Almost Biden time
January 19, 2021Editor’s Note: Weekly Tax is a weekly version of POLITICO Pro’s daily Tax policy newsletter, Morning Tax. POLITICO Pro is a policy intelligence platform that combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the day’s biggest stories. Act on the news with POLITICO Pro.
DO YOU HAVE THE VOTES? Joe Biden is now just a day away from being president, and here’s a big question about the early days of his tax policy: Yes, there is bipartisan interest in expanding the Child Tax Credit, but is there enough Republican support to do that as part of Biden’s new recovery plan?
The president-elect has been hoping that the pandemic relief measure he outlined last week will attract a fair number of GOP supporters — but given the initial response from key Republicans last week, there is some reason for skepticism.
And let’s just say you can see how some on the right might say that broadening the child credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit don’t have a place in this kind of coronavirus response, no matter where you stand on the merits of expanding refundable tax credits.
“President-elect Biden would use the pandemic to enact large, unrelated, permanent expansions of the federal government,” Brian Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute wrote last week, arguing that too many parts of the new relief proposal “were just pulled from the old Democratic wishlist.”
MORE ON THAT IN A BIT, but thanks for joining us for an extra special Tuesday version of Weekly Tax — where we're asking: Has it really been two decades since the days of The New Radicals?
Guess that’s one way to go off the grid: Today marks 13 years since three Britons and a Canadian became the first folks to ever reach the southern pole of inaccessibility (i.e., the part of Antarctica furthest from an ocean) without any kind of mechanical assistance.
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THE STAKES ARE HIGH: Something else to watch out for here — Biden’s proposed refundable tax credit expansions wouldn’t be permanent, but D.C. history has proven that short-term tax policies are usually temporary in name only.
In other words, this is what some conservatives are afraid of, and what some liberals are counting on: All it likely takes to expand the CTC and EITC permanently is to get your foot in the door temporarily. (Bloomberg Tax’s David Hood and Kaustuv Basu had more on this.)
One recent example: The beer, wine and spirits industries toiled for years to get lower excise rates on alcohol before getting a temporary version in the 2017 tax law. Three years and one short-term extension later, Congress permanently extended those lower rates.
And broadly speaking, Republicans made a similar bet when they made individual tax cuts temporary in that 2017 law, thinking that most of them would be extended when they came up in 2025. (Though, yes — congressional budget rules also played a big role there.)
A final point: The proposed child credit expansion has gotten most of the attention over the last week or so, perhaps understandably.
But activists on the left are plenty excited about potentially expanding the EITC, too, as they’ve long been pushing to get more of the credit’s benefits to workers without kids or who aren’t raising children in their home.
GETTING THAT TEAM IN PLACE: Janet Yellen, Biden’s pick for Treasury secretary, starts her confirmation hearings with the Senate Finance Committee today — and the big news heading into the proceedings is that the almost surely soon-to-be Treasury secretary isn’t too worried about deficits as the country continues to battle Covid-19.
In her opening statement for the hearings, Yellen will say that both she and Biden understand how much red ink the government has run up. “Without further action, we risk a longer, more painful recession now – and long-term scarring of the economy later," Yellen says, via our Victoria Guida.
Now whether that leads to expanded refundable tax credits, or more robust aid to states and localities? Remains to be seen.
In any event, Yellen is bound to be asked about taxes in a variety of ways during her confirmation hearing. (At least we hope.) Yellen herself came out in favor of a carbon tax in recent months. And with the former Fed chair saying debt isn’t such a big deal these days, Republicans are sure to ask about the Biden administration’s interest in raising taxes on the rich and corporations and perhaps rolling back some of those 2017 tax cuts.
WHILE WE’RE WAITING: It’s going to be awhile before the Biden administration really sinks its teeth into the global digital tax situation and the talks being run through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The Trump administration’s decision to hold back on another round of retaliatory tariffs earlier this month does seem to have given Biden more room to maneuver until he can get his team up and running, lobbyists and other interested parties told our colleagues in Europe. “Unravelling tariffs is a lot more complicated than not having them imposed in the first place,” as Bill Reinsch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies observed.
The U.S. trade representative is putting out a slew of reports that label the unilateral digital taxes employed by some countries as discriminatory. Meanwhile, the hope among many European officials is that a Biden administration will be more willing to negotiate on this and other topics, but there remains no real desire among Democrats to chip away at the U.S. tax base to help revenue departments around the world.
DO YOU WANT A TAX CUT, FELLOW KIDS? Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary is planning to exempt those under 25 from income taxes, which Bloomberg notes is likely a ploy to win over the youth vote in next year’s parliamentary elections. Orban will be running for a fourth straight term next year, and his softest support in Hungary has long come from younger voters. Still, some of Hungary’s neighbors — Poland in 2019, and Croatia last year — have put similar policies into place to try to keep younger workers from moving to greener pastures. Orban’s proposal would cost as much as 150 billion forint a year (or about a half-billion dollars), and he has plugged it as part of Hungary’s recovery efforts from the coronavirus.
ALWAYS A WFH ANGLE NOW: A Vermont commission has released a new report on how to update the state’s tax system — and one of the recommendations is to become a more desirable spot for remote workers. But as the VT Digger notes, the Vermont Tax Structure Commission’s central advice was to change up how the state covers public education costs, by shifting to an income tax from a property tax that now finances about two-thirds of Vermont’s K-12 spending. The group also pushed the state to broaden its narrow sales tax base. Vermont doesn’t tax clothing, groceries or a host of services, for instance, in large part to protect lower-income people. But the commission projected that a broader base would allow Vermont to enact a big cut in the sales tax rate, from 6 percent to 3.6 percent. As for that WFH angle: Better broadband would help attract more remote workers, the commission found — and that could give a boost to an income tax base that’s going to start losing a lot of baby boomers soon.
Mark your calendars: The IRS won't open tax filing season until Feb. 12.
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the soon-to-be Finance chair: Any tax-exempt group involved in this month's attack on the Capitol should lose that exemption.
South Africa is thinking about tax hikes to help pay for Covid-19 vaccination efforts.
The actor Steve Buscemi was nominated for seven Emmy Awards before finally winning in 2016 on his eighth try, for an AOL talk show titled "Park Bench with Steve Buscemi."
Source: https://www.politico.com/