President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan yesterday. Biden signed the bill a day earlier than expected, since the $1.9 trillion bill arrived at the White House sooner than expected. Biden wanted to sign the bill quickly since enhanced federal unemployment benefits expire on Sunday. The White House also says the first economic impact payments could go out as soon as this weekend.
Treasury Secretary Yellen: Relief package puts US on track for full employment by 2022. In a statement released after the bill passed, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said, “We are now charting a very different course out of this crisis compared to the one a decade ago. Rather than a long, slow recovery, I expect we could reach full employment by as soon as next year.” Conservative critics have the opposite fear: They worry the $1.9 trillion bill will overheat the economy.
President Biden announces key Treasury nominees. Biden announced he will nominate Lily Batchelder as Assistant Treasury Secretary for Tax Policy and Ben Harris as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy. Batchelder, who teaches tax law at NYU, was an adviser to President Obama and chief tax counsel for the Senate Finance Committee. Harris teaches at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He served on Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Harris is a TPC alum and Batchelder was a visiting fellow at TPC.
TPC has updated its pandemic relief bill analysis. TPC has a new distributional analysis of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) that includes several relatively minor tax provisions that were not in TPC’s original estimates. The latest analysis shows slightly larger tax cuts for most households. TPC has also corrected a small error in its earlier analysis to better reflect households who do not normally file tax returns but now will claim the expanded earned income tax credit (EITC). That change also slightly increases the tax savings of lower income households. The corrected tables are here.
In West Africa: Ghana plans tax increases. The government plans to raise $889 billion to cut its deficit and make tax collection more efficient. The plan would increase consumption taxes and taxes on petroleum and bank profits. But the government says it will help small businesses.
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