Want to receive this newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to POLITICO Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories. BACK TO STATES AND TAXES: It’s also worth noting that moving from Washington to Florida isn’t quite the tax contrast of, say, New Jersey or New York to Florida. Washington might be a pretty liberal state, but it historically has had a fairly regressive tax system — an income tax, for instance, was long viewed to have been banned under the state constitution. But what Washington does have is a new capital gains tax and a push from some Democrats for a wealth tax, neither of which are happening down in the Sunshine State. There’s also this: The Seattle area might be well-known as the home of both Amazon and Bezos, but it’s not totally clear whether the company’s founder still counted Washington as his home state for taxes. (Certainly, Bezos had other options on that front.) But let’s assume that it’s only around now that Bezos will no longer be a Washington state resident for tax purposes. Because if that’s the case, he might have avoided paying the state more than $1 billion in that new 7 percent capital gains tax, according to Jared Walczak of the right-leaning Tax Foundation — by unloading close to $16 billion worth of Amazon stock in 2020 and 2021, before that tax went into effect. Still, Bezos hasn’t been shy in selling Amazon stock in general in recent years, and he still got rid of quite a few shares since 2022 began — close to 10 million in all, via the Seattle Times. Meanwhile, about that wealth tax — Walczak also projected that Bezos would personally have contributed about 45 percent of the more than $3 billion a year that the latest proposal in Washington state would raise. But the author of that proposal, Noel Frame, a Democratic state senator, said Bezos’ departure wouldn’t affect the official revenue projections for her proposal, telling Geek Wire that the Amazon founder “is far from the only billionaire in Washington state.” THE UPCOMING WEEK IN WASHINGTON: Congress will continue its debate over emergency assistance to Israel when lawmakers get back to town. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said last week that a House proposal — which would link more than $14 billion in aid to Israel with a similar amount of cuts to the special funding stream that Democrats gave to the IRS last year — was “unserious” and wasn’t going anywhere in his chamber. Still, the top two Republicans went on the Sunday shows to continue to defend their proposal. Both House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise scoffed at the idea that cutting IRS funding would lead to ballooning deficits — and got pushback on “Fox News Sunday” and ABC’s “This Week,” respectively, because CBO has projected just that. Scalise did reference reducing the size of government in his interview — a conservative goal that’s different than cutting deficits, because the idea would more be to bring spending down in line with reduced revenues. The majority leader also suggested that Republicans don’t trust CBO’s projections on the IRS cut, even though he approvingly cited the office’s numbers on a related issue — whether the increase in audits from the new IRS funding would hit just the very rich. (For whatever it’s worth, CBO has been more conservative than other budget analysts in estimating the amount of revenue lost by cutting IRS funding.) Staying on the GOP side: Republican investigators are making it abundantly clear that President Joe Biden’s taxes will be playing an increasingly big role in their impeachment inquiry. Unlike his predecessor, Biden hasn’t been shy in releasing his tax returns — and even if he was, House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) would be able to access them, though he wouldn’t be able to release them without full committee approval. But House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), the lead figure in the GOP’s impeachment charge, said on Fox News over the weekend that he believed that the Bidens had structured certain transactions as loans to try and put one over on the IRS. For his part, Smith raised the question on Fox Business recently about why President Biden didn’t report any interest income from loans that he gave to his brother and sister-in-law. Because these are the things we focus on: The upheaval within the House GOP and the upcoming focus on appropriations might be the main reason that there are some real doubts that Congress will be able to score a year-end tax agreement this year. But another potential reason that has been raised by Democrats is how involved Smith is in the impeachment process — the concern being both the amount of time that might take up for the chairman, and that the incredibly partisan nature of the inquiry into Biden might make bipartisan negotiations that much tougher. A quick addendum: Weekly Tax reported last week that the IRS was concerned that an influx of information returns due to cryptocurrency might overwhelm the agency’s systems, based on the comments of an agency official. The IRS provided a transcript that showed that the official, Julie Foerster, was referring to current systems and was confident that the IRS would be able to handle a stream of new crypto returns because of the funding increases provided by the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act.
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