Ron Wyden takes a buzzer-beating shot at billionaires - POLITICO

The jeering section for the Senate Finance chair’s bank-shot tax plan includes House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal.

The Senate Finance chair is suddenly in the toughest position on Capitol Hill as he assembles a tax package for President Joe Biden’s social spending plan that can satisfy both Sen.

Yet House Democrats say his pitch is unworkable at best.

The jeering section includes House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who feels like months of work from his panel is being undercut to satisfy a single centrist senator.

Wyden said Tuesday that he’s spoken with Sinema about his plan and seemed unbothered by the arrows he's taking from Neal and other Ways and Means members.

When the House talks about various approaches to raise taxes on adjusted gross income or something of that nature, the fact is that unless you try an approach like ours, you’re not going to get billionaires paying taxes,” Wyden said.

That’s little consolation to House members who assembled a $3.5 trillion financing package in September for the party's social spending and climate ambitions.

Neal has repeatedly raised concerns about not seeing language from Wyden and said Tuesday that paying for the bill “looks harder to me every day without the Ways and Means package.”.

Without legislative language for Wyden's plan, negotiators cannot get an official score to know how much money the provision would raise — a key roadblock to securing a deal under the current time constraints, according to House Democrats.

Senate Democrats believe Wyden's tax will raise several hundred billion dollars.

Privately, Neal and other House Democrats are fuming about the latest turn in the negotiations.

The two tax chairs have never had a close working relationship, with Neal mostly taking an indifferent posture toward his former House colleague, according to several Democrats.

“We have to be polite to our Senate friends, but I think we feel that we’re way ahead of the Senate in terms of having thought through all the revenue measures,” said Rep.

Likewise, Senate Democrats say House members don’t understand the math senators face.

Cardin said if a deal on Biden’s social spending plan is reached this week, “I think it will be in there.”

“More and more senators heard that the billionaires made something like $2 trillion during the pandemic,” Wyden said