A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds the average effective federal income tax rate paid by large, profitable corporations fell to 9 percent in the first year the Trump tax law was in effect, and the share of such companies paying nothing at all rose to 34 percent that year.
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
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blog January 13, 2023 GAO Report Confirms: Trump Tax Law Cut Corporate Taxes to Rock Bottom
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blog January 14, 2022 The Compelling Data and Moral Case for Continuing the Child Tax Credit Expansion
In just six short months, the enhanced Child Tax Credit (CTC), enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP), decreased the number of children living in poverty by 40 percent. ITEP estimated that the lowest-income 20 percent of households with children would receive a 35 percent income boost from this policy alone in 2021. This is a meaningful, life-changing sum.
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blog April 20, 2021 SALT Cap Repeal Would Worsen Racial Income and Wealth Divides
A bipartisan group of 32 House lawmakers banded together to form the “SALT Caucus,” demanding elimination of the SALT cap. None of their arguments in favor of repeal change the fact that it would primarily benefit the rich and, according to new research, exacerbate racial income and wealth disparities.
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report April 20, 2021 Not Worth Its SALT: Tax Cut Proposal Overwhelmingly Benefits Wealthy, White Households
A previous ITEP analysis showed the lopsided distribution of SALT cap repeal by income level. The vast majority of families would not benefit financially from repeal and most of the tax cuts would flow to families with incomes above $200,000.
This report builds on that work by using a mix of tax return and survey data within our microsimulation tax model to estimate the distribution of SALT cap repeal across race and ethnicity. It shows that repealing the SALT cap would be the latest in a long string of inequitable policies that have conspired to create the vast racial income and wealth gaps that exist today.
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blog April 1, 2021 Biden’s Corporate Tax Revolution
The corporate tax plan put forth on Wednesday by President Joe Biden to offset the cost of his infrastructure priorities would be the most significant corporate tax reform in a generation if enacted.
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blog November 12, 2020 Biden’s Economic Policy Agenda Deserves Serious Debate, Not Obstruction
Obstructing policies that improve economic well-being should not be on any party’s legislative agenda, especially when so many are barely keeping their heads above water.
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blog October 22, 2020 Trump Says Taxes Will Be Too High on the 2% Who Pay More Under Biden’s Plan
The Trump campaign has failed to convince the public that large numbers of Americans would face tax hikes under Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s tax plan. The claim has been widely discredited. For example, ITEP found that the federal taxes that people pay directly would rise for just 1.9 percent of taxpayers in the U.S., and that number does not vary much by state. So, Fox News and other conservative voices are trying out a new argument: Biden’s tax plan would be too burdensome for that 1.9 percent.
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report July 16, 2020 Trade Deals Aren’t Enough: Fixing the Tax Code to Bring American Jobs Back
We all need the public sector to protect public health, keep us safe, educate our children, and much more. Companies, particularly multinational corporations, could not function without the legal, infrastructure, financial, regulatory, health, and transportation resources that the government provides.
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blog April 6, 2020 Trump to Restaurant Owners: “Let Them Eat Skyboxes”
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.
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blog March 3, 2020 Administration Once Again Touts Misleading Information on 2017 Tax Law
The Trump administration has remained consistently on message about its 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. More than two years after the passage of the law, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin… -
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.
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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.
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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 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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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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blog February 13, 2019 Fact-Checking on Trump Tax Law Needs a Fact Check
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), enacted by President Trump and Congressional Republicans at the end of 2017, has caused quite a bit of confusion, and a recent “Fact Checker” column by the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler does not help. TCJA created real problems that can’t be resolved without real tax reform. To begin that process fact checkers, lawmakers, and everyone else need to be clear about what TCJA did, and did not, do to our tax system.