Laying down the chips: This one isn’t even that much of a sleeper issue anymore. House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Friday that Republicans likely would have an interest in repealing the bipartisan bill to offer new incentives for the domestic production of semiconductors, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. Johnson later sought to walk back those comments made at a campaign stop in New York, instead saying that the chips law could be improved upon — and allies suggesting that the speaker misheard the question. The speaker’s comments came after Trump called the chips measure “so bad” in his interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan, and prompted a quick retort from Harris. “Let’s be clear why he walked it back. Because it’s not popular,” Harris said while campaigning in Milwaukee. “And their agenda is not popular.” Still, there might be questions about how popular the chips law is among Democrats, even though the vast majority of lawmakers in the party voted for the act a couple years back. The semiconductor industry would be interested in extending and expanding the tax breaks provided in the existing law, which currently apply to projects started before the end of 2026, in next year’s tax negotiations. But progressive Democrats “ are souring” on the measure, as our Christine Mui and Brendan Bordelon reported, in part because of questions about the labor standards required of companies benefitting from the law. The Johnson Amendment: The current requirement that nonprofits abstain from politics barely survived the 2017 tax negotiations — saved near the end by the Senate parliamentarian, in fact. Seven years later, Trump and his evangelical allies have made it clear that they’d like to take another run at allowing tax-exempt 501(c)(3) groups to take part in electioneering if the former president is reelected. Meanwhile, nonprofit advocates have told tax writers that protecting what’s known as the Johnson Amendment — because it was shepherded into law seven decades ago by future President Lyndon B. Johnson — is a top priority in next year’s negotiations. One of the current issues is that churches and nonprofits rarely face repercussions for dabbling in politics. In fact, a group representing atheists and agnostics, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, just asked the IRS to crack down on Johnson Amendment violations conducted to help both Harris and Trump, as Tax Notes reported. The IRS: Key GOP lawmakers have said for a couple years now that they’d love to pull back the tens of billions of new funding that Democrats gave to the tax collector in 2022. They’ve already been partially successful in that goal, getting Biden to agree to cut a quarter of the original $80 billion in funding during last year’s debt limit negotiations. But it’s not just the new auditors funded through the Inflation Reduction Act that Republicans would likely target next year. The Direct File initiative, a portal for income tax filing run by the IRS, got its start through the IRA, and GOP lawmakers have made some noise about targeting it through the appropriations process. Direct File started in a dozen states this year, a number that’s set to double in 2025. One potential problem for Republicans next year: It could be harder to kneecap the program if Direct File runs smoothly next year, as it mostly did in 2024, as Bloomberg Tax just noted. Don’t forget crypto: The virtual currency industry is pouring money into this election — and it looks like that’s only just the beginning. The super PAC Fairshake will start the 2026 midterm cycle with at least $78 million in the bank, as our Jasper Goodman reports this morning. Both Trump and Harris have courted the crypto sector, to varying degrees, during the 2024 campaign. The industry, meanwhile, is making it clear that it will back lawmakers from either party, as long as they’ll help establish a crypto-friendly regulatory regime. That comes as the Treasury Department and the IRS are still working to implement new tax reporting requirements for the crypto industry, which were passed in the bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021.
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment