Earlier this week, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) gleefully trotted out a revenue estimate from Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and claimed it showed that Whitehouse’s bill, S. 2059, would generate a “meager” $47 billion in revenue over ten years.

But as Senator Hatch surely knows, official estimates like JCT’s are done against a “current law” baseline that assumes that Congress will let all of the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule. If that actually happened, many fewer millionaires would be paying super low rates. In other words, the $47 billion from the Buffett rule would be on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that would result from getting rid of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which are a major reason we need the Buffett Rule in the first place. (Even with the same baseline, another estimate shows S. 2059 raising $171 billion in revenue, much more than the JCT score.)

Of course, Hatch and his Republican colleagues have fought successfully to protect the high-end Bush tax cuts. Against a “current policy” baseline that assumes that Republicans continue to block the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, Whitehouse’s bill has been estimated to raise $264 billion — more than five times as much. That is not a “meager” amount of revenue. In fact, it’s twice the amount needed to restore all of the cuts to federal nutrition assistance in the House Republican budget unveiled this week.

More importantly, however, S. 2059 is only one specific approach to implementing the Buffett Rule, which President Obama and Whitehouse have said is best accomplished through fundamental tax reform. The Joint Committee made fairly clear that tax avoidance behavior — millionaires delaying asset sales, shifting income from one year to another — was a key factor holding down its revenue estimate for S. 2059. A broader tax reform that equalized the taxation of wages and investments would implement the Buffett Rule in a way that would cut down on tax avoidance.
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