The Senate passed a bill spending hundreds of billions of dollars on climate and healthcare programs while raising taxes on large, profitable companies, as Democrats unified around elements of President Biden’s agenda after a year of frustrated efforts to advance a broader package, the Wall Street Journal reported. The legislation, which passed the Senate 51-50 on Sunday with a tiebreaking vote by Vice President Kamala Harris, offers tax incentives for reducing carbon emissions, seeks to allow Medicare to negotiate the price of some prescription drugs, allots roughly $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service and extends subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Along with a new 15% corporate minimum tax, it creates a 1% excise tax on companies’ stock buybacks and sets aside roughly $300 billion toward reducing the deficit. The package will still need to clear the narrowly Democratic House in a vote scheduled for Friday. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and progressive caucus leader Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) have backed the proposal, putting it on course for likely approval. Republicans argued that the climate and tax package would do nothing to cool inflation and would hurt the economy, and that tax increases on corporations would hit households as well.
