With Congress set to depart DC for the next two weeks, there’s been a notable increase in chatter regarding the status of BBB negotiations:

• On Friday, Politico reported that Schumer and Manchin met twice last week.  They’ve only met six times this whole Spring, so that suggests the pace of discussions is ramping up.
• Monday, Bloomberg published an article suggesting that talks were making progress, including a specific agreement on EV tax credits.
• Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that a new fee on methane emissions from oil and gas operations is going to be part of the package.
• And …
  
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With the odds of a recession rising, a common tool used to counter past slowdowns may no longer be available.  That’s bad news for private businesses and the workers they employ.  Congressional tax-writers need to start thinking about this issue now, while there’s still time to address it.

The tool in question is allowing businesses suffering losses to carry those losses back to previous years, reducing their tax liability in those years, and receiving refunds now while the economy is doing poorly.  The benefit itself is mostly one of timing.  Any refunds received while the economy is slow will be …

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Tax Notes is out with a new piece that makes the case for expanding the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT).  The article quotes exclusively from individuals who would like to see the tax applied to a broader base of income.  Absent is anybody from the business community, which is uniformly opposed to these tax hikes.

Instead, the article comes across as an advocacy piece highlighting people long opposed to the pass-through structure as a whole.  The article starts off:

President Biden has proposed addressing a long-perceived flaw with the net investment income tax, but as with his predecessors, political considerations …

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Still more evidence the tax hikes included in the Build Back Better Act would make inflation worse.  As noted by Bruce Thompson in the Washington Examiner, a “Working Paper” from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows how tax hikes on businesses result in higher prices for consumers.

The study found that increases in corporate tax rates are passed on to consumers, in part, in the form of higher prices.  Here’s the key conclusion from the write-up:

This paper provides evidence that corporate taxes impact retail product prices, and that a significant portion of corporate tax incidence falls on consumers…. …

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