Republicans fight Democrats for tax bill Reagan wants

Press, 19 December 1985, Page 8

Republicans fight Democrats for tax bill Reagan wants

NZPA-Reuter Washington The United States House of Representatives approved yesterday Ronald Reagan’s domestic priority, a huge reform of the nation’s income tax system that would ease the tax burden for most Americans. The Democrat-dominated House approved the tax bill on a voice vote. The bill, drafted by a taxwriting committee led by opposition Democrats, was sent to the Republican-led Senate, where Mr Reagan promised Republicans that he would fight for big

changes next year. The victory was credited to Mr Reagan’s extraordinary lobbying campaign in the last few days aimed at rebellious Republicans who last week had blocked consideration of the tax bill because they feared it would cause an economic recession. Republican leaders continued to oppose it and it did not win a majority of the 182 Republican members. Speaking for them, Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, said that he did not have faith in the Senate’s ability to improve it “I

hear an uncertain trumpet coming from the other body,” he said. Several House members complained that the bill was approved without a roll-call vote. But the Speaker, Mr Thomas O’Neill, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that he had looked “with deliberation” for a roll-call request and had seen none. The legislation as it now stands will mean the broadest reform of the nation’s income tax system in its 72year history, affecting the finances of every American and businesses in the United States and abroad.

Over the next five years six million working poor would drop off Uncle Sam’s tax rolls, average-income Americans would see tax rates fall and receive a SUS3OO ($600) a year tax cut, businesses would pay SUSI4O billion ($2BO billion) in higher taxes, and hundreds of tax loopholes would be tightened. The bill was passed after the House defeated a Republican move, 171 to 256, to send it back to the tax committee. A Republican substitute then lost 133 to 294. Some Republicans doubted that Mr Reagan

could meet a promise to veto any tax bill that did not meet their goals of fairness for low and middleincome people and foster economic growth. “A vote against moving a House bill forward would doom our efforts to achieve real tax reform for the American people,” he said in a letter to Republican congressmen in a last-ditch effort to win their support. Mr Reagan billed the tax reform plan as “a second American revolution,” to bring more fairness to tax laws that were criticised as favouring the rich when he sent it to Congress in May.