Members of Congress will be home for the holidays, but not before they decorate a Christmas tree with a massive assemblage of tax breaks.

Rep. Charlie Rangel says humbug.

The dean of the New York delegation told Crain's he is "damn sure" he will vote against the package and that his fellow Democrats are settling for “crumbs.”

The cuts were billed as temporary when they first passed in 1988. But the tax-extender legislation has become a Washington tradition that seems to get costlier when renewed every year or two. The latest price tag is more than $700 billion (with a B) over 10 years.

This year’s bill, not yet finalized, could make some of the tax breaks permanent, such as one for research and development that will cost the Treasury $80 billion in the next decade, according to the watchdog Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Most of the city’s representatives in Washington expect to support the package if it includes permanent benefits for poor families, such as the earned-income tax credit, while their counterparts across the aisle get big tax breaks for business.

"The minority should say, 'I'm not going to have that blood on my hands, dammit,'” Rangel said. “Don't count me in. Take out the EITC, take out the child tax credit. These are crumbs compared to what this bill is going to cost.”

Among the city's delegation, all of whom are Democrats except for Daniel Donovan of Staten Island, Rangel is alone in his outright rejection of the plan, according to a Crain’s survey answered by all but three members. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn said he would not support the bill if it leaves “our most vulnerable communities behind.”

But Rangel said Democrats who support the cuts are falling into a Republican majority's trap to reduce federal revenue.

"This tax package is really obscene, and while people are negotiating for low-income people's credit, what the Republicans are really doing is 'starving the beast' by $700, $800 billion,” Rangel said. “Which means when it comes to discretionary spending, there won't be any money there."

"I don't know why the minority should help the majority to pass this terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible tax bill," he added.

There's a new tax deal being debated in Congress right now, and it comes with a 10-year price tag of about $700 billion in foregone revenue.

You see, for every tax break that is passed, the budget deficit balloons in order to "finance" that lost revenue.

And this new tax package would extend approximately 50 temporary tax breaks that have either expired or will soon lapse. By combining Republican business breaks with Democratic tax credits for lower-income workers and families, representatives are hoping the new legislation will escape the common partisan roadblocks for which Congress has become notorious.

As it looks right now, the deal will likely pass before Congress breaks for the year.

While it's nice to see everyone at last getting along, we're a little worried about the $700 billion budget deficit…

One Senate aide initially projected the package would cost $500 billion over 10 years, reported The Hillearlier today. But a House aide later set the price tag closer to somewhere between $700 and 800 billion over 10 years, reported The New York Times this morning.

Since the deficit has been falling for six consecutive years – from $1.4 trillion in 2009 to $439 billion in 2015 – this $300 billion discrepancy is also a little worrisome. The centrist group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has called the emerging package "a fiscally irresponsible bipartisan deal," reported The New York Times on Friday.

So let's have a look at what makes the new tax deal so expensive…

The New Tax Deal Is Pricey Thanks to These 3 Core Provisions

Democrats are pushing for stimulus-era expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EIC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC), which are scheduled to expire at the end of 2017. They would like to:

• Decrease the threshold at which someone can claim the refundable portion of the child credit.
• Expand the maximum Earned Income Tax Credit available to families with at least three children.

Combined, these provisions would cost $100 billion, according to U.S. Treasury estimates.

Democrats' demands aren't stopping there. Part of their new tax deal agenda includes indexing the child credit for inflation. This means that as inflation rises, so does the amount you and I claim for our children.

"If we don't [raise the child credit], within four years or so, 700,000 children fall back into poverty," said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), a member of the tax-writing Finance Committee.

For their part, Republicans are worried about oversight of fraud with both the EIC and the CTC. So part of what is being negotiated is significant improvements to the programs' verification process – though specifics haven't been given.

The Republicans are also responsible for the new tax deal's costliest provision…

 In past presidential elections, candidates hoped to convince voters of their fiscal rectitude. This time, though, fiscal responsibility is out. Tax giveaways are in. 

