If for some reason you were searching for the perfect distillation of Republicans’ priorities in the year 2020, over the weekend Mitch McConnell and his colleagues chose to deliver one so ridiculously on the nose that it probably offended the gods of satire. It came in the midst of Congress’s $900 billion relief bill in the form of a trade Democrats had to make to get the GOP to pretend like they care at all about the millions of Americans currently suffering. And if you guessed it involved tax breaks for corporations and perks for the kind of people who network over steak and booze-soaked lunches, you guessed right!
Yes, in the 5,593-page proposal released Monday, you’ll find a call for a “temporary allowance of full deduction for business meals,” applying to the cost of food and beverages purchased at a restaurant through 2022. It’s a deduction Donald Trump has talked about for months, and while Republicans and the administration claim it’s all helping the devastated hospitality industry—“As you know, the president is concerned about restaurants, so we restored the deductibility of meal expenses for businesspeople,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNBC this morning—very few people are convinced.
Referring to Trump’s April call to increase the current allowable deduction of business meals from 50% to 100%, a move he claimed would make restaurants “hotter than before,” Kyle Pomerleau, a tax analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told The Washington Post: “Months later it is still bad policy, and still not good economic relief for the current situation. It just should not be in there.” Noting how utterly absurd it is to include in a bill intended to help, among others, people who‘ve been out of work for months, Dan Herron, CPA and principal of Elemental Wealth Advisors, told CNBC: “It’s great for wealthy folks who can blow money through a corporation, but I know people who are struggling to make ends meet. Their priority isn’t a three-martini lunch.” As for supposedly being all about saving restaurants, as New York magazine wrote shortly after Trump started pushing for the deductions last spring: “Letting executives write off the cost of meals where they ‘discuss business’—a notoriously lax requirement that functionally subsidies pleasure as a business cost—is unlikely to save those restaurants. How many executives are going to start crowding into restaurants just to get the sweet tax deal if they’re worried about contracting a deadly virus?” Given that we’re still many months away from life returning to some semblance of normalcy, telling business people they can write off their meals now does basically nothing for restaurants currently hanging on by a thread.
So, yes, the proposal seems to be nothing more than yet another giveaway to Trump’s good friends, but it still made the bill because apparently it was the only way Democrats could get Republicans to throw a lifeline to the people who are actually suffering right now, according to The Washington Post:
“Republicans are nickel-and-diming benefits for jobless workers, while at the same time pushing for tax breaks for three-martini power lunches. It’s unconscionable,” said Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
Three-martini lunches aside, the good news is that something is going to be passed, and something is better than nothing. The bad news is that it’s not enough—the $600 check is presumably roughly what Trump spends on bronzer each month—and it’s not going to last:
Remember when Senator Joni Ernst suggested that doctors were inflating COVID-19 deaths to make money?