Even with some of the Democrats’ proposals falling short of Biden’s ambitions, White House National Economic Council director Brian Deese hailed the broader momentum on Tuesday, saying lawmakers were making “major progress” with their efforts to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
The package offered by Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee is “not everything that the president called for, but gets at the core issues we face in our tax code,” Deese said Tuesday during an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “What’d You Miss.”
Other outstanding items still being hashed out in the House include a Biden-proposed requirement on banks and other financial institutions to proactively report their customer account and transaction information to the Internal Revenue Service as part of an effort to collect more unpaid taxes, and whether to partly or fully reinstate the state and local tax deduction, or SALT, that many House Democrats ran on restoring in 2018.
Reinstating the deduction, a priority for several members, could take budgetary space away from other Democratic priorities and has contributed to intraparty tension during the negotiation process over the broader multitrillion-dollar package that Democrats hope to pass this fall.
Beyer acknowledged the bank reporting requirement, seen as key part of a two-pronged approach to collect more taxes along with increased IRS enforcement funding, also faced headwinds in the chamber. But the idea of changing how capital gains taxes fall on inheritance, “seems more dead,” Beyer said.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.