With Minnesota poised to enact worldwide combined reporting of corporate income taxes, business lobbyists are pulling out all the stops to make state lawmakers believe the apocalypse is upon them.
Matthew Gardner
Matt Gardner is a senior fellow at ITEP where he has worked since 1998. He previously served as ITEP’s executive director from 2006 to 2016. Matt’s work focuses on federal, state and local tax systems, with a particular emphasis on the impact of tax policies on low- and moderate-income taxpayers. He uses ITEP’s microsimulation model to produce economic projections and analyses on the effects of current and proposed federal and state tax and budget policies.
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blog May 7, 2023 Minnesota Poised to Enact Landmark Loophole-Closing Corporate Tax Reforms
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report May 4, 2023 Extending Temporary Provisions of the 2017 Trump Tax Law: National and State-by-State Estimates
The push by Congressional Republicans to make the provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent would cost nearly $300 billion in the first year and deliver the bulk of the tax benefits to the wealthiest Americans.
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media mention March 7, 2023 The Why: Matt Gardner on Corporate Tax Avoidance
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media mention March 7, 2023 CNBC: State Tax Rates Are Not Central to Migration Patterns
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media mention January 26, 2023 The American Prospect: Reanimating the Taxman
At its core, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the federal government’s revenue collector and benefits administrator. Yet with Congress inclined to run virtually every function of the government through… -
media mention November 23, 2022 The Lever: Will Biden End An Illegal $50 Billion Tax Giveaway?
The IRS is sanctioning state laws allowing rich Americans to bypass the SALT cap and avoid billions in taxes, but a new Biden nominee could end the scheme. Read more. -
brief November 10, 2022 Twenty-Three Corporations Saved $50 Billion So Far Under Trump Tax Law’s “Bonus Depreciation” that Many Lawmakers Want to Extend
Nearly two dozen of America’s largest corporations together received roughly $50 billion in tax breaks from 2018 through 2021 under a Trump tax law provision that many lawmakers now want to extend. Corporate lobbyists are even asking Congress to extend this “accelerated depreciation” tax break as part of a possible year-end tax bill.
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blog October 31, 2022 Tax Foundation’s ‘State Business Tax Climate Index’ Bears Little Connection to Business Reality
The big problem with the Index is that it peddles a solution that not only falls short of the goal of generating business investment, but one that actively harms state lawmakers’ ability to provide the kinds of public goods – like good schools and modern, efficient transportation networks – that businesses need and want.
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blog August 5, 2022 Corporate Minimum Tax Examples: Apple Would Likely Pay More, 3M Would Not
Apple, one of the largest corporations in the United States despite manufacturing most of its physical products offshore, would likely pay the corporate minimum tax that is included in the Inflation Reduction Act that the Senate is debating this week. 3M, a manufacturer that has about 40 percent of its workforce in the United States, likely would not pay the corporate minimum tax if current trends in the company’s profits and taxes continue, because it is already paying above 15 percent of its profits in taxes.
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media mention April 15, 2022 MarketPlace: Millions of college students are eligible for tax credits. But they have to file for them
“They’re sensibly designed to make college more attainable, to make it so that students don’t have to live in poverty just to pay for their college expenses,” said Matthew Gardner,… -
media mention April 14, 2022 CNBC: How companies like Amazon, Nike and FedEx avoid paying federal taxes
The current United States tax code allows some of the biggest company names in the country to not pay any federal corporate income tax. In fact, at least 55 of… -
media mention April 12, 2022 CSPAN Washington Journal: Biden Tax Proposals
ITEP Senior Fellow Matthew Gardner appeared on CSpan’s Washington Journal on Tuesday, April 12, 2022, to discuss President Biden’s tax proposals. -
media mention March 14, 2022 Washington Post: Congress urges DOJ, Treasury to examine drug companies aiming to turn opioid settlements into tax breaks
There is uncertainty in the law about these types of tax breaks, said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Though recent changes… -
media mention March 2, 2022 CNN: Fact-checking Biden’s 2022 State of the Union address
Facts First: This needs context. Biden left out a significant word from the prepared text of his speech. The prepared text, which the White House emailed to journalists just before… -
media mention February 25, 2022 The Guardian: ‘A really bad deal’: Michigan awards GM $1bn in incentives for new electric cars
Meanwhile, GM has recorded $70bn in profits since 2010 while taking $8bn in subsidies in recent decades – more than all but one company nationwide. The idea that it needed incentives to… -
blog February 7, 2022 Amazon Avoids More Than $5 Billion in Corporate Income Taxes, Reports 6 Percent Tax Rate on $35 Billion of US Income
Amazon avoided about $5.2 billion of federal income tax on its record $36 billion in U.S. pretax income for fiscal year 2021.
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blog February 1, 2022 Netflix Posts a Record $5.3 Billion in Profits and a Federal Tax Rate of Just 1.1 Percent
Netflix’s 2021 financial report shows it doubled its profits to $5.3 billion from the previous year and reported an effective federal corporate income tax rate of 1.1 percent.
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blog November 18, 2021 Report Illustrates How 70 Corporations Could Be Affected by Minimum Tax Proposal in the Build Back Better Act
Amazon, Bank of America, Facebook, FedEx, General Motors, Google, Netflix, PayPal, T-Mobile and Verizon are just a few of the 70 corporations that would have paid more taxes under the Democrats’ proposed Corporate Profits Minimum Tax (CPMT) if it had been in effect in 2020 according to a new report from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s office with estimates verified by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
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media mention September 24, 2021 Wall Street Journal: Zero-tax companies could remain
Mr. Biden’s often-cited list of 55 companies comes from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, or ITEP, a progressive group that publishes a regular report on the zero-tax-company phenomenon.… -
report September 21, 2021 Tax Changes in the House Ways and Means Committee Build Back Better Bill
This report finds that the vast majority of these tax increases would be paid by the richest 1 percent of Americans and foreign investors. The bill’s most significant tax cuts — expansions of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) — would more than offset the tax increases for the average taxpayer in all income groups except for the richest 5 percent.
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report August 26, 2021 Options to Reduce the Revenue Loss from Adjusting the SALT Cap
If lawmakers are unwilling to replace the SALT cap with a new limit on tax breaks that raises revenue, then any modification they make to the cap in the current environment will lose revenue and make the federal tax code less progressive. Given this, lawmakers should choose a policy option that loses as little revenue as possible and that does the smallest amount of damage possible to the progressivity of the federal tax code.
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media mention July 29, 2021 Common Dreams: 73 Major Corporations Paid Just 5.3% Federal Tax Rate Between 2018 and 2020: Report
Thirty-nine U.S. corporations reaping over $120 billion in profits between 2018 and 2020—the first three years of the so-called “GOP tax scam”—paid no net federal income tax, or claimed refunds… -
report July 29, 2021 Corporate Tax Avoidance Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Thirty-nine profitable corporations in the S&P 500 or Fortune 500 paid no federal income tax from 2018 through 2020, the first three years that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was in effect. Besides the 39 companies that paid nothing over three years, an additional 73 profitable corporations paid less than half the statutory corporate income tax rate of 21 percent established under TCJA. As a group, these 73 corporations paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 5.3 percent during these three years.
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media mention July 14, 2021 Washington Post: As IRS audits waned, big businesses racked up unapproved tax breaks
One challenge for the IRS is that each company tends to interpret tax laws differently, says Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a… -
media mention July 8, 2021 Napa Valley Register: California’s progressive tax system proved its worth during the pandemic
In fact, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports that California’s tax system does the most of any state to alleviate inequality — while taxes in most states serve…