DALLAS -- Congressional negotiators seeking common ground for additional revenues to support a multiyear highway bill said Thursday that talks may falter over a proposal by Sen. Chuck Schumer to significantly increase federal transportation funding beyond what has been proposed thus far.
House and Senate Republicans said the proposal would boost federal transportation funding, which totaled $53.7 million in fiscal 2017, to more than the $80 billion per year in President Obama's $478 billion, six-year Grow America Act.
The Democrat from New York told reporters on Thursday that he has been talking with Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, on a revamp of the international tax code that would generate the additional revenue needed to support a long-term bill. He declined to give the specific level of annual funding being sought, citing a reluctance by Republicans to raise taxes.
"We're talking. It's very hard," said Schumer. "We need a nice, robust highway number. A lot of their budget rules constrain them, so we'll have to see."
Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., chairman of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, said the amount of funding that Schumer is seeking in a long-term transportation bill has not been specified.
"Right now we don't know," he said. "The President said $450 billion. The baseline is around $300 billion. Schumer is somewhere north of there, significantly north of there."
President Obama's six-year transportation proposal would be funded with $238 billion from a mandatory 14% tax on corporate overseas earnings and $240 billion of gasoline and diesel tax collections.
Schumer's plan calls for deemed repatriation of overseas corporate earnings, which means the earnings would be taxed even if they are not brought into the U.S.
A Senate Finance Committee panel on international tax reform headed by Schumer and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said in July that said corporate tax overhaul targeting the profits held overseas by U.S. corporations could provide the revenue needed for years of federal transportation funding. The panel's report did not include a proposed tax rate or estimates of how much revenue the revamp tax code would bring in.
Overseas earnings are currently taxed at 35% but only if and when the money comes into the U.S.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the House should take up the six-year DRIVE Act passed by the Senate in late July if the tax talks fail.
The current 90-day extension of the Highway Trust Fund will expire on Oct. 29.
"Frankly, I don't see how you can do what they want to do in this limited timeframe that we have," Hatch said.
Sen. David Durbin, R-Ill., said Thursday that House Speaker John Boehner should schedule a vote on the DRIVE Act before Boehner resigns from Congress at the end of October.
"While the House of Representatives sits on a long-term transportation bill passed by the Senate this summer, states and businesses lack the certainty and resources to move forward on critical infrastructure projects that will make us more competitive in the global economy and create thousands of jobs in the process," Durbin said in a release. The DRIVE Act (H.R. 22) is fully funded for the first three years with $47 billion of revenue offsets complementing gasoline and diesel tax collections in the Highway Trust Fund.
The House should vote this month on the Senate's multiyear highway bill, said Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a chief architect of the DRIVE Act.
"If we wait until the end of the year, Congress will jeopardize resources that the Senate has set aside to pay for the highway bill, and our nation will lose another construction season, in turn wasting taxpayer dollars and postponing big, economy-boosting projects," Inhofe said.
