Everybody loves the R&D tax credit. But when you pass a tax bill so fast that no one knows what’s really in it—and then top it off with a 24 hour gold rush of pet giveaways for all your favorite pals—accidents can happen. Like effectively getting rid of the R&D tax credit:

Late Friday, just hours before the Senate voted 51-49 to pass the bill, which included about $1.4 trillion in tax cuts, Republicans decided to preserve the corporate alternative minimum tax instead of repealing it as planned. The change helped them provide money for other priorities lawmakers demanded to include in the legislation.

….The alternative minimum tax is a parallel tax system with low rates and few tax breaks. Under the present system, the corporate alternative minimum of 20% is rarely applicable to business filers, who end up paying a higher 35% tax rate and can have lower effective rates by claiming breaks that aren’t affected by the AMT. But the corporate rate is now proposed to be 20%, so the overhaul could drive many companies into the AMT—and force them to lose some of their breaks in the process.

….Murray Energy Corp., an Ohio-based firm and the largest privately held U.S. coal-mining company, complained that the AMT decision and the Senate’s tougher limits on interest deductions made a “mockery out of so-called tax reform.”

Robert Murray, the company’s chief executive officer, said the Senate tax plan would raise his tax bill by $60 million. “What the Senate did, in their befuddled mess, is drove me out of business and then bragged about the fact that they got some tax reform passed,” Mr. Murray said Sunday. “This is not job creation. This is not stimulating income. This is driving a whole sector of our community into nonexistence.”

Pshaw. There’s no longer any need to provide incentives for R&D. The Republican tax bill will unleash a tidal wave of business activity, and all that extra profit will be plowed back into business growth. It will not be used for stock buybacks and higher dividends. That’s just liberal class warfare talk. I’m sure Mr. Murray has nothing to worry about.

From Fox’s Lou Dobbs, responding to a gentle suggestion from Barack Obama that it’s a good idea to have an “edit function” before you tweet:

I mean, he should be brought back by the marshals. Isn’t there some law that says presidents shouldn’t be attacking sitting presidents?

Well, if there isn’t a law, there ought to be, amirite?

Are American corporations overtaxed? Let’s find out! First off, here are corporate profits and tax rates since the Reagan era:

Profits have been going up, up, up. Tax rates have been going down, down, down. You can probably guess what this means for owners of capital: they’ve been doing really, really well. Indeed, net dividend payouts to shareholders are up more than 400 percent:

And American tax rates are really low compared to other countries:

Since 1980, obviously, corporations have been doing great. So has this trickled down to the common man? Let’s check out how the middle class is doing:

So there you have it. Over the past four decades, corporate profits have doubled; tax rates have been cut in half; dividend payouts have gone up 400 percent; and the household income of the middle class has…

Gone up a whopping 20 percent.

But don’t worry. This time trickle-down economics will work. Believe me.

Why is it no big deal that Michael Flynn pled guilty yesterday to a charge of lying to an FBI agent? Conservatives have run several excuses up the ol’ flagpole to see if anyone salutes. One tactic is to claim that everyone lies and it’s really not a big deal. A related gambit is to ignore the fact that Flynn is obviously being let off the hook because he’s cooperating with prosecutors, and pretend that the single charge of lying is all there is to this. Tucker Carlson went all in on this last night:

.@TuckerCarlson: “If investigators can prove that the Trump campaign worked with Vladimir Putin in order to steal the 2016 election, by all means, prosecute…But this? So far it’s hard to know exactly how this makes America better.” #Tucker pic.twitter.com/0RJVzLibcN

— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 2, 2017

Nothing to see here folks. What’s more, according to Carlson, the big problem with special investigations like this is that often “they wind up entrapping people whose only crime is the false testimony they provide during the investigation.” This is close to a perfect description of Ken Starr investigation of Bill Clinton, and conservatives sure didn’t feel this way about perjury traps back in 1998. Back then, they thought that lying was a very serious crime indeed. I guess times change.

Another tack is to pretend that Flynn is just a minor functionary. According to the White House, he is a “former Obama official.” What’s more, they’re now claiming that the Obama administration authorized his talks anyway. It’s certainly odd that he felt the need to lie about it, then, isn’t it?

Finally, there’s the peculiar but oddly Trumpian defense: admit further guilt because you’re too dumb to realize what you’re doing.

