Rep. Steven Horsford pitches PARITY Act as ‘durable floor’ for crypto tax at Consensus Miami
The Nevada Democrat told Professor Yesha Yadav that incremental, bipartisan reform is the path forward as Senate negotiations on the CLARITY Act stall.
What to know:
- Rep. Steven Horsford, co-author of the bipartisan PARITY Act, told the audience at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference Tuesday that crypto tax policy needs to advance through narrow, durable reform rather than a single comprehensive overhaul.
- He admitted Senate negotiations on the CLARITY Act between Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks seemed to be “on hold,” slowing the broader bipartisan market-structure framework.
- Horsford framed crypto and digital-asset policy as a tool for closing the wealth gap, saying “no one party should own crypto.”
The Nevada Democrat co-authored the PARITY Act discussion draft with Republican Representative Max Miller of Ohio in December, and revised it on March 26. He told moderator Yesha Yadav that he prefers a narrow approach over comprehensive alternatives, including Sen. Cynthia Lummis’s proposal. The risk of a comprehensive bill, Horsford said, is that “it pairs genuinely helpful provisions with definitional language that is so broad that it creates other problems.”
PARITY’s headline provisions include a stablecoin-payments cost-basis test, a five-year tax-deferral election on staking and mining rewards and an extension of wash-sale rules to digital assets. Horsford said that while retirement account access is absent in present drafts, he considers it “something that I personally want to see, because in order to close the wealth gap, we have to be able to help people plan for their retirement. Digital assets are a way to do that. I know that there is genuine bipartisan appetite for us to work on this, but rushing it and just putting language in a bill without getting it right creates these unintended consequences.”
