StudioGlyphic

The [tax] bill is crenellated with more loopholes than a medieval castle. Film studios, cruise-ship operators and even accountants benefit. Tobacco farmers are to be paid about $10 billion to give up quotas and price supports that Congress bestowed on them decades ago. Multinational companies, many of which keep profits overseas to avoid paying taxes on them at home, will be rewarded with a one-year amnesty, during which time their foreign profits can be brought home at a tax rate of just 5.25%, a fraction of the normal rate.

The bill reserves its biggest tax break for manufacturing. The sector, as defined by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, has shed 2.8m jobs over the past four years. The lay-offs are often disastrous for the workers involved, but they need not damage the economy as a whole, at least over the medium term. Few economists still believe that manufacturing is "special" or that "de-industrialisation" is quite as ghastly as it sounds. Indeed, the decline of manufacturing employment is often the result of welcome gains in productivity and inexorable shifts in comparative advantage.

But the principle of comparative advantage counts for rather less in Congress than the principle of electoral advantage. Eager to win votes in hard-hit manufacturing states, lawmakers will cut the corporate-tax rate for manufacturing from 35% to 32%, phased in over the rest of the decade. Suddenly, everyone wants to be a manufacturer. Oil refiners, software engineers and architects lobbied to be counted as such. Making movies is manufacturing, the bill says, but making pornographic movies is not (that, one can only presume, counts as a service). Even farmers are now manufacturers. Cornbelt or rustbelt, smokestacks or haystacks, it's all the same to Congress when it's in a giving mood.