I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2017

No no no, Mr. President. You didn’t know Flynn had lied to the FBI back then! Remember? We’ve rehearsed this cover story over and over. But I guess it doesn’t matter. Trump basically admits to wrongdoing all the time, and somehow it never seems to matter. He’s confessed that he never would have appointed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General if he’d known he was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. He confessed on national TV that he fired James Comey because of the Russia investigation. He then admitted the same thing to the Russian ambassador, telling him that he “faced great pressure because of Russia,” but that it was all taken care of now that Comey had been canned.

This is a striking and novel strategy in American politics. I never would have thought of it myself. I guess that’s why I’m not president.

Sometimes I get up really early these days for no apparent reason. Today was one of those days. It’s annoying, but there’s no need to waste it: we have a supermoon coming up tomorow, so why not catch it a day ahead at moonset instead of moonrise? As it happens, I was just a few minutes late, but I did get some last-second shots just before it disappeared beneath the rooflines.

The swamp is back! After rounding up 51 votes, Senate Republicans are busily rewriting their tax bill so that every lobbyist will love it. The thing is already a Rube Goldberg monstrosity, and now it’s time to break out the Christmas presents.

The senator from Alaska is getting a break for cruise ships—but only ones that stop in Alaska. The other senator from Alaska is getting something for Native Americans. The senators from Kansas and South Dakota are both getting breaks for agriculture interests. The senator from Pennsylvania got a special exemption from the new university endowment tax—an exemption that benefits only Hillsdale College, a conservative darling.¹ The senator from South Carolina is getting some money for opportunity zones. The chairman of the Finance Committee is shepherding through a provision that taxes university name and logo royalties. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is a hair’s breadth away from being opened to more oil and gas drilling. And we’re not finished yet. Oh no.

This is so bad. We have just gotten list of amendments to be included in bill NOT from our R colleagues, but from lobbyists downtown. None of us have seen this list, but lobbyists have it. Need I say more? Disgusting. And we probably will not even be given time to read them. pic.twitter.com/Mn0i56JeZg

— Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) December 1, 2017

The senator from Texas is getting a break for private (i.e., mostly Christian) school tuition. The senator from Kentucky won passage of a provision allowing car dealers to deduct interest paid on loans to stock showrooms. The senator from Missouri, whose son is a lobbyist for MillerCoors, scored a provision that cuts taxes on imported beer and liquor. The senator from Georgia, home of Delta Airlines, got a provision that penalizes foreign airlines. This is all being done via handwritten notes at the last second, and the result is that about $600 billion of taxing and spending has been redirected within 24 hours without a single hearing.

No one has any idea how this is going to play out. The bill was written so hastily, and the amendments are being jammed through so fast, that nobody has any clue how all the moving pieces work together. One provision, for example, apparently provides an enormous tax break for equipment purchased in 2018—and only 2018. Is this designed to goose the economy next year before the midterms? Or is it just a mistake? Other provisions, in the hands of a talented tax attorney, would apparently provide a gigantic tax benefit for athletes and rock stars, though I suppose no one really knows for sure. Hedge fund billionaires not only get to keep their cherished carried interest loophole—which Donald Trump promised to eliminate—but they get a big new tax deduction to go along with it.

This is, I’m sure, an extremely incomplete list. It’s just what I ran across over the past few hours while I was scanning the news. God only knows how many dozens of other little goodies are buried deep in the bill for worthy donors and lobbyists. It’s an early Christmas for everyone.

Except the middle class, of course. I already showed you how many middle-class families would be getting tax cuts under the Republican plan, but a sizeable number of them will be getting tax increases. By 2027, nearly a full quarter of families earning $30-75,000 will pay more in taxes than they would under current law:

¹At the last second, an amendment to kill the Hillsdale giveaway passed. Even a few Republicans couldn’t quite stomach it.

Jonathan Chait complains today that Republicans always justify their claim that tax cuts boost the economy by simply taking credit for the normal economic expansions that happen afterward:

They deemed the Reagan tax cuts to be a growth miracle by starting at the trough of a recession, in 1982, and measuring through the peak of the expansion, in 1990. The 1980s expansion was actually an unremarkable business cycle recovery, but by measuring from the trough to the peak, conservative propaganda transformed it into a miracle.

OK, let’s do just the opposite. Let’s take a look at economic growth after each of the six major tax bills since 1980, but for each one we’ll arbitrarily use the decade following. Everyone gets exactly ten years and that’s that. This is blogging without a net: I have no idea how this is going to turn out, but I promise to post the results regardless of what they look like.

