Congressional Negotiators Agree to Extend Some Tax Credits and Add to Debt
WASHINGTON — Brewers, distillers, racehorse owners, churches with parking lots and some wind energy producers won federal tax breaks in a last-hour congressional agreement on taxes and spending that was unveiled Tuesday morning.
The tax-break bonanza has become a rite of passage, transcending partisan bickering and congressional rancor and allowing lawmakers to dole out special-interest tax breaks by attaching the provisions to must-pass legislation.
The agreement reached on Tuesday capped months of contentious negotiations between lawmakers from both parties and the White House over whether to extend a series tax credits and other provisions that were set to expire or had already ended.
Among the biggest changes tucked into the broader spending agreement is the permanent repeal of taxes on medical devices, health insurers and generous health plans. Those taxes were meant to fund the Affordable Care Act, which the Trump administration has targeted for elimination.
Congressional staff and lobbyists were referring to the agreement on Tuesday as a “skinny” deal, which fell short of both Democratic and Republican ambitions for a more expansive effort that could have included additional aid to low-income families and fixes for errors written into the sweeping package of tax cuts that President Trump signed in 2017.
Still, the provisions in the deal will reward certain industries and businesses with tax breaks that could add nearly $500 billion to the federal debt over the next decade, according to some initial estimates.
“This is a gluttonous tax binge that has the desperate feel of politicians scrambling to heap political favors on powerful interest groups,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “and there isn’t a single credible justification to defend it.”
Negotiators reached the deal hours before they were set to vote on spending legislation to keep the government fully funded through the end of the fiscal year. The package of extenders, through a procedural maneuver on the House floor, is expected to be attached to one of the spending packages up for a vote Tuesday.
It will then head to the Senate, which is expected to take up the legislation before government funding expires on Friday.
The agreement did not include the kind of dramatic increases in credits for low-income families that Democrats had hoped for and also fell short of Republicans’ hopes of correcting language in the 2017 tax law that has hurt some business owners, including a provision that accidentally reduced tax benefits for restaurant renovations.
It also violates a long-running promise by fiscal conservatives to kill expiring tax credits once and for all.
Some senators and outside groups had also hoped to include measures to improve accountability and transparency in “opportunity zones,” a creation of the 2017 law that were pitched as an effort to boost struggling communities but have at times served to enrich wealthy developers and already affluent areas. None of those measures survived in the final agreement.
Congressional staff said that a broader agreement, including the extension of more tax credits, was at hand this weekend, but that White House officials and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ultimately rejected it. Mr. Mnuchin pushed for any larger deal to include the relief for restaurant owners, they said, but Democrats were unwilling to support it without more in return on their priorities.
The deal as agreed to includes a few reversals from the 2017 law. It eliminates a tax increase that hit the children and spouses of deceased members of the military, along with a new tax that was set to hit churches and other nonprofit organizations that offer parking to their employees.
It extends tax benefits for railroad track maintenance, racehorse and racetrack ownership, hiring and investment on Native American reservations and some victims of natural disasters, among others. It extends tax advantages for winemakers, beer brewers and liquor distillers.
It also extends a handful of credits for renewable energy, such as wind production, but does not include an extended credit for the buyers of electric cars.
Gregory Wetstone, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, called the package a “squandered opportunity” on Tuesday. “While A.C.O.R.E. supports the modest extensions in the package,” he said, “they will do little for renewable growth and next to nothing to address climate change.”
Those that advocate lower taxes said extending the special-interest tax breaks would do little to encourage investment and economic growth, in part because some of those extensions apply retroactively to tax years already gone by.
“Many of these tax provisions expired two years ago,” said Nicole Kaeding, an economist and the vice president of policy promotion at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. “Retroactively extending these provisions doesn’t change economic behavior; we can’t change the past. All it does is provide a windfall to these companies years after their activities occurred.”
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