Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Trifecta vote might be delayed until after the election?

Tax Notes Today ($) reports that the Senators charged with getting more Democrats on board for the "trifecta bill" are already raising the possibility of a post-election vote on the bill. The thinking seems to be that Democrats then will be more willing to buck the party line and Harry Reid's passsionate opposition to estate tax reform.

The flaw in that theory is that the IRS 2006 tax forms go to the printers on November 1. So if the extenders portion of the bill passes after that date, the forms will be, well, inaccurate. That might be cured with supplemental forms, but that's not good practice. And late amendments to the tax law can also be problematic for the writers of tax preparation software.
Posted by Jim Gust at 10:09 AM

1 comment:

JLM said...

Though I clipped this from a liberal source, I fear it's an all too accurate summary of the silly games that Senator Frist and others have played with the extenders:

"Earlier this year, Sen. Grassley planned to add the renewal of these extenders to the tax reconciliation bill. But the GOP leadership argued that the tax extenders should not be added to the reconciliation bill because they are very popular and the special protections afforded under reconciliation are not needed to pass them. The leadership convinced Grassley they could easily be added to the pension reform bill. Yet with Congress fast approaching the final days before its August recess, the House GOP leadership suddenly floated the idea of pulling the extenders package from the pension bill so it could be paired with a major estate tax cut and a stingy minimum wage increase – all at Frist's behest.

"Frist understood the trade-off here. On June 8, the Senate had rejected a bill to repeal the estate tax by three votes. He thought a “compromise” estate tax cut costing 75 percent of full repeal combined with the popular "extenders" package might buy him the votes he needed.

"The normally reserved and accommodating Grassley felt betrayed, saying he had been “knifed in the back.” He pointedly noted that he had been promised by the Senate GOP leadership that the tax extenders would be on the reconciliation bill and then on the pension reform bill.

"The House GOP leaders, working in concert with Frist, quickly passed the trifecta bill, which, predictably, fell three votes short of the 60 needed to proceed in the Senate. As Grassley had feared, the estate tax proposal was the killer. As a result, the popular tax extenders, the only must-pass piece of legislation in the whole mix, lie on the cutting-room floor. "

6:16 PM

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