Victor ReklaitisRobert Schroeder
EV tax credits: The House Ways and Means Committee has proposed tax credits up to $12,500 for electrical vehicles. However, automobile makers with non-unionized workforces, such as Tesla /zigman2/quotes/203558040/composite TSLA -2.24% , have spoken out against a provision that would reduce the credits for their vehicles by $4,500, as only union-made vehicles assembled in the U.S. would qualify.
Don’t miss: Automobile industry’s future ‘is electric, and there’s no turning back,’ Biden says, as he touts EV goal
Immigration changes: The House’s version of the bill would shield immigrants in the U.S. illegally from deportation for five years and provide a five-year, renewable work authorization, available to anyone in the country before 2011, notes a Wall Street Journal report . In addition, House Democrats propose to “recapture” hundreds of thousands of unused green cards from the last several decades and make them available to applicants waiting in line, the Journal reported . Those proposals from the House come after Biden’s framework last month showed “Build Back Better” spending that would total $1.75 trillion, then an additional $100 billion for immigration. That $100 billion for immigration would help with “reducing backlogs, expanding legal representation, and making the asylum system and border processing more efficient and humane,” the White House said. But the Senate parliamentarian must rule on whether any immigration proposals meet strict criteria that govern the Senate budget process, as the Democratic social-spending bill is expected to advance through budget reconciliation .
What’s out
Free community college: Biden, whose wife, Jill Biden, is a community-college professor , campaigned on making two years of community college tuition-free, and the proposal has been among the major parts of the Build Back Better agenda. But the plan is getting left out after opposition from “Manchin and one other person,” the president said last month. Biden said boosts for Pell Grants are “what I think we can get done,” saying that’s “a start.” His framework proposes increasing the maximum Pell Grant by $550 for more than 5 million students.
Clean-electricity performance program: This program — which would provide grants to utilities that increase their use of clean electricity — was strongly opposed by Manchin . Biden’s framework, meanwhile, contains $555 billion in clean energy and climate programs.
Paying for it
Democrats had been aiming to get wealthy Americans and companies to pay higher tax rates, which would fund the social-spending package — but some of those hikes have been opposed by Arizona’s Sinema. She appeared open to an excise tax on stock buybacks and a 15% minimum corporate tax rate, so those are in the latest plan.
Boosting tax enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service is another way that Democrats plan to find funding for their priorities. In addition, the wealthiest U.S. households would face a 5% added tax for income above $10 million, and, once income reaches $25 million, they’d pay an 8% added tax. That would affect 0.02% of Americans, according to the White House.
Top Democrats at one point said a new annual tax on billionaires’ unrealized capital gains was likely to be included in their social-spending package, but that proposal quickly met criticism from other Democrats. An excise tax on tobacco and nicotine products also has been left out, along with a proposal to increase the extent to which banks tell the IRS about cash flows in customers’ accounts.
See: Corporate rates left alone, stock buybacks targeted — what’s in Biden’s tax plan
This is an updated version of a report first published on Oct. 18, 2021.
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