Carry critic to lead key congressional committee

Michigan Democrat Sander Levin will take over for Charles Rangel as acting chairman of the US House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee, after Representative Rangel resigned his post earlier this week amid an ethics scandal.

The committee is in charge of writing tax legislation and bills affecting Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlement programs. Representative Rangel had been at the head of the committee since January 2007.

Sander Levin

Representative Levin has long been a proponent of raising the tax rate on carried interest. In 2007 he introduced the first bill to treat carried interest as ordinary income, subject to a tax rate around 35 percent, rather than capital gains, currently subject to a tax rate around 15 percent.

Representative Rangel was also a proponent of this idea, and he included a provision on carried interest in the Tax Extenders Act of 2009, which would raise tax rates on carried interest in order to pay for the extension of a number of tax cuts for middle class Americans. That bill has already been passed by the House of Representatives, and a version of it is currently being debated in the Senate. If the Senate approves its own bill, the two bills will have to be reconciled in committee before the legislation passes into law.