The Full List Of Every GOP Senator Who Stands To Be Personally Enriched By The Tax Bill
by David Sirota of International Business Times
ZeroHedge.com
Dec 19, 2017
When the U.S. Senate takes up the final tax bill this week, more than a quarter of all GOP senators will be voting on a bill that includes a special provision that could give them a new tax cut through their real estate shell companies, according to federal records reviewed by International Business Times.
The provision was not in the original bill passed by the Senate on Dec. 1. It was embedded in the final bill by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is among the lawmakers that stand to personally benefit from the provision.
In response to Democratic lawmakers who have slammed the provision as a lobbyist-sculpted giveaway to the rich, Republican Majority Whip John Cornyn promoted on Twitter a column by Ryan Ellis, a registered bank lobbyist who has been working to influence the tax legislation and who has defended the provision.
In all, 14 Republican senators (see list below) hold financial interests in 26 income-generating real-estate partnerships — worth as much as $105 million in total. Those holdings together produced between $2.4 million and $14.1 million in rent and interest income in 2016, according to federal records.
IBT first reported on the tax carve-out, which allows investors in “pass-through” entities, including real-estate partnerships such as LLCs and LPs, with few employees to deduct part of their income that passes through those partnerships. In response to IBT’s reporting, Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who owns up to $35 million in “pass-through” real-estate interests, claimed he did not know of the carve-out when he announced his support for the legislation on Friday, after previously casting the only Republican vote against the bill in the Senate, which did not then include the provision.
In the face of a Twitter-trending hashtag #CorkerKickback, Corker has been vociferously defended by Liam Donovan, a registered lobbyist for the construction and real estate industry who is lobbying Congress on tax reform and specifically on “pass-through rates,” according to federal records.
While Republicans have argued the House version of the bill contained the controversial provision, experts have told IBT the provision appeared in the legislation only after the bill was finalized during House-Senate Conference Committee deliberations.
“The mechanism is completely new and can’t be found in any prior version of the bill,” Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute of Economics and Tax Policy, previously told IBT.
Because the provision was added by the conference committee, it is “unlikely to have been fully priced into the revenue estimate, because the new provision was never subject to the benefits of crowdsourced analysis of all its implications,” University of Southern California law professor Edward Kleinbard told IBT.
The Rest…HERE
