White House seeks ‘perfecto’ tax bill
WASHINGTON — The House and Senate are not even in formal conference negotiations on a tax overhaul measure yet, but the expectation from the White House is clear: It’s got to be “perfecto.”
On a day of increasing uncertainty over how to fund the government past Dec. 8, President Donald Trump hosted a small group of Senate Republicans at the White House and placed his marker.
Americans will “be making so much money you are not going to know what to do with it,” Trump said Tuesday, adding that “I think we’re going to make it so that it comes out very beautifully.”
After the Senate passed its measure on Saturday, 51-49, GOP leaders and the White House had a choice, Trump explained: put the Senate bill up for a vote on the House floor, or “put it into the conference and let’s come out with something where everything is perfecto.”
They chose “perfecto,” he said as GOP senators, seated around a rectangular table in the Roosevelt Room, looked on.
But getting to perfecto is easier said than done, particularly when issues like the alternative minimum tax, pass-through companies, the individual mandate to purchase health insurance and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are added to the mix.
For instance, repealing the AMT is a priority for House Republicans in conference negotiations with Senate tax writers, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady said.
The Texas Republican said he has spoken to many House Republicans who “feel strongly” about perma- nently repealing the AMT for corporations and individual taxpayers. The House-passed tax bill would do so, while the Senate measure would keep the current corporate AMT and expand exemptions for the individual AMT rather than repeal it.
“Both of them are very costly and they add complexity,” Brady said Tuesday. The individual alternative minimum tax particularly affects families in high-tax states and the corporate AMT “undermines some of the pro-growth provisions that we kept in the tax code,” including the tax credit for research and development, he said.
Meanwhile, Brady said there were “strengths” in each chamber’s proposed structure for taxing pass-through business income.
“Right now we’re looking at how we can really improve on both structures, especially making sure pass-throughs that make a lot of capital investment in their business can achieve the lowest possible pass-through rate that we can deliver,” he said.
On deductions for state and local taxes, Brady said possible changes are still on the table. Both the House and Senate tax plans would allow up to $10,000 in property taxes to be deducted, but that provision could be tweaked in conference to further address concerns of Republicans from high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California.
He said making such a change could be costly in terms of revenue. “It’s got a pretty big figure to it. But all of this stuff interacts with each other,” he said.