What’s in the New Tax Deal?

Budget watchdogs warn that temporary changes to the tax code that are being debated on Capitol Hill will lead to more deficits in the long run.

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Congressional leaders are racing to pass bipartisan tax legislation before filing season begins this month.

Lawmakers on the House Ways and Means Committee will attempt a rare feat on Friday when they begin debate on something that rarely comes together in an election year: bipartisan tax legislation.

A group of top Republicans and Democrats reached agreement this week on a $78 billion package that would expand a tax benefit that provides money to parents and restore three popular expired business tax breaks. That combination offers both parties an opportunity to claim wins as voters begin to head to the polls ahead of the election in November.

The legislation still faces a murky path through Congress, but tax writers are racing to pass it before the official 2023 tax filing season kicks off this month.

The agreement on a tax bill could foreshadow the kinds of trade-offs that lawmakers will face next year, when many other provisions of the 2017 tax law begin to expire. Although this package remains a work in progress, here is a look at what it includes at the moment:

An expanded child tax credit

In 2021, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, President Biden and Democrats in Congress temporarily beefed up the child tax credit, allowing most families to receive checks of up to $3,600 per child. That amount reverted to $2,000 per child in 2022, and the money was no longer directly deposited into bank accounts. Instead, qualifying families were able to receive a tax credit as part of their regular federal tax filing to the Internal Revenue Service.

The proposal under consideration in Congress aims to make the program more generous. It would phase in an expansion of the credit by allowing it to grow along with the rate of inflation and would make more of it refundable. That means families would be able to claim the full credit even if they owe little or even nothing in federal taxes.

Democrats have been agitating to expand the program, which was found to have reduced poverty during the pandemic. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projected that the changes, which would apply for tax years 2023, 2024 and 2025, would lift as many as 400,000 children above the poverty line in the first year.

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