….And here they are:

There you have it. None of this matters, of course, since Republicans pass tax cuts mostly to please their donor class, not due to any macroeconomic evidence that they do much for the economy. Still, at least we got a colorful chart out of the deal.

Last week I was looking out the window and noticed that the sun was shining brightly on my neighbor’s bougainvillea plant. Then one of the cats walked by on the top of the fence. I went out with my camera and immediately realized that a picture of a cat with the bougainvillea in the background would be spectacular.

However, the sun only shined properly twice a day, for about half an hour. And the cat had to be positioned just so in order to get the right angle. Needless to say, the cats cooperated about as well as you’d expect. I’d put Hopper on the fence and she’d immediately walk away. Hilbert would hop onto the fence, but by the time I got outside he’d decide to jump into the neighbor’s yard. In the afternoon I’d see Hopper heading toward the right spot, but as soon as she saw me she’d scurry behind a plant. (She’s afraid—with good reason—that I might be planning to pick her up and take her inside. She likes to make me play a little bit first before she agrees to be escorted inside.)

Long story short, I finally got the picture I wanted. Close enough, anyway. And it was even with the right cat, since Hilbert’s black face contrasts with the flowers ideally. He is today’s supermodel for the cover of Feline Vogue.

Ting Shen/Xinhua via ZUMA

Earlier today, Michael Flynn pled guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI about his efforts to stall a UN vote on Israeli settlements during the presidential transition. This was obviously a plea bargain to avoid more serious charges, but still, it is what it is. David French comments:

While Twitter will no doubt find it “shocking” and “outrageous” that Trump transition officials were trying to influence Russian policy on matters that would directly impact the Trump presidency, there is a long history of presidential campaigns and transition teams initiating contact with foreign powers. The Trump administration — not the Obama administration — would bear the primary burden of responding to any additional Russian sanctions and the fallout from the U.N. vote. In other words, we can debate the prudence of the PTT’s actions all day long, but it was not illegal, and it was not “collusion.”

OK. I mean, technically it might have been a violation of the Logan Act, but no one ever gets charged for violating the Logan Act. Certainly not a top official of a presidential transition, anyway. Nor would there have been any political fallout if this had been made public at the time. Everyone knew Trump didn’t want the vote to happen. It just wasn’t a big deal. So if there’s no collusion, why lie about these contacts?

One last point — a number of folks have asked me, “If there’s no collusion, why lie about these contacts?” I can think of a number of reasons, including inexperience, hubris, and paranoia. Remember, these contacts were taking place against the backdrop of a public feeding frenzy about Trump’s Russian contacts. To admit to these contacts was to chum waters already boiling with hungry sharks. So they chose the worst possible course. They lied, and they lied when active FISA warrants meant that investigators may have immediately spotted the lies. When you start the lies, it’s hard to stop — especially when you don’t know what the FBI knows, but you do know that changes in your story will almost certainly leak to the press and create yet another firestorm.

Hmmm. I just did a search of the New York Times archives to make sure my memory was correct. During the first three weeks of December 2016, just before Flynn’s contacts with the Russians, there was coverage of Russian interference in the election but not much about possible Trump collusion with Russia. Likewise, during the first three weeks of January 2017, just before Flynn lied to the FBI, there was coverage of the Steele dossier, but at that point it still hadn’t really gotten a lot of traction. In fact, probably the most on-point story the Times ran during that period was a piece by public editor Liz Spayd criticizing the Times for its feeble coverage of the Trump-Russia connection.

The Trump-Russia story got a fair amount of play around the time of the Republican convention, thanks to Paul Manafort, and it’s gotten a lot of play since February. But in December and January things were in a bit of a lull. There was plenty of chatter, but nobody really held it against Trump that he was weighing in on Russia—he’d soon be president, after all—and there was no particular reason to deny contacts with the Russians. So I don’t really buy this. There must be more to it.

On the other hand, I would think there’s more to it, wouldn’t I? Still, I’ll bet there is.

Have you been wondering what kind of tax cut you’ll be getting from the Republican tax bill? Wonder no longer! If you’re middle class, with an income between $30-75,000, here’s the answer:

Maybe you can remodel your kitchen! A few hundred bucks should cover that, shouldn’t it?

Too bad about that big dropoff in 2027, but we have corporations to take care of. Their trillion-dollar tax cut lasts forever. That seems fair, doesn’t it?