This puts Hillary Clinton in a straitjacket. She has proposed about $1 trillion in new government spending -- much of it through the tax code. But unlike the Republican candidates, she doesn't claim that tax breaks lead to higher growth and thus pay for themselves. So she's under pressure to show how she'd pay for all the tax credits she is proposing. 

Not only are the Republican candidates offering more generous tax breaks on everything from estates to investment returns. They aren’t even pretending to honor the concept of budget neutrality -- that is, they haven’t identified spending reductions or tax increases elsewhere to offset all the tax cuts they are proposing. 

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan think tank, has an infographic showing that the seven GOP candidates with tax-cut plans, using conventional scoring, would add a total of $42 trillion to federal deficits over 10 years. 

This election’s sole fiscal hawk, Ohio Governor John Kasich, is finding out the hard way that fiscal probity is out. He's making little headway with his old-fashioned call for a balanced budget and warnings about his rivals' "fantasy tax plans." 

The new outlook is also haunting Clinton, who has targeted one interest group after another with tax-relief gifts. The most recent example: up to $1,200 in credits to reimburse family members for the cost of caring for aging parents. (Say thanks, baby boomers.) That followed an offer of up to $2,500 in tax credits for out-of-pocket health-care costs. (This one's for you, millennials.) 

And those followed her proposals for making college more affordable, including making permanent a generous tax credit for college tuition and other expenses that began under the 2009 stimulus law. The package's price tag: $350 billion over 10 years. 

Clinton also would provide tax credits to help working parents pay for child care. Low-income homeowners who install solar panels would be eligible for a break, as would investors in low-income urban areas. 

For companies, she would provide $1,500 tax credits for each apprentice hired, and an expansion of an existing job credit if businesses hire ex-felons and other marginalized people. She would reward companies with profit-sharing plans with a 15 percent tax credit on the value of bonuses paid out. 

The list goes on. It's so lengthy that Clinton opens herself to charges of mucking up an already over-complicated tax system. Besides, the government already offers a wide array of means-tested grants and loans for college; why is it necessary to use back-door spending to subsidize higher education even more? 

Clinton was not going to forget Big Labor. She offers a tax credit that encourages infrastructure spending, which would provide jobs to union workers. She salami-slices the whole Democratic base -- boomers with aging parents; millennials with college loans; homeowners with costly mortgages; and minorities living in under-served urban areas. Each would get a generous credit. 

She vows to pay for it all, but so far hasn't said exactly how. 

Months ago, Clinton suggested limiting the value of tax deductions for well-off taxpayers, similar to a plan President Barack Obama has offered for several years but that Congress has never seen fit to take up. Obama's plan would cap at 28 percent the value of deductions -- for charitable contributions, payment of state taxes and the like -- that itemizers use to lower their tax bills. If Clinton offered the same idea, she could claim to have "saved" $525 billion over 10 years, which is the score given by Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation. 

Even then, she needs to find about $500 billion in savings to pay for the rest of her free stuff. That's the price of claiming to be fiscally responsible. It's also the price of playing interest-group politics.

 Congressional negotiators are working on a deal to pass tax breaks that could end up being the biggest legislative addition to the deficit since President Obama's 2009 stimulus.

The negotiations concern a package of potentially dozens of tax breaks for corporations and families. The final mix of tax breaks will be determined by bargaining between congressional Democrats and Republicans and the White House.

Some of the key players, however, have been suggesting that they're working toward a larger bill. "There is a growing appetite to find a substantial and balanced deal," Oregon's Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said Thursday.

The package is a grab bag of temporary tax provisions that have expired and that, for the most part, are regularly re-upped each time they expire. For that reason, they're known as "extenders." Most of them ran out at the beginning of this year and won't be available for taxpayers unless they are reinstituted before the year ends.

The bargain could make certain provisions permanent, rather than temporary, which lawmakers have long sought to do with the biggest and most familiar breaks to provide certainty.

