This week is expected to be a defining one for the Biden agenda, bookended by the bipartisan infrastructure bill signing on Monday and the long-anticipated Congressional Budget Office score of the Build Back Better Act due on Friday. The CBO score is the contingency upon which the five conservative Democratic holdouts in the House have conditioned their support for the $1.85 billion package.
Already, that CBO score seems to be hitting a long-prophesied snag. In its insistence that the entirety of the legislation be “paid for,” the White House has assumed $400 billion in savings from tax enforcement over the ten-year budget period, based on an $80 billion allocation to the Internal Revenue Service to go after tax cheats. It’s an essential revenue-raiser, and one of the only meaningful tax changes for the ultra-rich, as everything from closing the carried interest loophole to ending step-up in basis to taxing wealth has fallen out of the bill. Rich people love cheating on their taxes, though, so stronger IRS enforcement is still consequential, and difficult for lobbyists to justify opposing.
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