Freedom Caucus working on tax reform plan: report

Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus want to take an active role in negotiating tax reform and are crafting a bill, Politico reported Thursday.

According to the publication, the caucus members appear to be more aligned with President Trump’s vision of tax reform than they are with the House GOP leadership.

Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) told the newspaper that he already disagrees on a number of issues in the plan proposed by House GOP leadership and wants conservatives to influence the process from the very beginning.

{mosads}“Rather than react, then stop something, and then go in fits and starts forward, we can constructively engage at the front end and say this is more of what we believe,” he told the publication.

“Let’s … avoid the kind of dislocation that we saw in this particular [healthcare] bill about a month ago.”

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said that a team is already working on a possible way to create legislative text around Trump’s general tax reform ideas.

“We’re looking at President Trump’s tax reform plan to see how we can maybe put some legislative text to that to come alongside the administration … and hopefully agree more than we disagree and move what he proposed in those bullet points the other day. We’ve got guys working on that,” he told Politico.

The president has proposed a tax plan that includes a lower 15 percent across-the-board business tax rate, which has been highly criticized by some Democratic lawmakers.

There is also apparent disagreement over the border-adjustment tax, which would place a tax on imports but exempt exports, that is primarily backed by the House GOP leadership.

The idea has been a dividing issue in the business community, with Trump being skeptical about the proposal to tax imports and exclude exports.

“A number of folks have registered grave concerns with the border adjustment tax in the way that it opens up a new revenue source for the federal government,” Sanford explained.

According to Politico, the conference is not fully ready to present a finished tax proposal.