And now some words from Robert Rubin

The House Republicans have passed a terrible "tax reform" plan -- it's hard to see how they can even say good things about it with a straight face -- but hopefully the Senate will derail their hopes.  Meanwhile, I am quoting from Robert Rubin's appearance in the pages of the Washington Post, in a piece entitled "The Republican Tax Plan's Five Worst Dangers".

"Adding $1.5 trillion or more to the federal debt would make an already bad situation worse. A useful measure of our fiscal position is the ratio of publicly held government debt to economic output or gross domestic product, called the debt/GDP ratio. In 2000, the debt/GDP ratio was 32 percent. The ratio is now 77 percent. Looking forward, the CBO projects the debt/GDP ratio to be 91 percent in 2027 and 150 percent in 2047. After $1.5 trillion of deficit-funded tax cuts, those future ratios have been estimated to increase to roughly 97 percent in 2027 and 160 percent in 2047. These estimates likely substantially understate the worsening of our fiscal trajectory. That’s because they do not account for the increasingly adverse effect on growth of the difficult-to-quantify effects of fiscal deterioration.
...
We have an imperative need to address our unsustainable longer-term fiscal trajectory with sound economic policies. Few elected officials want to face this fact, but, at the very least, they should not make matters worse. We can only hope that responsible elected officials will prevent this irresponsible tax plan from being adopted."

There might be just enough responsible elected Republican senators to stop this atrocity. These are dangerous times.