Joseph Lawler reports for the Washington Examiner on congressional Republicans’ latest idea for funding federal transportation infrastructure.
Republican lawmakers are looking to tax the $2 trillion in earnings that U.S. companies hold overseas as a way to fund roads and bridges.
With the prospects for a broad revamp of the tax code dimming, lawmakers are looking to the exhaustion of the highway trust fund next month as a crisis that could prompt Congress to rewrite at least part of the tax code pertaining to international taxation.
The enticement is the $2 trillion-plus in untaxed overseas earnings that could be repatriated and taxed, enough to make up the highway funding shortfall for a long time.
“A lot of people are talking about this in the context of tax reform,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Wednesday, speaking at a conference put on by the law firm BakerHostetler in Washington.
Portman, a member of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, is one of several lawmakers on both the Right and Left who have expressed interest in a deal related to the highway fund in recent days.
Their comments reflect an acknowledgment that a deal on overall tax reform that would lower rates while broadening the tax base is not doable in the 114th Congress. President Obama had sought a reform for business taxation, and the GOP chairmen of the tax committees expressed interest in working toward that goal. But the effort was slowed by the difficulty of including the thousands of businesses that file through the individual side of the tax code.
Speaking at the same conference Wednesday, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said that admitting defeat on the push for tax reform would be crucial to getting smaller legislation done.
