Munis

Call it the liberal (arts) penalty. This year’s tax overhaul slapped a 1.4 percent levy on the annual investment income of the wealthiest private university endowments. Republicans targeted the measure so narrowly that it ended up as a tax almost entirely on elite blue-state institutions.

The final Republican tax bill set for a House vote Tuesday would add $448 billion to federal deficits over 10 years with economic growth factored in, the right-of-center Tax Foundation said Monday.

The final version of the tax bill struck by Congressional negotiators would continue to subsidize municipal bonds that help businesses to finance infrastructure projects such as airports and toll roads, dropping one provision that threatened to cut sales of tax-exempt debt by tens of billions of dollars starting next year.

A provision to treat graduate school tuition waivers as taxable income won’t be in the final House-Senate tax package, according to Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana and one other person briefed on a tentative deal reached Wednesday.

Lawmakers are re-examining a provision that would roll back subsidies for a big chunk of the municipal-bond market beginning next year, according to House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady.

Congress is giving finance officials at America’s colleges and universities even more to worry about.

The Republican chase for a rare political and policy win with passage of their tax plan has thinned the ranks of the party’s deficit hawks.

It just might be Ted Cruz’s biggest victory as a senator: Helping stop in its tracks a plan late Thursday night to add $350 billion in tax increases to the Senate’s tax bill to placate fellow Republican Senator Bob Corker’s worries about the deficit.

A provision in the tax bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would only intensify the housing crunch in the nation’s fourth-largest city—and others across the U.S.—by crippling affordable housing construction.

In the rush to borrow before the Republican tax bill reshapes the debt market, states and municipalities are paying up. The biggest spree of debt issuance in more than a decade has pushed up borrowing costs and eroded returns in the $3.8 trillion municipal-debt market.