"The possible marginal tax rate of more than 100% results from the combination of tax policies designed to provide benefits to businesses and families but then deny them to the richest people."

"As income climbs and those breaks phase out, each dollar of income faces regular tax rates and a hidden marginal rate on top of that, in the form of vanishing tax breaks. That structure, if maintained in a final law, would create some of the disincentives to working and to earning business profit that Republicans have long complained about, while opening lucrative avenues for tax avoidance. As a taxpayer’s income gets much higher and moves out of those phaseout ranges, the marginal tax rates would go down. Consider, for example, a married, self-employed New Jersey lawyer with three children and earnings of about $615,000. Getting $100 more in business income would force the lawyer to pay $105.45 in federal and state taxes, according to calculations by the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation. That is more than double the marginal tax rate that household faces today. If the New Jersey lawyer’s stay-at-home spouse wanted a job, the first $100 of the spouse’s wages would require $107.79 in taxes....."

From "The Taxman Cometh: Senate Bill’s Marginal Rates Could Top 100% for Some/Certain high-income business owners would face backwards incentives; lawmakers work to bridge gap" in The Wall Street Journal (which you can get into without a subscription if start at Drudge, where it's the top story right now).

So the rich are fighting back. The effort to make the tax bill politically palatable with these phaseouts at the high end created what is either a terrible problem or the raw material to frame an argument that the phaseouts are unfair. So the rich have got the Wall Street Journal drumming up sympathy for the group that was getting less than zero sympathy. These people who needed to be deprived of a tax cut now need to be saved from radical unfairness. Or so this article says.

I don't know if this is enough to leverage the GOP in Congress to help the rich (but I've heard that's what the GOP really always wants to do). It needs a lot of political cover. The WSJ paints a vivid picture of unfairness — even for a New Jersey lawyer who makes $615,000, normally one of the least sympathetic characters on the face of the earth.

If this article is wrong, somebody better get on the task of showing why it's wrong. Who's motivated to disprove what this article says? I don't think it it would be the Democrats, who hate the tax bill and want to see the whole thing fail. And it won't be the GOP people who actually want to help the rich and don't like the phaseouts. It might be someone who wants the big tax cut and also wants to make sure the rich don't get it — which could be someone who simply believes that for GOP to prevail in the next 2 elections, it must deliver a tax cut that does not hand the Democrats the argument that the GOP gave a big tax cut to the rich.