In an expansive interview with the Portland Business Journal, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden defended the Green New Deal, questioned the effectiveness of tariffs to influence China trade policy and urged the IRS to waive penalties for federal income taxpayers who failed to withhold enough for their 2018 taxes.
Oregon’s senior senator also urged the Trump administration to waive IRS penalties on taxpayers who failed to withhold enough money to cover their 2018 income tax and called for a review to determine if opportunity zones are being used as intended to encourage investment in impoverished areas.
Wyden called criticism of the Green New Deal “nonsense.” “It is a resolution. It is aspirational, not a legislative text,” he said. Wyden, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said he is looking at “throwing more than 40 separate tax breaks for energy…, which are basically dirty energy relics that cost billions of dollars a year, into the trashcan and substituting three new ones: one for clear energy, one for clean transportation and one for energy efficiency.”
On trade with China, Wyden said there is agreement “tariffs should be part of the trade toolbox, but we don’t share the view that every time there’s an issue, you drop another tariff. It has not worked particularly well with China.” He said strong measures are necessary to stop China from “ripping off our technology.”
Wyden said bipartisan support is growing for legislation he and Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio have introduced to require shell companies to disclose their beneficial owners. Failing to require ownership disclosure, he explained, would mean “you’re playing catch-up ball.”
Taxpayers who face penalties for their 2018 federal income taxes deserve a break, Wyden said, because the IRS didn’t properly update its withholding tables and forced taxpayers to deal with “complicated online calculator, which had its own problems.” He added that multinational corporations “are not sweating it today [because] they’ve got their tax breaks locked in.”
Wyden agreed a review is needed to see if opportunity zone tax incentives are being mis-applied. PBJ reporter Matthew Kish noted Oregon has used an expansive definition for opportunity zones, which include Portland’s downtown area, prompting Bloomberg Businessweek to call it “Tax Breaklandia.
Wyden said the goal of his Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act is to “promote innovation and focus on small guys.” He also touted his ELEVATE Act that aims to “connect the dots” between training dislocated workers for thousands of available jobs.
In upcoming days, Wyden said the Senate Finance Committee will invite seven CEOs from major pharmaceutical companies at a hearing to “get an agreement to stop some price-gouging.” “What I want to know is whether they’re going to get beyond the blame game. Everything they always do with respect to pharmaceutical prices and health care costs generally is blaming the other guy,” he said.
