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Tag: corporate tax rate
Budget Bill Revives Biden Vow To Tax Wealthy And Corporations

Budget Bill Revives Biden Vow To Tax Wealthy And Corporations

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- President Joe Biden's campaign promise to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy as part of a battle against glaring income inequality in the United States got an unexpected boost on Wednesday.

Early proposals to increase tax rates from Biden and his fellow Democrats hit a brick wall in Congress after Republicans -- and some Democrats -- opposed them. But a sudden reversal by West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, a swing vote in the divided Senate, has given Biden's tax agenda a new lease on life.

The amount U.S. companies contribute to tax revenue that funds roads and schools has plummeted since the 1940s.

Biden has often said in office that companies should instead pay a "fair share," a contrast to deference to private markets begun by Republicans with former President Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and buoyed by rounds of tax cuts and deregulation, by both parties.

The new compromise bill includes $430 billion in new spending on energy, electric vehicle tax credits and health insurance investments. It more than pays for itself by raising minimum taxes for big companies and enforcing existing tax laws, Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.

Biden said during a speech on Thursday that the deal would "for the first time in a long time begin to restore fairness to the tax code - begin to restore fairness by making the largest corporations in America pay their fair share without any new taxes on people making under $400,000 a year."

The bill would impose a 15 percent minimum tax on corporations with profits over $1 billion, raising $313 billion over a decade, they wrote. Companies could claim net operating losses and tax credits against the 15 percent.

The U.S. corporate tax rate dropped to 21 percent from 35 percent after a 2017 tax cut pushed by then-President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans, but many companies pay much less than that, and some of the largest pay no federal taxes, research groups including the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy have found.

Biden proposed raising that rate to 28 percent last year as part of an infrastructure spending bill, but the tax component was struck from the bill.

The new Manchin-Schumer bill also aims to close the so-called carried interest loophole, long a goal of Democrats.

Carried interest refers to a longstanding Wall Street tax break that let many private equity and hedge fund financiers pay the lower capital gains tax rate on much of their income, instead of the higher income tax rate paid by wage earners.

Eliminating the loophole would raise $14 billion, the senators say.

Schumer said he expected the Senate to vote on the legislation next week, to "lower prescription drug prices, tackle the climate crisis with urgency and vigor, ensure the wealthiest corporations and individuals pay their fair share in taxes, and reduce the deficit."

The Manchin-Schumer measure is substantially smaller than the multi-trillion-dollar spending bill Democrats had envisioned last year.

But it still represents a major advance for Biden's policy agenda ahead of midterm elections on Nov. 8 that could determine whether Democrats retain control of Congress.

It came just as Biden celebrated Senate passage of a bill aimed at boosting the U.S. semiconductor industry, another key priority of his administration, and as he struggles with low job approval ratings and ebbing support from his own party after a series of conservative Supreme Court rulings.

"This bill will reduce the deficit beyond the record-setting $1.7 trillion in deficit reduction we have already achieved this year, which will help fight inflation as well," Biden said in a statement.

"And we will pay for all of this by requiring big corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, with no tax increases at all for families making under $400,000 a year," he said.

(Reporting By Steve Holland; editing by Heather Timmons and Mark Porter)

Sinema Now Defending Trump Tax Cuts She Condemned

Sinema Now Defending Trump Tax Cuts She Condemned

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos

It's Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's turn to play the skunk at President Joe Biden's picnic. It's almost as if she and Sen. Joe Manchin are deliberately working together to try to kill the large budget reconciliation package that will contain his Build Back Better programs. It's turning into a dangerous game of Whack-a-Mole: Manchin presents his unreasonable demands and the White House and fellow Democrats scramble to meet them, only to have Sinema then pop up with her must-haves. Or in this case, must-have-nots.

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Jeff Bezos

Raising Corporate Taxes Makes Plutocrats Cry — But The People Cheer

Not only are the rich different from you and me; they're becoming more different than ever.

