Democrat Floats ‘Patriot Tax’ on the Wealthy

By Yuval Rosenberg

Selling the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal Won’t Be Easy

The sales pitch has started for the bipartisan infrastructure
bill negotiated by 10 senators. Closing a deal with the White House
and fellow lawmakers won’t be easy.

“Some Democrats already have expressed discomfort with the early
details of the nearly $1 trillion, five-year package, arguing it
should be bigger and more robust in scope. Republicans, meanwhile,
signaled there may not be widespread support for it within their
own party, either,” The Washington Post’s Tony Romm
reports.

The White House said last week it
has questions about the $974 billion, five-year
proposal, which would add up to $1.2 trillion if extended out to
the White House’s preferred eight-year timeframe. And with some
Democrats losing patience with the process, party leaders have said
they are pushing ahead on two tracks, one bipartisan and the other
that wouldn’t require GOP support.

Politico’s
Playbook on Monday offered some details of the
dynamics at play, suggesting that the White House is seriously
considering the deal, according to senior Democrats, but wants to
see if party members are open to it. And congressional Democrats
reportedly want assurances from two centrists pushing the deal,
Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), that they’ll
back a second, broader infrastructure package if this deal is
adopted. “There would have to be clarity that we’re getting the
second package. Manchin and Sinema are going to have to give
assurances to Bernie [Sanders],” one senior Democratic
source told Politico.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) indicated as much on
Sunday. In an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,”
Pelosi said, “I don’t know how we can possibly sell [the bipartisan
deal] to our caucus unless we know there is more to come.”

For his part, Sanders is pressing ahead with the second track, a
broader reconciliation bill that could be passed by a simple
majority. “He’s focused on building momentum for a reconciliation
bill that will be the most consequential legislation for working
people enacted since the 1930s,” a Sanders aide told
Politico.

The White House, meanwhile, reportedly wants more details on the
financing in the bipartisan deal, more funding for climate
priorities and some assurance that 10 Republican senators will back
the compromise agreement, since there are just five in the group
that negotiated it.

Playbook summed up the challenges involved by harkening
all the way back to Rodney Dangerfield’s 1986 movie “Back to
School”: “One way to think about why this deal is
like the Triple Lindy of legislating for Biden: to pull it
off, the two most conservative Democrats (Manchin and Sinema) need
to deliver the most liberal senator (Sanders) in their caucus while
the five most anti-Trump Republicans (Portman, Romney, Murkowski,
Collins, and Cassidy) need to deliver five of their Trumpy
colleagues. Sounds hard!”

House Democrats Propose $1.5 Trillion for Discretionary
Spending

Democrats in the House unveiled a resolution that would
authorize roughly $1.5 trillion in discretionary spending for
fiscal year 2022.

The so-called deeming resolution would allow the House to move
ahead without debating a budget resolution and enable lawmakers to
start working on the details of next year’s spending plan.

House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY) said he hopes
to have a budget resolution by July. In the meantime, House
appropriators will begin drafting the 12 annual spending bills that
fund much of the government.

A major boost in spending: The $1.5 trillion topline
number represents a 9% increase in overall spending from the
previous year. The deeming resolution does not specify the split
between defense and non-defense spending, but the numbers within
the individual bills are expected to stick close to what the Biden
administration proposed — about $770 billion for domestic programs
and $753 billion for defense, with the domestic spending increasing
16.5% and defense spending increasing 1.6%.

Budgetary strategy: Skipping over the budget debate
allows Democrats to avoid what could be difficult votes on key
details, not least the relative levels of defense and non-defense
spending, an issue that has the potential to divide liberal and
moderate members of the party.

Democrats are also attempting to lay the groundwork to advance
their spending plans under different scenarios. If Republicans and
Democrats are unable to agree on a deal on infrastructure spending,
Democrats could move ahead on their own through the reconciliation
process, the instructions for which would come in the budget
resolution to be released later.

Again bypassing the normal budget process: Republicans
complained Monday about the failure to produce a budget resolution.
“It has been nearly 900 days since Democrats became the majority in
the House of Representatives and during that entire time they have
failed to pass anything close to a real budget,” House Budget
Committee ranking member Jason Smith (R-MO) said.

The budget watchdogs at the Committee for a Responsible
Federal Budget also expressed their concerns. “Deeming
discretionary levels should be a last resort, not a first resort.
With a unified government, Congress has absolutely no excuse for
not passing a budget,” said CRFB’s Maya MacGuineas in a statement.
“Yet almost two months past the legal deadline for Congress to
finish a budget, neither the House nor the Senate Budget Committees
have released so much as a draft. After putting forward a budget
nearly every year since 1998, this could be the third year in a row
where the House fails to even introduce a real budget resolution.
This is a clear-cut failure of leadership, and it is no way to run
a country.”

Democratic Lawmaker Floats 'Patriot Tax' on the Wealthy

A Democrat who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee says
he’s exploring the idea of a one-time wealth tax to help fund
President Biden’s ambitious spending plans.

Rep. Thomas Suozzi
told The Hill Friday that he’s exploring the idea
of a “patriot tax” of 2.5% on households worth between $50 million
and $100 million and 5% on households worth more than $100 million,
to be paid over a five-year period. Suozzi’s office says the
one-time tax could raise $450 billion.

“We all know that people who are wealthy did very well during
the pandemic and people that were low-income people did not do
well,” Suozzi said, adding that the levy would be “a way to help
your country to build back better.”

The tax could also help defray the cost of restoring the state
and local tax deduction in its entirety, the congressman said,
citing a high-priority issue for some lawmakers from New York and
other states with relatively high property values and local
taxes.

The bottom line: A wealth tax of any
kind is a long shot, facing enormous political and possibly legal
hurdles. But the release of a
report last week from ProPublica on the relatively
modest level of taxes paid by some of the country’s wealthiest
citizens has brought the issue back to the forefront, and the
interest in such a tax expressed by Suozzi, a member of the
bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, suggests that it could remain
part of the political conversation in the coming months.

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