But, on paper, the cost would be high. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit group that advocates lowering the federal debt, estimated this week that one possible version of the permanent tax breaks package would cost the Treasury up to $840 billion over 10 years, when interest on the associated debt is taken into account.

That's only on paper, however. Many lawmakers in both parties have chosen to ignore the stated budgetary costs of extending the breaks. The logic for that is they are reinstated every year, so they should be considered the same as permanent tax breaks in the tax code, such as the mortgage interest deduction. That popular tax break loses money for the government every year, but Congress doesn't cut spending or raise taxes to make up the difference.

Rep. Paul Ryan laid out that argument on the House floor in February, back when, as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he was shepherding a permanent extension of charitable tax credit extenders.

"This isn't costing anything, in that we are not lowering someone's taxes. We are just keeping their taxes where they are, and we are preventing them from going up," the Wisconsin Republican said when Democrats criticized GOP lawmakers for adding to the deficit.

"We don't hear all these hues and cries about the deficits when we extend these tax provisions for two years. We don't hear these concerns when we extend current law tax provisions for one year. And we don't hear these concerns about deficits when we retroactively extend it from last year, going forward," Ryan also said. "We only hear these concerns when we are giving people the certainty."

Congress did pass a one-year re-extension of a broad package of extenders late last year, just before the deadline for companies and individuals to claim them on their tax returns.

Marc Goldwein, a senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, disagrees with Ryan's logic and believes that the extenders should be offset, he told the Washington Examiner.

But granting that some extenders, such as the research tax break for businesses that has been extended 16 times since 1981, really should be considered part of the baseline, much of what's in consideration should not be.

In Goldwein's estimation, lawmakers are discussing as much as $200 billion in tax breaks that have not been part of current policy until now. That would be enough, Goldwein noted, to provide relief from the sequestration automatic spending cuts for two years, or to cut the corporate tax rate from its current 35 percent to under 30 percent.

One example is a version of the research tax credit that the House passed earlier this year, which included an expansion of the tax credit that doesn't exist currently and would cost an additional $73 billion over 10 years.

Another is one of Democrats' top asks, namely that the Child Tax Credit, which provides $1,000 for child, be indexed for inflation. Currently, rising prices eat into the real value of the credit each year.

Including that measure would add another $73 billion to deficits, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

One example is a version of the research tax credit that the House passed earlier this year, which included an expansion of the tax credit that doesn't exist currently and would cost an additional $73 billion over 10 years.

Another is one of Democrats' top asks, namely that the Child Tax Credit, which provides $1,000 for child, be indexed for inflation. Currently, rising prices eat into the real value of the credit each year.

Including that measure would add another $73 billion to deficits, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The Child Tax Credit provision is one that could generate added pushback from conservatives.

Part of the Child Tax Credit is refundable, meaning that if the credit exceeds a filer's tax liability, the government will write them a check. Dan Holler, a representative for the conservative group Heritage Action, said "the concerns that we have are when you start talking about the refundable tax credits in there, because that's essentially spending."

His group, he said, is not concerned about revenue lost from cutting taxes on businesses or individuals. "If it's an actual tax cut, then that's good," he said.

 President Barack Obama and some of his allies are trying to transform an ugly piece of tax legislation into something that gives critical help to millions of low-income Americans.

The gambit hasn't gotten much attention until now. But if it works, the resulting commitment of resources would arguably represent the biggest anti-poverty effort of Obama’s second term.

The legislation is a big bundle of tax breaks that could be worth somewhere between $700 billion and $800 billion over the next 10 years, depending on how negotiations go. To put those numbers in perspective, the high end of that range would approach the projected cost of the Affordable Care Act in its first decade. The package has no offsetting spending cuts or revenue, which means that, at least on paper, it would increase the federal deficit.

