Negotiations over a year-end tax and spending deal are nearing completion but negotiators are still unable to agree on a plan to lift the 40-year ban on oil exports, according to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
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The compromise tax and spending bill is expected to include a $1.1 trillion bill to increase domestic and military funding and companion legislation that would extend almost 50 expired tax breaks.
Republican leaders predicted the legislation would be unveiled by day’s end and come to a vote Thursday, allowing lawmakers to head home for the holidays having completed their needed tasks, if not distinguished themselves much beyond that.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said lawmakers were making progress. “We’ve made very clear to Republicans that if they want this… there must be included in this policies to reduce our carbon emissions and encourage renewable energy”, Reid said on the Senate floor.
From the White House, press secretary Josh Earnest sounded resigned to Obama signing a bill lifting the crude oil export ban despite previous threats to veto the measure as stand-alone legislation. With temporary spending for the government expiring Wednesday night, lawmakers will likely need to approve another stopgap measure keeping agency doors open for a few more days while work on the leading-edge bill is finished.
“We’ve been pretty clear: we’re not going to have a shutdown”, Ryan said at an event sponsored by Politico. Oil companies have said the ban on exporting crude oil is no longer necessary considering the production boom happening in the United States.
Separately, leaders are also trying to broker a almost $700 billion package of tax breaks – including specialty deductions for the film industry, school teachers and thoroughbred racehorse owners, and broader ones for business investments and depreciation. The packages are likely to move as separate measures in the House, because Republicans are more inclined to support the tax breaks but oppose the spending bill, while the opposite is true for Democrats.
“I would anticipate that there will be some elements of the budget bill that are not consistent with the kinds of policies that we have long supported here”, he said.
In exchange, Democrats wanted concessions including renewed tax breaks for solar and wind energy producers for five years and reviving an environmental conservation fund. Environmentalists say lifting it would amount to a giant windfall for the oil industry.
The final package is expected to ignore conservative demands for language clamping down on Syrian refugees entering the U.S. Instead it would contain changes to the “visa waiver” program that allows visa-free travel to the U.S. for citizens of 38 countries, including France and Belgium, where numerous Paris attackers were from. While both said they had not decided on the merits, McConnell said President Barack Obama should be cautious about putting the deal to a vote in Congress, given widespread opposition.
Negotiators were sorting through remaining disputes over environment, labor and other provisions in a $1.1 trillion bill financing federal agencies for 2016.
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-Budget deficit. There is not any official estimate of the tax-minimize package deal, however its value might turn into in the vary of $ 900 billion over the approaching decade, reversing most of the current good points in decreasing the deficit. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee.
