Congressional Republicans’ big push to overhaul Obama-era health care laws appears to be dead, so are tax changes next on the agenda?, The New York Times reported today. Business leaders may be left scratching their heads about what those would look like — and how any overhaul would affect their ability to strike deals. Ask corporate chieftains, bankers and lawyers what is important for mergers, and they will probably say that the key thing is confidence, in the economy and in the regulatory environment. Confidence seems to be in short supply: The pace of deal activity in the first half of the year was moderate at best. The dollar volume of mergers announced worldwide during that time was up 2 percent compared with the same period last year, at $1.6 trillion, but the overall number of deals fell 4 percent, to 22,752. On Thursday, a group of Republican leaders announced their main principles for a tax initiative. They include no border adjustment tax; lower corporate taxes; a way to bring back money that companies currently hold offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes, an amount estimated at over $1 trillion; and any repeal of the Affordable Care Act, after a fractious process that saw Senate Republicans squabbling among themselves, raises questions about how any changes to taxes will proceed.
