Daily Deduction Crossing The T’s, Dotting The I’s
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There’s a spending deal on deck… A vote on the deal is imminent as soon as the deal’s text is finalized by appropriators. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) plans to give the House 72 hours from the time of the bill’s introduction to its vote, and then the Senate will have to move quickly to pass the bill before the end of Friday. That’s when funding for the Departments of Defense, Treasury, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, State, and other agencies will otherwise expire.

Pozen: Congress should offer businesses prospective, not retroactive, tax relief. Robert Pozen, Chair of TPC’s Leadership Council, writes for MarketWatch about the House-passed tax package that would lift limits on corporate deductions retroactively for expenditures made in 2022 and 2023. Those limits, established by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, aimed to offset the revenue loss from reducing the corporate tax rate. Pozen argues, “The retroactive removal of deduction limits is simply a giveaway to corporations, which undermines [that] fundamental trade-off in the 2017 Act… a windfall on a select group of shareholders without benefitting the rest of us.”

New York State Court of Appeals allows a lawsuit challenging New York’s property tax system to advance. The lawsuit challenges city and state rules that allow homes with equivalent values to be taxed at different rates depending on where they are in New York City. It also asserts that the city taxes owners of rental properties at higher rates than owners of higher-end condominiums and co-ops, and renters end up paying those costs.

Vermont’s tax sales lack guardrails, critics say. Municipalities in the state can auction a homeowner’s property if the homeowner falls behind on their tax payments. The tax sale can help municipalities recover taxes owed, and —if a homeowner can pay off their debt and fees within a year —they won’t lose their home to the highest bidder. But state law offers few protections for residents facing a tax sale, nor does it specify a threshold for when towns could bring a property to tax sale. The Vermont House recently passed a bill that makes some changes to the law; the bill is now headed to the state Senate’s Committee on Finance.

In two weeks: How did the antitax movement hijack America? On Wednesday, April 3, the Brookings Institution and TPC will host a hybrid (in-person and virtual) event to examine the antitax movement, explored in a new book by professor emeritus at Columbia Law School and Yale Law School, Michael Graetz. Graetz, after an opening presentation, will join Steven Dean (Boston University Law), Douglas Holtz-Eakin (American Action Forum), and Vanessa Williamson (Brookings) to dive deeper into this issue. David Wessel (Brookings) will moderate. Learn more and register here.

 

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