The old political cliche about the legislative process and how nobody likes to see the sausage made is correct as far as it goes. I actually buy it as long as somebody's watching the sausage get made. Otherwise, we're all getting a big old bowl of salmonella gumbo for Mardi Gras. In this case, the Center for Public Integrity was keeping an eye on how the administration*'s big old tax cuts were fed into the vertical stuffer and, judging by the CPI's account, I'd rather have a salad, thanks.

But by the time the measure was signed into law 10 months later, it had ridden a roller-coaster ride of flip-flops, exaggeration, hypocrisy, falsehoods and contortions. Rosy estimates of economic growth were summoned from right-wing pro-growth think tanks. Budgeting gimmicks made deficits disappear. Deals were cut. Historic Republican concerns about the long-term debt were abandoned. The result: flawed and ill-considered legislation that disappointed some tax experts like Trier, and utterly flummoxed others.

Try to suspend disbelief. No, really, try. It'll be worth it.

...two main themes emerged.

One is that the bill, with its 21 percent corporate tax rate, was first and foremost a gift to multinationals. They had wanted cuts in the corporate tax rate for foreign and domestic profits for decades. Everything else flowed from that: the tax cuts for smaller businesses known as “pass-throughs,” which had been their holy grail, and the cuts for individuals, which were needed to sell the bill to voters. The second: All the posturing about “tax reform” and “revenue neutral” was meaningless. In fact, the bill had to create a $1.5 trillion 10-year deficit to pay for its generous tax cuts, which some believed would create economic growth. Without the deficit, the corporate rate of 21 percent could never have been achieved, and, more important, the bill could not have passed at all.

A lot of the rest of the report takes in what we know about our most recent Gilded Age: the power behind our politics rests in the hands of a billionaire donor class that wants what it wants and the devil take the rest of us. (There's a guy named Doug Deason in there who is one of a kind.) It tracks through the days of Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, and his relatively impotent Speakerhood. And, as in all things Ryan, there were magic asterisks.

Two ideas buried in the Better Way plan, however, would have a huge bearing on what the tax bill would be portrayed as costing. One was called the “current policy baseline” and the other was “dynamic scoring.” These bureaucratic-sounding terms would be used much later to mask the bill’s deficits — and to defend votes by lawmakers. But they were hardly noticed at the time.

Paul Ryan dreams of slashed corporate tax rates alongside Mitch McConnell and, way back there, Mr. Ted Cruz. Bill Clark Getty Images

And now we have moved once again into the Happy Gumdrop Fantasyland of conservative economics. And there is no returning from that gauzy realm. First up, cutting the corporate rate down to near invisibility.

And then Trump, who had campaigned on a 15 percent corporate rate, won, changing everything. “And once he won,” Feehery said, “we had to be very much not even talking about a number, not 25 percent, not 20 percent; it was just low as you can go.” Among Republicans, a big corporate rate cut was not a tough sell. The RATE coalition had “framed the debate well in the preceding years,” Roskam told the Center in an interview. “And so there was orthodoxy on the Republican side and even assent on the Democratic side.”

Then there is the inevitable horse-trading among various Republican horse's arses, and we come to a section called The Death of Revenue Neutral. And we enter Neverland.

On the Senate side, the issue was discussed at weekly member lunches in the Mike Mansfield Room, a grand dark-wood-paneled chamber in the Capitol decorated with a large crystal chandelier, golden sconces and oil paintings. There it was said that “dynamic scoring” and “current policy baseline,” those two terms buried in the 35 pages of the Ryan-Brady blueprint, would offset — some would say hide — the deficits in a tax bill.

Tax bills are evaluated by a process known as “scoring,” which analyzes how much tax revenue a bill will bring in and how much it may lose. It may be done by Congress’s official scorer on tax bills, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), or by any think tank, ideologically tinged or not, that wants to be part of the debate.

Fun times were had by all. Drew Angerer Getty Images

Static scoring just assesses the actual numbers in a bill: taxes cut, taxes levied. But dynamic scoring tries to predict how much economic growth will be produced by the tax cuts, and how much tax revenue that growth will generate. That projected revenue can make deficits much smaller. Here’s what Bruce Bartlett, a senior policy official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations said about it in 2013: “It is not about honest revenue-estimating; it’s about using smoke and mirrors to institutionalize Republican ideology into the budget process.”

And that, of course, has worked splendidly over the past 40 years. Anyway, there was more pulling and hauling, and former Senator Bob Corker folded like a cheap suit, and the "deficit hawks" in the House evaporated, and it was feeding time at the seal tank.

As the tax bill made its way toward a full Senate vote, a special madness ensued. The printed bill, 479 pages and three inches thick, did not even surface until after sunset on Dec. 1, when it first appeared in the offices of K Street lobbyists. Not a single Democrat had seen it. Most Republicans hadn’t seen this rewritten version either. Last-minute changes in the legislation were written into the margins. “One page literally has hand scribbled policy changes on it that can’t be read,” tweeted Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana.

Remember Dana Trier, the Republican economist we met at the beginning of the story? He pretty much summed up not only this bill. but where it put us, and where the country in general is heading.

The feeling didn’t last long. Six days later, on April 26, President Donald Trump released his one-page plan for Tax Reform, and Trier was aghast. The plan was clumsy, unsophisticated. It was short on specifics — just bullet-points — and some of them in Trier’s view were crazy. One bullet said: “15% business tax rate.” If this meant corporate taxes, which were then at 35 percent, it would be impossible to pay for, Trier thought. It also seemed to include one-owner businesses and partnerships, which would make it even harder. “I mean I thought to myself, ‘My God, I’m joining this administration? This is lunacy.’”

Well, yes.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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