Last week, President Trump destroyed everyone’s coronavirus press conference bingo card by announcing that a conversation he had with celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck inspired him to propose restoring a corporate tax deduction for business entertainment expenses. Trump’s own signature tax plan repealed this break two years ago.
Corporate Tax Watch
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blog April 6, 2020 Trump to Restaurant Owners: “Let Them Eat Skyboxes”
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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.
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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.
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blog March 10, 2020 COVID-19 Is No Excuse for Airline Industry or Any Other Corporate Tax Cut
Trump administration officials have reportedly floated the idea of including tax breaks for the airline industry in its package of COVID-19-related stimulus proposals, which would allow airline companies to defer income taxes into the future. This is an odd policy choice since most of the biggest airlines are already using deferral to zero out most or all of their federal income taxes on billions of dollars in profits.
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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.”
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blog February 11, 2020 Why Today’s Congressional Hearing on “The Disappearing Corporate Income Tax” Is Imperative
The United States is collecting a historically low level of tax revenue from corporations. In 2018, corporate tax revenue as a share of gross domestic product (the nation’s economic output)… -
blog February 10, 2020 President Trump’s 2021 Budget: Promises Made, Promises Broken
President Trump has kept only one of his promises–his pledge to lower taxes for corporations and their investors.
The budget plan he released today again breaks his promise to reject cuts in Medicaid that would affect millions of people. His budget once again fails to eliminate the deficit, much the less the national debt, during his presidency as he promised. It cuts trillions from safety net programs and student aid programs despite his pledge to stand for forgotten Americans.
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blog February 4, 2020 Trump Already Did Tax Cuts 2.0… For Corporations
If President Trump puts forth another tax proposal this year, as he is hinting, it will be his third. The second round, already costing the U.S. Treasury billions, was implemented largely out of the public’s view.
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blog January 31, 2020 From 0% to 1.2%: Amazon Lauds Its Minuscule Effective Federal Income Tax Rate
If we focus on the taxes the company paid in 2019, we see an effective federal income tax rate of just 1.2 percent. And since the company enjoyed federal income tax rebates in 2017 and 2018, this means that over the last three years Amazon has paid zero on $29 billion of U.S. pretax income.
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blog January 24, 2020 GOP Legacy on IRS Administration: Auditing Mississippi, not Microsoft
Money doesn’t buy happiness—but it can buy immunity from the reach of Uncle Sam. The IRS is outgunned in cases against corporate giants because that’s how Republican leaders want it to be. They have systematically assaulted the agency’s enforcement capacity through decades of funding cuts. Instead of saving money, these cuts have cost billions: each dollar spent on the IRS results in several dollars of tax revenue collected.
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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.
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blog December 18, 2019 Why Corporate Tax Avoidance Matters
Corporate tax avoidance boosts companies’ bottom lines, and this benefits the owners of corporate stocks, which are mostly concentrated in the hands of the well-off. The cost of corporate tax dodging is borne by everyone, in several different ways.
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blog December 16, 2019 More of the Same: Corporate Tax Avoidance Hasn’t Changed Much Under Trump-GOP Tax Law
A new report from ITEP released today shows that, based on the first year of financial reports released by companies operating under the new tax law, tax avoidance appears to be every bit as much of a problem under the new tax system as it was before the Trump tax law took effect.
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news release December 16, 2019 Fortune 500 Companies Avoided $73.9 Billion in Tax Under First Year of Trump Tax Law
A comprehensive examination of Fortune 500 companies’ financial filings in 2018, the first year of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, finds that the law did nothing to curb corporate tax avoidance, with 91 companies paying $0 in taxes on U.S. income in 2018 and profitable companies overall paying a collective effective tax rate of 11.3 percent, which is barely more than half the 21 percent rate established by the tax law, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) said today.
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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.
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blog October 24, 2019 House Passes Landmark Bipartisan Bill to Crack Down on Shell Companies Used for Tax Evasion and Other Crimes
On Tuesday night, 25 Republicans joined nearly all the chamber’s Democrats to approve the Corporate Transparency Act, a bill that would require those creating a company to report its owners to the federal government. The White House expressed support but called for the House and Senate to work on certain details, creating the possibility that the measure could be enacted.
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blog October 18, 2019 Depreciation Tax Breaks Are a Problem that Deserves More Attention
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ recently released corporate tax plan would shut down the major breaks and loopholes that allow corporations to dodge taxes. The reforms in his plan that are most likely to get attention are proposals to shut down offshore tax dodging, as ITEP has long called for.
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blog August 20, 2019 Business Roundtable’s Newfound Devotion to Corporate Responsibility Doesn’t Include Paying Taxes
If you squint really hard, the Business Roundtable’s newly declared fondness for “supporting the communities in which we work” could be read as an acknowledgment of the need for a tax system that can pay for needed services. But it’s not.
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blog August 16, 2019 One Tax System for Most Americans, and a Second System for the Wealthiest
Last year, the Walton family’s fortune grew by $100 million a day. This level of wealth is particularly obscene in the context of the Walmart Corporation’s dark store strategy. The company works nationwide to reduce its property tax assessments, which, when successful, deprives local communities of revenue necessary to fund education, libraries, parks, public health and other services.
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blog August 9, 2019 Taxing Offshore Profits and Domestic Profits Equally Could Curb Corporate Tax Dodging
In recent days, presidential candidates Sen. Kamala Harris and New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio have called for taxing corporate profits the same whether they are earned in the United States… -
brief July 26, 2019 Election 2020: Tax Policy Essentials
The nation’s tax policies and their role in economic inequality are front and center during this election cycle. For those interested in how the nation can move toward a fairer tax system and or more detailed information about progressive tax policy ideas, ITEP created this quick guide.
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blog June 25, 2019 What to Watch for on Tax Policy During the Presidential Primary
America needs a new tax code. The Democratic presidential debates beginning this week present an opportunity for candidates to make clear how they would address inequality or to raise enough revenue to make public investments that make the economy work for everyone. Here are some of the big tax issues that we hope they will touch on.