Military spouses, clean coal on Senate Finance docket

The Senate Finance Committee will consider a slew of tax provisions – 17, in all – on Wednesday, dealing with issues as varying as cider production and clean coal. 

{mosads}Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) cast Wednesday’s mark-up as a bipartisan way to kick off the committee’s docket for the year. Hatch and the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), worked to craft the list of noncontroversial, relatively inexpensive tax breaks up for consideration.

“This is an opportunity for the committee to clear the deck and advance common-sense tax bills that have garnered strong bipartisan support within the Congress,” Hatch said in a statement.

None of the preferences up for consideration costs more than $85 million over a decade, with the most expensive proposal changing the tax treatment for small insurance companies. Others would have little to no impact on the nation’s revenue stream.

Senators have introduced other proposals before the current Congress, including bills that would give a tax break to military spouses who are forced to move and have to get a new certification or license for work, an incentive for cider producers who use pears and allow for the creation of new tax-exempt groups to study farming.

The Senate mark-up will come a week after the House Ways and Means Committee marked up its first tax bills of the new Congress. Those measures were more expensive, including a preference for small business expensing that cost $77 billion, and Democrats balked at adding the cost of the tax breaks to the deficit.

The Finance panel is also moving on the new tax bills at a time when leaders in both parties say they want to overhaul the tax code – a process that would likely require stripping out many tax preferences. During the last Congress, former House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) urged tax writers not to push their own targeted tax bills while the committee worked on tax reform.