Congress will soon debate provisions from the Trump tax law that are set to expire at the end of 2025, as well as other tax policies that Trump proposed on the campaign trail. Here we examine what’s at stake as lawmakers consider significant changes to our tax system.
Corporate Taxes
ITEP’s corporate tax research examines the tax practices of major corporations. Besides its corporate study on average effective tax rates paid by the nation’s largest, most profitable corporations, throughout the year, ITEP produces research on subjects such as offshore cash holdings, tax haven abuse, executive stock options and other tax loopholes. See ITEP’s more recent study of profitable corporations’ tax rates.
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December 12, 2024 Tax Debate 2025
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blog November 8, 2024 Tax Justice in the Crosshairs
Billionaires and businesses have too much power in Washington. Tax revenue is needed to pay for things we all need. If we want economic justice, racial justice and climate justice, we must have tax justice.
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blog October 30, 2024 How Tax Decisions in 2025 Can Advance Racial Justice
In the coming 14 months, federal lawmakers should address longstanding issues of racism in the tax code. With a presidential election this fall and many provisions of 2017’s Trump tax law expiring at the end of 2025, the debate over tax policy and economic fairness is in full swing.
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blog October 23, 2024 How Would the Harris and Trump Tax Plans Affect Different Income Groups?
Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have put forward a wide range of different tax proposals during this year’s campaign. We have now fully analyzed the distributional impacts of the major proposals of both Vice President Harris and former President Trump in separate analyses. In all, the tax proposals announced by Harris would, on average, lead to a tax cut for all income groups except the richest 1 percent of Americans, while the proposals announced by Trump would, on average, lead to a tax increase for all income groups except the richest 5 percent of Americans.
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report October 23, 2024 A Distributional Analysis of Kamala Harris’ Tax Plan
The tax proposals from Vice President Kamala Harris would, on average, lead to a tax increase for the richest 1 percent of Americans and a tax cut for all other income groups.
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blog October 10, 2024 Fifteen Companies Each Avoided More than $1 Billion in Taxes from a Single Trump Tax Cut
The deduction for Foreign-Derived Intangible Income (FDII), one of the tax cuts included in former President Trump’s signature 2017 tax law, provides a lower effective tax rate on income earned from intangible assets, such as patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property. Since the law went into effect in 2018, 15 corporations have separately reported more than $1 billion in tax benefits. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) reported the most, at more than $11 billion in tax breaks from 2018 to 2023. Other beneficiaries include large tech firms such as Meta, Microsoft, Intel, and Qualcomm.
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report October 7, 2024 A Distributional Analysis of Donald Trump’s Tax Plan
Former President Donald Trump has proposed a wide variety of tax policy changes. Taken together, these proposals would, on average, lead to a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups.
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report July 16, 2024 Corporate Tax Breaks Contribute to Income and Racial Inequality and Shift Resources to Foreign Investors
Corporate tax cuts and corporate tax avoidance worsen income and racial inequality in our country. Most of the benefits flow to foreign investors and the richest 20% of Americans.
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report June 27, 2024 Who Benefits and Who Pays: How Corporate Tax Breaks Drive Inequality
Corporate tax breaks and corporate tax avoidance significantly contribute to income and racial inequality and largely benefit foreign investors.
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blog June 20, 2024 SCOTUS Rejects Expansion of Trump’s Corporate Tax Cuts, Leaves Broader Tax Questions for Another Day
The Supreme Court matters, for tax fairness as for every other part of our lives. Whether or not we ever have a government that taxes billionaires as much as it taxes the rest of us will depend on how the Supreme Court rules in the future and who appoints justices to the Court.
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report May 2, 2024 Corporate Taxes Before and After the Trump Tax Law
The Trump tax law slashed taxes for America’s largest, consistently profitable corporations. These companies saw their effective tax rates fall from an average of 22.0 percent to an average of 12.8 percent after the Trump tax law went into effect in 2018.
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blog April 1, 2024 Biden Is Right: Corporate Tax Avoidance Has Big Problems That We Can Fix
Sensible reforms to the corporate tax system can help both crack down on corporate tax avoidance and ensure companies that are flourishing are paying their share for the public infrastructure that forms the building blocks of their success.
