UPDATE:  Trump just signed the bill before blowing out of town to Cheeto Lago.  He didn’t get the PayGo waiver, so cuts to Medicare and other social programs should begin in early 2018.  It looks like Trump, like with so many of these issues, could care less what happens to Congress, or he has some trick up his sleeve in a signing statement.  This will be interesting to watch.

There’s a LOT in Trump’s tax bill to be upset about, especially after the vomit-inducing love fest at the White House Wednesday when the sucking up by Congressional Republicans got so pervasive that they actually dropped the barometric pressure in Washington.  This bill is bad, horrible, unsettling, __________ (add your descriptor here).  This bill is so bad that even Marketwatch, owned by the Wall Street Journal, published an editorial this week called The Four Worst Things About the Tax Bill.   And here are those four things: 1) It’s Unnecessary – the economy is growing at an average 2.3% which is normal for our economy and is stable with the growth of the work force.  US corporations are sitting on piles of cash already.  Trump yesterday said that this tax cut will increase our grow rate from 3% to 6%, which is a blatant lie. The economy historically grows at 2 to 3% and tax cuts have little to no long term effect on the economy.  2) It’s Inefficient – We already know what’s going to happen with this windfall to corporations; they’re going to buy back stock.  There will be little short term gain and virtually no long term gain, AND we’ll add over a trillion dollars to our accumulated deficit just because we can. 3) It’s Unjust – Tax cuts for corporations are permanent.  The tiny tax cuts received by the majority of Americans will vaporize in 10 years.  In the interim, Donald Trump and his cronies in Congress stand to put millions of dollars in their own pockets through preferential cuts to taxes on their incomes. 4) It’s corrupt – this is nothing but a shopping list for big GOP donors.  It repeals the ACA mandate; it keeps the carried interest deduction for hedge fund and private equity executives; it opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil development.  And, as I already mentioned, it includes the #CorkerKickback, giving preferential treatment to passive income from real estate.

As you dig into the 500 page bill, it gets worse and worse, but that’s not the actual worst of it.  The worst is that the drama and rush to get this bill passed was 100% Kabuki.  The drive to getting this bill on the books by yearend was complete and total fabricated bullshit.  After rushing the bill through, Trump is now sitting on it and won’t sign it until January.  The reason?  The gigantic deficit that this bill creates will trigger the Pay as You Go budget provisions enacted by Congress originally under Reagan and HW Bush which will require mandatory spending cuts including Medicare and Social Security.  If the bill is signed this year, those cuts will come early 2018, which is political suicide for Republicans.  The only way the mandatory cuts would not occur is if Congress passed a waiver to PayGo, but that would require 8 Democrats to cross over and vote with the GOP, and that will NEVER happen after they ran over the Dems to pass this bill before the end of the year.  So, everyone just went home, and Trump is headed off to Cheeto Lago for Christmas.

So, by signing the bill in January, the mandatory spending cuts will come AFTER the mid-term elections, and most voters won’t realize they’ve been pantsed once again while they stupidly vote for the people who are doing the pantsing.

This is not a “giant Christmas present” as Trump calls it.  It’s nothing but a giant bait and switch.