Article from Reason by Peter Suderman.

House Republicans passed a budget resolution yesterday, taking an early first step towards overhauling the nation’s tax code. But the larger effort is already starting to look like it is in trouble.

A group of senior Republicans released a reform framework last week, but left out many key details that will have to be included in any plan. Overall, it doesn’t look like there’s been much progress since last year, when a group of influential Republicans released an ambitious but notably (and similarly) vague framework for tax reform.

One of the major pay-fors that Republicans had hoped to rely on going into the year, the protectionist border adjustment tax (BAT), has already been dropped. Republicans also appear to be backing off of a plan to repeal the state and local tax deduction, another major tax code carve out that would raise significant revenue if eliminated. In other words, the same sort of infighting that doomed the health care effort may doom tax reform too.

All of these specific disagreements, however, are just expressions of a more fundamental problem: Republicans want to cut tax rates on corporations and individuals, but they don’t want to deal with the consequences of doing so. As a result, they run the risk of turning tax reform into an exercise in expanding government.

Read the entire article at Reason.