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report March 12, 2024 Revenue-Raising Proposals in President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2025 Budget Plan
President Biden’s most recent budget plan includes proposals that would raise more than $5 trillion from high-income individuals and corporations over a decade. Like the budget plan he submitted to Congress last year, it would partly reverse the Trump tax cuts for corporations and high-income individuals, clamp down on corporate tax avoidance, and require the wealthiest individuals to pay taxes on their capital gains income just as they are required to for other types of income, among other reforms.
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blog March 7, 2024 Tax Proposals Expected to be in President Biden’s Budget Plan
President Biden discussed multiple tax proposals during the State of the Union address to Congress. Several of these proposals appeared in the budget plan he submitted to Congress last year,… -
report February 29, 2024 Corporate Tax Avoidance in the First Five Years of the Trump Tax Law
The Trump tax law overhaul cut the federal corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but during the first five years it has been in effect, most profitable corporations paid considerably less than that.
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brief February 2, 2024 Impacts of the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act
The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act passed by the House of Representatives on January 31 is a compromise between lawmakers who want to address child poverty and… -
report January 17, 2024 Ongoing Use of Offshore Tax Havens Demonstrates the Need for the Global Minimum Tax
Key Findings To avoid taxation, American corporations use accounting gimmicks that make profits appear to be earned in foreign jurisdictions which tax corporate profits very lightly or not at all.… -
brief January 16, 2024 Proposed Tax Deal Would Help Millions of Kids with Child Tax Credit Expansion While Extending Damaging Corporate Tax Breaks
On January 16, Congressional tax writers officially announced the details of a tax policy agreement. The deal includes expansions of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) to improve access for low-… -
blog November 13, 2023 The Latest Convoluted Arguments in Favor of Rich People Not Paying Taxes
Two Senate hearings last week focused on how the richest Americans are avoiding and evading taxes in ways that ordinary Americans could hardly imagine. All the experts brought in to… -
blog October 25, 2023 On Corporate Tax Avoidance, Critics Take Aim at ITEP – and Miss
In identifying companies that avoid taxes, ITEP presented evidence that our federal corporate income tax was not working the way most Americans think it should work. The public and lawmakers paid attention, including President Biden who then made the case that this demonstrated the need for reform. As a result, Congress enacted the corporate minimum tax, to make the tax system a bit closer to what most Americans want it to be. If you look closely at this, you might just see an example of democracy working.
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blog October 24, 2023 Intuit Receives Millions in Federal Subsidies While Arguing IRS Direct File Would Be Too Costly
The tax preparation industry has for years lobbied to prevent the IRS from providing a tool that would allow Americans to file their taxes online for free. Recent public disclosures… -
blog October 6, 2023 The Campaign by Democratic Former Officials to Stop Taxes on the Wealthy
One of the most attention-grabbing anti-tax campaigns at work today is called SAFE, which stands for Saving America’s Family Enterprises. But it might as well mean Saving Aristocrats From Everything… -
blog September 27, 2023 Moore Case Could Enrich Tax-Avoiding Multinational Corporations – and the SCOTUS Justices Who Own Their Stock
The Moore v. United States case that will soon be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court could jeopardize at least $270 billion if SCOTUS finds the entire transition tax to be unconstitutional. The decision could also invalidate other important parts of the current tax system while preempting progressive wealth tax proposals. Such an outcome would represent one of the costliest—and most ethically questionable – Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history.
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report September 27, 2023 Supreme Corporate Tax Giveaway: Who Would Benefit from the Roberts Court Striking Down the Mandatory Repatriation Tax?
The Supreme Court is set to hear what could become one of the most important tax cases in a century. If decided broadly—with a ruling that strikes down the Mandatory Repatriation Tax for corporations, effectively making it unconstitutional to tax unrealized income—the Roberts Court’s decision in Moore v. US could stretch far beyond the plaintiffs themselves and would put in legal jeopardy many laws that prevent corporations and individuals from avoiding taxes and level the economic playing field.
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blog September 15, 2023 Kyrsten Sinema’s Latest Fight to Protect Tax Breaks for Private Equity
Sen. Sinema’s bill to stop a seemingly arcane business tax increase that was enacted as part of the 2017 Trump tax law would be hugely beneficial to the private equity industry.