Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the leading Senate GOP negotiator, said the talk was a positive step.
“The attitude that the president had in the Oval Office with us was very supportive, very much desirous of striking a deal,” Ms. Capito said.
In addition to hiking taxes, the president wants to beef up the IRS to go after tax cheats and suggested it’s an idea he can see Republicans supporting.
He said figuring out how to close the tax gap through stepped-up enforcement could generate between $700 billion and $1.3 trillion in revenues for the federal government
“Let’s say it’s somewhere in between. That’s a trillion dollars. I’m confident they would go for that,” the president told MSNBC this week.
The Senate bill, which is identical to the House version introduced today, is supported by a broad coalition [2] of advocates from across the political spectrum, including: American Civil Liberties Union, American Conservative Union, Americans for Prosperity, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Demand Progress, Due Process Institute, FreedomWorks, Government Accountability Project, Government Information Watch, Innocence Project, Justice Action Network, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, National Taxpayers Union, Open the Government, Protect Democracy, Project on Government Oversight (POGO), Public Citizen, R Street Institute, Right on Crime, and The Sentencing Project.
Pete Sepp, president of the National Taxpayers Union, said there are legitimate concerns about exactly how the IRS would use the additional money and power.
“The more data the government has and the more it exchanges, the greater the risk of a breach and all of the problems that come with it,” Mr. Sepp said. “Talk about infrastructure policy. I mean, does the IRS have the infrastructure in place to even manage this information?”
Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said the administration has the right idea on the reporting requirements but that the scope is much too broad and would likely leave the IRS with reams of relatively useless information.
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