Most of the tax breaks are for corporations, and while some have dubious justification, some have no justification at all. Probably the worst and most notorious among them is one that became law relatively recently -- a “bonus depreciation” provision that lets companies write off the full cost of new equipment right away, rather than spreading it out over time. This provision became law in 2009, as part of the Recovery Act, and it was supposed to encourage businesses to invest in production equipment and then hire more workers. There’s no good reason to think it did.

In theory, this and the rest of the business tax breaks are temporary. In reality, they haven't been. Whenever they expire, or are about to expire, corporations demand that Congress extend all of them, and Congress complies. Republicans vote yes. Democrats vote yes. Nobody worries what it does to the deficit. Approval of the “extenders,” as they’ve come to be known, has actually become something of a holiday ritual, since it usually happens just before Congress adjourns for December -- and the Internal Revenue Service is getting ready to print the next year’s tax forms.

The renewals have become so routine that corporations assume they will become law and make financial plans accordingly. But companies still wish they didn’t have to wait for Congress to act and their biggest allies, in the Republican Party, have other reasons to make the tax cuts permanent. By enshrining them in the tax code now, the thinking goes, it will be easier to pass other tax reforms later. To make the business tax cuts permanent, Republicans need votes from congressional Democrats and, of course, they need a signature from the president. That has given liberals, including the one in the Oval Office, a little leverage -- and now that leverage may produce some results.

Back in 2009, when Congress was trying to pump up the economy, it didn’t just create that bonus depreciation tax cut. It also expanded the Child Tax Credit, which gives relief to families with children, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, which basically makes small paychecks bigger.

The EITC may sound familiar, because it has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most effective anti-poverty measures around. And while it generates antipathy from some Republicans, who allege (incorrectly) that the program is prone to fraud, it also has a history of moderate bipartisan support -- largely because, to claim the credit, you have to have an income. To Ronald Reagan, probably its best known champion, that made the EITC the antithesis of a welfare giveaway.

Like the bonus depreciation cut, the EITC and Child Tax Credit enhancements were also temporary, though Congress has since extended them twice. All along, Obama, the Democratic leaders in each house, and key allies like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), have been agitating to make these cuts permanent. In the past, they’ve proposed offsetting the lost revenue with higher taxes on the rich.

That’s not happening in this Congress, so Democrats have also offered what amounts to a trade. They’ll sign off on a package that extends some of corporate tax breaks permanently, as long as it limits or winds down the less defensible ones while making those tax cuts for the working poor and middle class permanent. (The package would likely include a tax credit for education costs, in addition to the enhancements of the Child Tax Credit and EITC.)

The impact for the people who get these tax credits would be considerable. According to calculations by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, expiration of the tax credits for the working poor would put 16.4 million people, about half of them children, into or deeper into poverty. And while the improvements are not set to expire for another two years, waiting means risking the outcome of the next election. If Republicans win control of the White House and Congress, they may demand a much higher ransom for extending the EITC and Child Tax Credit. Or they could refuse to do so at all.

The officials and advisers trying to put this deal together from the left aren’t wild about extending the corporate tax cuts, particularly without offsetting spending cuts or revenue. But, they reason, the alternative is to continue the existing charade, with Congress approving these tax cuts year after year -- and adding to the deficit anyway. If the deal works out as some promoters hope, some of the largest and least attractive tax cuts, like bonus depreciation and some shelters for multinational corporations, would remain temporary and require new acts of Congress to extend.

Those concerns may still cause negotiations to unravel. So could arguments among the bill’s supporters. Congressional Democrats, for example, want the bill to include postponement of the Affordable Care Act’s “Cadillac tax” -- a levy on expensive health insurance policies that economists say helps to hold down health costs, but that is highly unpopular with just about everybody else. The White House opposes that. Tea party Republicans could still stage a revolt, since tax breaks for poor people, even the ones who work, are not especially popular with their supporters.

Still, negotiations over this bill have gotten farther than many people ever expected. Legislation could still pass. And whatever else its effects, that would mean bolstering two programs for the working poor -- at a time when the working poor can use all the help they can get.