President Donald Trump will push to have the long-promised reform of the U.S. tax code finished by the end of the year, according to National Economics Council Director Gary Cohn.
“Starting next week, the president’s agenda and calendar is going to revolve around tax reform,” Cohn told the Fiscal Times in an interview released Friday. “He will start being on the road making major addresses justifying the reasoning for tax reform and why we need it in the U.S.”
The timeline for the massive tax code overhaul which Republicans have wanted for years has been pushed back multiple times over the past few months as Congress got bogged down by repealing Obamacare.
While the legislative environment is not any better than the past six months, Congress has a leg up in that Republicans have been holding hearings and meetings and discussing tax reform for years, according to Cohn.
“It’s not like they are just starting the process now. I don’t know how long it will take to actually mark up the bill, but I do think it can pass both of the tax committees and both chambers in 2017,” Cohn said.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that he believes Congress is prepared to work on tax reform. (RELATED: Ryan Says Lawmakers Plan To Complete Tax Reform This Year)
“In Congress, we worked on this all last year in 2016 hoping to be ready so if we had the opportunity to be able to pass this bill we wouldn’t sit there in January of 2017, you know, just starting the work,” Ryan said. “So we’ve been working on this for almost two years — actually I’ve been working on this for pretty much my adult life.”
Congress will have to address the debt ceiling in September, before tax reform, and also has a slew of spending bills to pass that Trump has said must include funding for the border wall in order to get his signature.
As to the specifics of the reform, Cohn said he “would like to get the tax rate as low as possible so that businesses want to create jobs here.”
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