BACK TO THE CTC: One of the interesting facets of the debate over the current child credit proposal is how differently it’s viewed — from not nearly generous enough by some House Democrats to an unnecessary cranking up of the welfare state by other GOP lawmakers. Democrats’ approach to expanding the CTC was limited both by what Republicans would allow and how much money they had to pour into the program. Because of those constraints, advocates who support the deal say it made sense to focus more narrowly on helping lower-income parents with multiple children. Already trying to sell this: Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.), a freshman in a potentially competitive district, released a video following the House passage of the tax bill, trumpeting both its child credit expansion and its restoration of immediate write-offs for research expenses. Kiggans’ response underscores another interesting side plot of this deal — it was basically an easy yes vote for more centrist lawmakers in both parties, at least in the House. That is, of course, unless you were a blue-state Republican seeking to pick away at the $10,000 cap on state and local deductions. GOP lawmakers from New York got their leadership to wave forward a bill to let joint filers making up to a half-million dollars a year deduct up to $20,000 in state and local taxes for 2023. That proposal, however, is not on the weekly House schedule for this week. ICYMI: Pro Tax’s Benjamin Guggenheim took a deep dive into how a historically dysfunctional House of Representatives ended up passing a bipartisan tax bill by a 357 to 70 vote. How’d they do it? “A combination of leadership tactics, old-fashioned logrolling, an end-run around the most virulent opposition, intense lobbying by business and the support of interest groups across the ideological spectrum, even if some of it was grudging.” Also ICYMI: Ever wonder whether former President Donald Trump will have more to say about this tax bill, particularly since he’s not been shy about weighing in on Congress’ efforts at border security? Smith did brief Trump late in 2023 about the contours of what ended up being the tax bill, as our Burgess Everett, Olivia Beavers and Meredith McGraw noted. That might help explain why Trump and his team haven’t sought to undercut the bill, even as others on the right have raised some hay about the bill continuing to allow American-born children of undocumented immigrants to claim the child credit. In fact, a Trump alumni group publicly has supported the bill, and Republican senators have been openly wondering whether the former president himself will follow suit. WHAT DO THE PRACTITIONERS SAY? Natasha Sarin says she got the idea for her latest venture while serving in the Treasury Department as lawmakers and the Biden administration tried to put together the Inflation Reduction Act and other pieces of legislation — which included frantic last-minute searches for potential revenue-raisers to make the numbers work. “There was a scurry, right?” Sarin, now a professor at Yale Law School, told Weekly Tax. “There wasn’t a real chance to engage practitioners on ‘if you were going to do something on private equity, what would you want to do?’” Sarin’s latest initiative, the Tax Reform Project, hopes it can help fill that current gap when policymakers enter negotiations next year over the expiring individual tax provisions from the GOP’s 2017 tax law. In short, the new initiative hopes to create a practitioners’ equivalent of Treasury’s annual Green Book of tax policy ideas, with a focus on making proposals more workable, equitable and simpler. The Tax Reform Project will invite practitioners to send their own ideas for improving the tax system to an online portal. Fred Goldberg, a former IRS chief; Leslie Samuels, a former assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy; and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers are joining Sarin in starting the new project. Sarin told Weekly Tax that Goldberg, Samuels and Summers all regretted that the policymaking process is more rushed today. “There are a lot of good ideas and groups, incidentally, who sit eager to help inform the policy process in the practitioner world,” Sarin added. “The hope was to create some kind of conduit, certainly for 2025, but also even beyond that.” For that to happen, Sarin said it’s crucial to get as many ideas from the broader practitioner world as possible. Policymakers both on the Hill and in the executive branch have told her that they’re interested in more input from practitioners, but hopefully packaged in a more condensed way like the Green Book or how CBO offers revenue-raising options. "Those are proposals that policymakers go back to, and resources they engage with over and over,” Sarin said. “Our hope is that our resource is also going to be something that people engage with seriously as they’re making policy at all stages of the process.” DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE FUNDING: Dozens of civil rights groups wrote to Democratic congressional leaders urging them to stand strong against IRS funding cuts. The groups say they’re worried that the IRS’s base funding could be reduced as appropriators flesh out individual spending bills. They’re also still lobbying against the $20 billion cut, out of the $80 billion that the agency got from the IRA, that Democrats are allowing, and want lawmakers to block any potential riders that might seek to hinder the direct filing portal that the IRS is rolling out. “It’s essential for you to unequivocally state your strong opposition to any further reductions in IRS funding,” the groups wrote to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
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