House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., and other Republican leaders hope by summer to have a broad framework for comprehensive tax reform so that they can fast-track it next year.
“This is an idea House Republicans support, the speaker endorsed it earlier this week, and I urge the Senate and the president to get behind it as well,” Camp said here Thursday morning at an annual policy seminar hosted by the Federal Policy Group. “Doing so would send a clear, strong message to the markets, to employers and families that Washington is serious about reforming our tax code and putting us on a path to sustained economic growth.”
House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said he and Camp have been holding tax planning sessions in his office where they are trying to find a consensus on tax issues among House Republicans.
“I would hope we would be able to do something by summer,” McCarthy said on tax reform, adding that it likely would be a broad framework of tax changes.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio., this week sought to boost support for a 2013 tax system overhaul and said the House will vote before the August recess on a bill to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, which expire at the end of the year. A one-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts would serve as a bridge to tax reform, he said. It would allow Congress time to address several pressing issues, including a host of other expiring tax provisions.
Some of these tax provisions include renewing the alternative minimum tax patch, the state and local sales tax deduction, as well as several expired muni bond provisions that were in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Meanwhile, Camp said he and Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio., will continue to hold hearings examining dozens of expired and expiring tax provisions in the next few months.
“Clearly, progress has been made,” Camp said. “This isn’t just some Dusty Springfield song, and we aren’t just sitting around 'wishing and hoping and thinking and praying’ that tax reform will get done.”
Tiberi, the chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on revenue measures, has been tasked with reviewing the tax extenders. The subcommittee plans to hold its next hearing on extenders in June.
“If extenders are beneficial and are helping the economy, then they should be seriously considered,” Camp said. “If an extender has outlived its value, and if it is not producing the economic benefits it once was, then we need to determine whether there is merit in continuing that provision.”
The committee is not finished examining tax extenders and it is unlikely it will have finished by this summer, Tiberi told The Bond Buyer.
“We would certainly like to do comprehensive tax reform today, but that is not realistic so we have to have a bridge,” he said. “Not every extender has been created equally. We are trying to separate the weak from the strong.”
When asked about his position on tax-exemption for municipal bonds, Tiberi skirted the question and said that the tax expenditure “is important to a lot of folks.” He said the committee is still evaluating the effectiveness of all of the extenders to the overall economy.
