Congressional Democrats are at odds over both the tax and spending sides of a bill to enact the bulk of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, even as party leaders aim to have an outline of a deal by the end of the week.
The chances for agreement — which seemed in reach late Tuesday — receded Wednesday as Democratic leaders intensified a search for alternatives to the corporate and individual tax hikes they’d worked on for months. That’s amid opposition from Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Democrats also are reworking the bill’s climate provisions, after Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia said he can’t support a clean power program favored by Biden.
The eleventh-hour moves to appease the two senators — whose crucial votes are seen as the hardest to win — demonstrate the massive changes that lawmakers must make to the tax and spending plans the White House published in the spring.
Should Democrats nix a proposed corporate tax hike to 26.5% from 21%, they would set aside a promise to make the largest businesses shoulder more of the tax burden. It also would leave Democrats with a more than $540 billion hole in the roughly $2 trillion total they need to raise to offset the cost of spending plans that include climate, health care and early-childhood programs.
Setbacks seen
Besides the wide gulf on revenue, other items that had seemed close to being settled — like the elimination of free community college and the scaling back of the child tax credit expansion to one year — were met with resistance from some Democrats Wednesday.
With slim majorities in both chambers, Democrats need near-unanimous support to squeak the measure through Congress in face of concerted Republican opposition.
Even the skimpiest outline of a deal would need some detail on how Democrats plan to pay for it, particularly given Biden’s pledge that the package would not add to the deficit.
“There is an expansive menu of options for how to finance the president’s plan to ensure our economy delivers for hardworking families, and none of them are off the table,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement late Wednesday.
Biden’s push
Biden has marshaled a renewed push, both with lawmakers and with the public, to get his agenda enacted. On Tuesday, he met with key lawmakers at the White House, including Manchin and Sinema, and later met separately with one group of progressive lawmakers and a group of moderates.
On Wednesday, Biden headed to his hometown of Scranton, delivering a speech that relied heavily on his personal story in his call to boost the middle class.
“My Build Back Better plan is designed to get us moving again,” he said.
He invoked his victory in the 2020 election as a mandate for the pledges he made on the campaign trail.
Town hall
“Guess what? 81 million people voted for me,” he said. “Their voices deserve to be heard, not to be denied or worse, be ignored.”
On Thursday, Biden will head to Baltimore to hold a town hall hosted by CNN, where he’ll continue his campaign for a deal.
Democrats face a series of hard decisions in the coming days as they look to trim their plans down to roughly $2 trillion from the previous outline of more than $3.5 trillion.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday no decision had been made on ideas Biden and rank-and-file Democrats discussed at the White House Tuesday, including eliminating community college tuition and extending an expansion of the popular child tax credit for one year instead of four. That slowed momentum, after lawmakers had left that meeting saying that consensus was growing.
Neal’s frustration
Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal said he is negotiating with the White House to preserve his panel’s endorsement of extending for four years the $250-$300 per month expansion of the child tax credit for parents.
“We’re gonna continue to fight for the House position,” Neal told reporters. “We didn’t have a new tax plan every half hour. We laid out a plan that was fully paid for, and we set our priorities.”
Pelosi said that it’s still “very possible” to have an outline of a deal by Friday.
“We expect negotiations to remain very hectic over the next 10 days,” Evercore ISI analysts Tobin Marcus and Peter Williams wrote in a note to clients Thursday. “We see a 50-50 chance that Democrats can reach a high-level deal on a reconciliation bill in the $1.8 – $1.9 trillion range by the end of next week.”
Wealth tax
Without a modest corporate tax increase — which has broad support among nearly all Democrats, including Manchin — lawmakers will need to turn to other more untested ideas that are still being fleshed out.
Among the alternatives is a billionaire’s wealth tax, an annual levy on investment appreciation for some of the richest Americans. The idea, being developed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, has been favored by progressives for years, but is technically difficult to design and implement. Democrats are also considering a tax on corporate stock buybacks and a minimum tax on companies with high profit margins but little taxable income.
The relative newness of these ideas likely means that Democrats will need time to consider the economic and political impacts of the taxes, which could lead to Democrats beyond Manchin or Sinema balking at the proposals.
“Everyone is going to have to compromise if we are going to find that legislative sweet spot we can all get behind,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor Wednesday. Senators will keep talking “all week long until we get the job done,” he said.
— With assistance from Billy House and Josh Wingrove
