House OKs year-end budget deal, sends legislation to Senate

While some Democrats said it was an opportunity to make family tax breaks permanent, others complained that it was too skewed toward business.

Scientists tell us that we must act immediately to combat climate change, but this bill will lift the crude oil export ban and encourage the burning of more fossil fuels.

The legislation pairs two enormous bills: a $1.14 trillion government-wide spending measure to fund every Cabinet agency through next September, and a $680 billion tax package extending dozens of breaks touching all sectors of the economy, making several of them permanent and tossing the entire cost onto the deficit.

Congress on Friday cleared a year-end spending and tax deal with a strong bipartisan support, despite grumbling from both parties over what was included in the agreement and what got left out.

Senior Senate aides have said the two measures, part of a bipartisan deal that would avert a shutdown, would likely be combined in that chamber and considered in a single vote on Friday.

While Republicans voted almost in lockstep for the tax measure, it split Democrats, who opposed it by 106-77.

It’s a peaceful end in the House to a yearlong struggle over the budget, taxes, and Republican demands of President Barack Obama.

“I feel nearly jubilant about what is in this appropriations bill”, she said.

At the direction of U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, lawmakers will work on a measure separate from the spending bill to address Puerto Rico’s fiscal problems.

U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-IL, 17) was among the Democratic House members who voted in favor of the spending bill.

Regardless of dissenters in each events, passage was doubtless and President Barack Obama’s signature appeared assured for an accord bearing victories for everybody from oil corporations and working-class households to 9/11 emergency staff and bio-medical researchers.

Wolf and House Minority Leader Frank Dermody, D-Allegheny, have downplayed Turzai’s 24-hour ultimatum, while rank-and-file House Republicans said it would be a challenge to persuade 20 or 30 of them to support the tax increase. The spending bill contains a tax deduction for those refiners to help blunt any potential negative impact on them.

“I think we’ve got some good wins”, Ryan said of the tax and spending bills Thursday.

“They wanted big oil so much that they gave away the store”, Pelosi gloated.

“We are confident that we will have the support to pass this final budget”, Wolf’s press secretary Jeff Sheridan said Thursday night.

The spending measure awards increases of about 6 percent, on average, above tight spending caps that were a relic of a 2011 budget and debt deal, and were opposed by both GOP defense hawks and Democrats seeking boosts in domestic spending. The number of these program cuts might have been higher had individual spending bills been debated on the Senate floor, Blunt said.

Tucked into the two bills were provisions trimming some of the taxes that help pay for Obama’s prized 2010 health care overhaul.

While some Freedom Caucus members and other conservatives say they gave Ryan room to operate with a budget and tax deals, they might not do the same next year. Luckily, many failed, including riders that would have defunded Planned Parenthood, made it harder for Syrian refugees to come to the United States, blocked the Department of Labor from protecting retirees’ savings, and hindered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s ability to protect consumers.

The government subsidizes employee-sponsored health-care plans through the tax code; the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost employer plans represents the principle that the government will not fully subsidize relatively expensive policies – the ones that tend to encourage overspending on health care.

She said the environmental damage from exporting oil would be offset by 10 times because of measures in the bill such as the renewable power tax credits, funding of a parks conservation fund paid for with oil revenues and the elimination of measures that would have dismantled Obama’s clean power rules on power plants. The tax package includes the permanent reduction of state and local sales tax for taxpayers in states, such as Washington, that don’t have state income tax.