Top Lawmakers 'Pulling Out All the Stops' to Pass Tax Bill With 100% Bonus Depreciation

While Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., “introduced the bill, any action is unlikely to occur this week as lawmakers prepare to leave town for another recess period,” according to the business lobbying group.

The Finance Committee released new data from the Treasury Department “on the situation facing small businesses if the Senate doesn’t pass this bill,” Wyden told The Hill.

According to the Treasury, Wyden said, “3.8 million small businesses claimed bonus depreciation or the R&D deduction in 2021. They’ll be hurt if the Senate doesn’t pass this bill.”

Senate ‘Must Get This Done’

In an April 15 statement, Wyden said that “some Senate Republicans objected to a provision in the bill that deals with what’s called a ‘lookback’. That provision deals with flexibility for families to claim the child tax credit using their income from the previous year.”

Senate Republicans “claimed it would disincentivize work. The JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] disagreed. Even conservative experts from the Tax Foundation, Americans for Tax Reform and the American Enterprise Institute disagreed — they said the bill wouldn’t have an impact on work,” Wyden said in the statement.

Regardless, Wyden said he’d be “willing to drop the lookback policy” and replace it “with other approaches that achieve the same cut in child poverty without any effect on work,” and that he “also offered to add additional policies that Senate Republicans asked for.”

Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, a prominent critic of the bill, “did not accept that offer,” Wyden said.

“But I want the rest of the Senate to know, my offer still stands,” Wyden continued, adding that “the Senate must get this done. I know it’s difficult, but I believe the votes are there.”

If the Senate fails to pass the tax bill, “the soonest it will revisit these issues, in all likelihood, is late 2025″ when the Senate “will have to deal with trillions of dollars in tax policies up in the air” as much of the sweeping 2017 tax overhaul expires at the end of that year.