & nail……….”
*******
Gary Cohn is explaining the logic of making relocation in the U.S. appealing to corporations. (What a contrast).
I’m really surprised by this result – the chatter on this subject was more than it has been recently (Forbes, Financial Times had articles even) and I thought with the pro-business features of this reform package then it would have been included. Something seems off – I’m not sure it is shock but I’m hopeful that it will be included via some back and forth over the next weeks. The overseas revenue from citizens is not worth it – they don’t make enough to cover the expense of supporting it.
I’ll say this – I read a lot of the problems that come up from our situation but I don’t ever hear of any actual occurences of people being caught out by the IRS unless they are in some legal trouble to begin with – FATCA is different, that hurts us b/c the foreign banks are complying and we’re caught up in this dragnet. But the taxation rules – does anyone know of them ever even being enforced? IRS is severly underfunded and the Rs are further tightening…
@George
I am thinking of Solomon & Michael as fellow workers – not as apologists for the Republican Party.
I hate it when people do not appreciate what is done. There are 2 people doing the work at RO. That is all I meant.
This is a HUGE disappointment but I’m with Bubblebustin. This isn’t over until Nov. 6 (or will it be Nov. 7 now?) when the “mark-up” results are in. It may be that for some reason our issue has been meant to be added-on at the later date. I will give up hope only when that mark-up comes back “zero” for us.
IF “zero” is, indeed, our bottom line I ask you to please stay tuned for some action on the UN Complaint which has been sitting in the queue for over three years now awaiting attention by the UN Human Rights Committee. If “zero” is really the US government’s answer to the hundreds of letters it has received over the past many years and the thousands of petition signatures it has received recently we are going to have to go “international” in a big way. I will be asking for everyone’s help and advice. Stay tuned! Today is NOT the end!
By the way, Stephen, I am trusting everyone else’s reading of this document at the moment as I am not able to access the link to the House Ways and Means document. Obviously I will need to read the real thing before I start writing anything to the UN. I see you have already posted a different link than your original one but do you have yet another alternative I can use? Thanks!
AND, my huge thanks to RO for everything they did and, indeed, everybody else who tried hard as well to get us noticed. This was a huge effort and I simply won’t believe it didn’t bear any fruit at all until we know this for absolute sure. We need to hang on one more week!
@ George
Right on … especially when there are rabid dogs in the foyer waiting to tear everything non-dog into shreds. My apologies to the critters — I love ’em all — just needed a metaphor.
Muzzled,
Tricia is now adding a permanent link.
@MuzzledNoMore
This one seems to work, even from Tor : https://www.scribd.com/document/363306066/Tax-Cuts-and-Jobs-Act
Thank you Stephen, Tricia and Jefferson. The links worked great! The Table of Contents alone speaks volumes. Will spend some time looking through this in greater detail. Many thanks, again.
@Patricia, I know what you are saying in regards to Solomon and there has been a ton of work. That said he now needs to make a statement and what we have is a pig with lipstick on it. To be blunt and honest if this issue is not deserving of a tiny crumb, he should resign from the RNC.
@EmBee, my initial doubts came with the Obamacare fiasco in which the GOP pledged to repeal and replace it. In my book a promise made must be a promise kept.
To be honest, if there are no crumbs for expats……I pray the whole bill collapses and the GOP is relegated to the dustbin. A liar deserves deserves absolute scorn and fury.
A huge thank you to Solomon and the RO for all of their efforts. As for the Republican party,
fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…..
I have zero support left for these people.
I have not gone through the detail. I imagined that even if RBT was not mentioned that the simplification measures for all tax payers would lighten the load for those tax compliant.
In past months I did have this thought: instead of a call to dismantle statures of confederate generals, the call should be to dismantle the capitol building, on the grounds that Democracy is broke and that Congress only is out to work for Congress and not the people. That was not the intention of the founding fathers.