- The Senate and House versions of the Republican tax bill are significantly different, requiring a conference committee to hash out the discrepancies.
- Some of the key sticking points include a repeal of the so-called individual mandate for health insurance, the length of individual tax cuts, and more.
- The House voted on Monday to formally kick off the conference committee.
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The fight over the Republican tax plan isn't over — here are the biggest differences between the House and Senate bills
The GOP tax plan is headed for a conference committee. Here are the differences between the House and Senate bills that it will have to work out.
While both the House and the Senate have passed versions of the Republican tax plan, the fight remains far from over.
There is little doubt among investors and analysts that tax legislation will reach President Donald Trump's desk. But negotiators now need to iron out significant discrepancies between the House and the Senate versions of the tax bill, called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and pass that updated bill in both chambers.
The House voted on Monday to formally kick off the conference committee, and House Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi appointed conferees. Isaac Boltansky and Lukas Davaz, analysts at the research firm Compass Point, expect it to come out of negotiations with a compromise bill in mid-December.
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"The conference committee process could be volatile, but we expect it to move quickly and odds favor the president signing a bill this year," the analysts wrote on Monday. "We maintain our 75% odds of a tax bill passing."
While confidence is high, here's a rundown of the differences between the House and Senate bills:
Most analysts think the final bill will end up looking more like the Senate's version, since the GOP holds 52 seats in that chamber and therefore can afford only two defections to pass a tax bill along party lines. (The vice president would cast a tiebreaking vote.)
"Generally speaking, our sense is that the final conference committee report is likely to skew toward the Senate's version given the narrower margin in the upper chamber," Boltansky and Davaz said.
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