ABOUT THAT TAX BILL: The Senate has now been out of Washington for going on two weeks — and according to aides and others, not much progress has been made on the tax bill during that time. In fact, lots of GOP senators still have a variety of objections to the measure negotiated between Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.). Still, some lobbyists and aides have been wondering for a while whether the tax bill — which would both expand the Child Tax Credit and restore some key incentives for businesses, among other things — might end up getting attached to a broader spending vehicle in order to make it through the Senate. Given where matters stand right now, Congress could very well need a very short stopgap funding bill in the coming days, maybe of a couple weeks or so. And put it this way: It’s hard to see how that would be a bad development for the Wyden-Smith tax package. Those extra couple weeks could give Democrats and Republicans in the Senate the time they need to work the issues that GOP senators have with the bill, which would then allow them to attach it to a more robust spending package later in March. Or maybe Democrats and Republicans come to an agreement on amendment votes that allows the bill a standalone vote in the Senate. Or perhaps Democrats get tired of the gridlock in mid- to late-March, and just seek to attach the tax bill to a spending measure and dare Republicans to stand in the way. The broader point is that a little extra time for the tax bill in the Senate right now probably can’t hurt, even though it’s not clear whether it will actually help. At least for now: Keep in mind that Smith and Wyden reached this agreement in mid-January, with Wyden hoping for a time that the bill could be enacted before the IRS filing season opened later that month. The House passed the bill on Jan. 31, and IRS chief Danny Werfel has said that his agency could quickly send out any additional refunds that a taxpayer might receive this year because of an expanded child credit. Still, this is a tax bill with benefits attached to the current tax filing season, which ends in about a month and a half, and that is being debated with just over eight months before a presidential election. So without a breakthrough, the Wyden-Smith plan would probably reach a make-or-break moment at some point in the coming weeks or months, though when exactly isn’t clear. ABOUT THOSE GOP OBJECTIONS: Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the ranking member on the Finance Committee, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a key advocate for the child credit expansion in the GOP’s 2017 tax law, are among the Republicans who have problems with the so-called lookback provision in the bipartisan tax plan. That provision would allow recipients to use income from either the previous or current year to claim the child credit — something that skeptics, including scholars from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, believe would give parents an incentive to drop out of the workforce. Plenty of right-of-center analysts disagree with that assessment, as have groups on the left, like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. CBPP analysts argued in a report released Friday that the lookback provision was quite modest, and would largely serve as a buffer when workers in lower-income positions face trying times. The provision’s “impact on labor supply would be exceedingly small and, as some have noted, it is not even clear whether the provision’s impact is positive or negative,” the CBPP authors wrote, adding that it would “provide a temporary modicum of relief” for families that suffered a temporary decline in earnings.
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment