Trump Tax Policies

blog April 1, 2020
Boeing “CARES” A Lot About its Shareholders—But What about the Rest of Us?

The gigantic Coronavirus-related tax and spending bill enacted last week, the so-called “CARES Act,” sets aside $17 billion in loans for “businesses critical to maintaining national security.” It’s generally understood that the bill’s authors want much, if not all, of this $17 billion to go to a single company: Boeing. So it behooves us to ask whether Boeing benefits America and its economy in ways that merit this largesse.
blog March 31, 2020
House Democrats’ Suggestion of Retroactively Repealing SALT Cap is a Poor Emergency Relief Measure

The House Democrats have plenty of ideas to help workers and families and boost the economy, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent idea to repeal the cap on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT) is not one of them. The 2017 Trump-GOP tax law includes many provisions that should be repealed. Unfortunately, Congressional Democrats have long made it clear that they want to start by repealing the $10,000 cap on SALT deductions, which is one of the law’s few provisions that restrict tax breaks for the rich.
blog March 31, 2020
Congress “CARES” for Wealthy with COVID-19 Tax Policy Provisions

At a time when record numbers of Americans are facing unemployment, state and local governments are facing a perfect storm of growing public investment needs and vanishing tax revenues, and small business owners are struggling to avoid even more layoffs, lavishing tax breaks on the top 1 percent in this way shouldn’t be in anyone’s top 20 list of needed tax changes.
blog March 17, 2020
Checks to All vs. Trump’s Payroll Tax Cut

A payroll tax cut would help those lucky enough to keep their job and would provide a bigger break to those with more earnings. Sending checks to every household would be a far more effective economic stimulus because it would immediately put money in the hands of everyone who would likely spend it right away, pumping it back into the economy.
report March 13, 2020
Trump’s Proposed Payroll Tax Elimination

President Trump has proposed to eliminate payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare through the end of the year. ITEP estimates that this would cost $843 billion and 65 percent of the benefits would go to the richest 20 percent of taxpayers, as illustrated in the table below.
blog March 10, 2020
Trump’s Proposed Payroll Tax Cut Is Not the Right Answer

The Trump administration is floating a cut in the Social Security payroll tax as a measure to counteract a potential economic downturn related to the COVID-19 virus. It should go without saying that a public health crisis requires government interventions that have nothing to do with taxes. But even if policymakers want to find ways to stimulate the economy beyond solving the health crisis, the payroll tax cut is not likely to be very effective.
blog March 10, 2020
Taxes in a Time of Coronavirus

Some problems can only be solved when public officials have the resources to act. Today’s public health crisis is that kind of problem. Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s deep tax cuts leave our health infrastructure knee-capped, just when we need it most.
blog February 21, 2020
Tax Cuts Floated by White House Advisors Are an Attempt to Deflect from TCJA’s Failings

Now that multiple data points reveal the current administration, which promised to look out for the common man, is, in fact, presiding over an upward redistribution of wealth, the public is being treated to pasta policymaking in which advisors are conducting informal public opinion polling by throwing tax-cut ideas against the wall to see if any stick. But the intent behind these ideas is as transparent as a glass noodle.
blog February 12, 2020
2021 Trump Budget Continues 40-Year Trickle-Down Economic Agenda

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may as well have been called the Promise for Austerity Later Act.
blog February 12, 2020
Hearing Witness: Trump Administration Giving Tax Breaks Not Allowed by Law

The Treasury Department, tasked with issuing regulations to implement the hastily drafted Trump-GOP tax law, is concocting new tax breaks that are not provided in the law. This is the short version of what we learned while watching Tuesday’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing on “The Disappearing Corporate Income Tax.”
blog January 7, 2020
Guilty, Not GILTI: Unclear Whether Corps Continue to Lower Their Tax Bills Via Tax Haven Abuse

President Trump and GOP lawmakers often cited corporations’ abuse of tax havens, e.g. shifting profits offshore to avoid taxes, as justification for dramatically lowering the federal corporate tax rate under…
blog December 19, 2019
Corporate Tax Avoidance Is Mostly Legal—and That’s the Problem

As usual, corporate spokespersons and their allies are trying to push back against ITEP’s latest study showing that many corporations pay little or nothing in federal income taxes. One way they respond is by stating that everything they do is perfectly legal. This is an attempt by the corporate world to change the subject. The entire point of ITEP’s study is that Congress has allowed corporations to avoid paying taxes, and that this must change.
report December 16, 2019
Corporate Tax Avoidance in the First Year of the Trump Tax Law

Profitable Fortune 500 companies avoided $73.9 billion in taxes under the first year of the Trump-GOP tax law. The study includes financial filings by 379 Fortune 500 companies that were profitable in 2018; it excludes companies that reported a loss.
blog September 10, 2019
Census Numbers Show the Power of the Tax Code to Direct Resources to Low-Income Families

Refundable federal tax credits, including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC), lifted 7.9 million people out of poverty in 2018. This latest analysis from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrates the power of federal programs to alleviate poverty and help low-income families keep up with the increasing cost of living.
blog September 10, 2019
How Tax Policy Can Help Mitigate Poverty, Address Income Inequality

Analysts at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy have produced multiple recent briefs and reports that provide insight on how current and proposed tax policies affect family economic security and income inequality.
blog August 28, 2019
Updated Estimates from ITEP: Trump Tax Law Still Benefits the Rich No Matter How You Look at It

President Trump’s allies in Congress continue to defend their 2017 tax law in misleading ways. Just last week, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee stated that most “of the tax overhaul went into the pockets of working families and Main Street businesses who need it most, not Wall Street.” ITEP’s most recent analysis estimates that in 2020 the richest 5 percent of taxpayers will receive $145 billion in tax cuts, or half the law’s benefits to U.S. taxpayers.
report August 28, 2019
TCJA by the Numbers, 2020

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), signed into law by President Trump at the end of 2017, includes provisions that dramatically cut taxes and provisions that offset a fraction of the revenue loss by eliminating or limiting certain tax breaks. This page includes estimates of TCJA’s impacts in 2020.
blog August 12, 2019
The Mortgage Interest Deduction Is a House of Cards

Given how much more exclusively this deduction now benefits the highest-income households, its continued existence is hard to justify. Even when the credit was available to a larger swath of families, it was ineffective at promoting homeownership.
report August 7, 2019
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: A Timeline

In December 2017, federal lawmakers hastily enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. So rushed was its passage that provisions of the legislative text were scrawled in the margins. Scroll through this timeline for an in-depth look at the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the impact since its passage.
blog May 17, 2019
Bootstraps Remain an Ineffective Tool for Combatting Poverty

Policymakers and the public widely agree that economic inequality is the social policy problem of our age. It threatens the livelihoods of millions of children and adults, and it even threatens our democracy. Although some say Americans could fix it themselves by simply rolling up their sleeves, as a sub-headline in a March U.S. News and World Report column implied, the reality is different.
blog April 23, 2019
So-Called Opportunity Zones Provide Opportunity for Whom?

In early April, a diverse but mostly black crowd took to the streets in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington D.C. to protest T-Mobile’s decision to order Metro PCS to cease playing gogo music. This tale is a shining example of why economic investment—especially taxpayer-incentivized investment—in underserved communities is fraught with controversy. Who ultimately benefits after developers pour millions of dollars into these communities? And, as this controversy reveals, are the usually black and brown denizens of these neighborhoods and businesses that may have catered to them no longer welcome once economic development reaches a critical mass?
blog April 12, 2019
$4.3 Billion in Rebates, Zero-Tax Bill for 60 Profitable Corps Directly Related to Loopholes

Meet the new corporate tax system, same as the old corporate tax system. That’s the inescapable conclusion of a new ITEP report assessing the taxpaying behavior of America’s most profitable corporations. The report, Corporate Tax Avoidance Remains Rampant Under New Law, released earlier this week, finds that 60 Fortune 500 corporations disclose paying zero in federal income taxes in 2018 despite enjoying large profits.
report April 11, 2019
Corporate Tax Avoidance Remains Rampant Under New Tax Law

For decades, profitable Fortune 500 companies have been able to manipulate the tax system to avoid paying even a dime in tax on billions of dollars in U.S. profits. This ITEP report provides the first comprehensive look at how the new corporate tax laws that took effect after the passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act affects the scale of corporate tax avoidance.
blog March 27, 2019
The Trump Tax Law Further Tilted an Already Uneven Playing Field

Proponents sold the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) as a way to spur new investment, increase workers’ paychecks, and reverse the off-shoring of jobs. Testimony presented during a House Ways and Means hearing held today reflected on how—more than a year after the law’s passage—each of those pitches ring hollow.
blog March 25, 2019
Corporate Profits ?, Corporate Federal Tax Collections ?

Data released Friday by the U.S. Treasury Department should give great pause to all who care about the federal government’s ability to raise revenue in a fair, sustainable way. In the wake of the 2017 corporate tax overhaul, corporate tax collections have fallen at a rate never seen during a period of economic growth.