A better BCRA to the CBO tomorrow? Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he’ll send a revised Better Care Reconciliation Act to the Congressional Budget Office before Congress departs for its July 4 recess on Friday. His hope: CBO can produce a new score by the time Congress returns on July 10. That would give lawmakers two full weeks to consider the bill before they depart again for a month-long August recess. Will revisions appease those on the political left or right? Which Senators will McConnell try to sway? Stay tuned.
About that budget window… GOP Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania proposes an expansion of the ten-year budget window, but Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch says it’s unlikely. Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says a longer-term fiscal analysis can provide useful information, but shouldn’t be used as a gimmick to dodge budget rules. House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows said of the effort to create a 15- to 20-year window: “That’s not a hill to die on. We’re really looking at the underlying policy.”
A staff shuffle at Finance. Jay Khosla was named Republican staff director of the Finance Committee. He's replacing Chris Campbell, who President Trump has nominated to become an Assistant Treasury Secretary for Financial Institutions. Despite his title, taxes likely will be part of Campbell’s portfolio.
Is Amazon avoiding taxes? President Trump tweeted yesterday that the "AmazonWashingtonPost" is not paying “internet taxes.” It is unclear what the president meant since there is no federal internet tax. Moreover, on April 1, Amazon began collecting, and presumably remitting, sales tax on purchases in every US state that levies the tax. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. And the president is not happy with The Post.
A new tax system leads to protests and strikes in India. The government has given companies two months to pay the new goods and service tax that goes into effect on Saturday. But the week has seen strikes, protests, and other delays, as most of the country’s millions of small businesses say they need more time. Most do not have computers, an internet connection, or awareness of how much they owe. Over 50,000 textile traders went on strike to protest the tax.
This week’s cyberattack started in tax software. The ransomware, a variant of “Petya,” affected computers in 65 countries, and Microsoft traced it to a Ukrainian company M.E.Doc’s tax accounting software. The ransomware encrypts files and hardware, and then demands a $300 bitcoin payment to retrieve them. As of Wednesday morning Eastern time, the cybercrooks’ bitcoin account only had received around $10,000.
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