I'm not referring to mere millionaires but to the billionaire bunch. In the past year, while ordinary Americans have lost jobs, businesses, and homes due to the economic crash caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, America's 664 billionaires have found themselves nearly 40 percent richer than before the pandemic! These fortunate few collectively added more than a trillion dollars to their personal stashes of wealth in 2020. And practically all of them got so much richer by doing nothing : Their money made the extra money for them, because corporate stock prices zoomed even as regular people lost income.

Take a peek at THE richest of these different ones: Jeff Bezos, the alpha-geek of Amazon. He hauled in an additional $75 billion last year (roughly $8.6 million an hour), giving him roughly $188 billion in total wealth. You can do a lot of good in our world with such riches ... or you can splurge on yourself.

Jeff splurged. He bought a boat — more accurately, an ocean-going ship, one of the largest sailing vessels ever built. More than one-and-a-third football fields long, the super-yacht apparently cost the diminutive mega-billionaire some half a billion bucks. But that is the price before Bezos' big boat goes anywhere: He'll reportedly pay some $60 million each year for operating expenses.

Plus, he had to buy a "support yacht" to sail along with his main boat. Why? Because the three sails on his 400-footer are so huge that a helicopter can't land on the deck, requiring an auxiliary yacht to provide a helipad.

See, the rich really are different. Where to park the helicopter while at sea is a problem you and I don't have to face.

According to mega-yacht sellers, the main draw of these ostentatious purchases is that they reinforce inequality, literally letting the rich float in leisure and luxury, oceans apart from even having to see hoi polloi like us.

"Outrageous," screeched the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Archaic," moaned the president of the National Association of Manufacturers. "It doesn't feel fair," whimpered the chief executive of the giant Bechtel construction company.

The wailing by those who run corporate America is not for the plight of the great majority of workaday families who've seen their incomes stagnate and even plummet to zero during the past months of the coronavirus pandemic. Rather, this chorus of woe is arising from powerful plutocratic interests that have been enjoying windfall profits but now want us to feel sorry for them. Why? Because, they cry, that meanie in the White House, Joe Biden, intends to jack up their corporate tax rate up from 21 percent to 28 percent.

But wait. Didn't former President Trump and the GOP Congress slash the corporate share of our nation's upkeep nearly in half just four years ago, from 35 percent to 21 percent, shifting the burden to the middle class and poor? Yes. And didn't they promise that those cuts would create millions of new jobs and raise the incomes of the working class? Yes, again. Yet corporations got richer and working stiffs got shafted.

Still, here they come again, howling that raising corporate taxes would crash the stock market. Well, on the day Biden announced his plan, stock prices did fall ... by less than one percent. The next day, they bounced right back, and they're still booming.

Moreover, those are crocodile tears the rich are shedding, for they know that — as Biden himself makes clear — his proposed uptick in their tax share "is not going to affect their standard of living at all, not a little tiny bit." They'll still have their two or three big houses, private jets, and yachts. But with them paying just a bit more toward the Common Good, our country will be able to reinvest in society's physical and human infrastructure, making America stronger and fairer for all.

That's why there are broad and deep public majorities — even among Republicans — supporting Biden's infrastructure plan and an increase in corporate taxes to pay for it. For more information, go to AmericansForTaxFairness.org.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville

WATCH: Hilarious Video Of Confused Sen. Tuberville Talking Taxes And Regulations

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) argued on Tuesday that taxes on corporations cannot be increased because "we can't put laws on private companies." Increasing the corporate tax rate to fund social services, Tuberville said, would also cause companies to leave the United States.

Tuberville made his comments during an appearance on Fox Business' Mornings with Maria to promote his Prohibiting TSP Investment in China Act, which would prohibit the federal Thrift Savings Plan pension fund from investing "in any security of an entity based in China or in a subsidiary that is owned or operated by a Chinese company," as he said in an opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal on May 17.

While arguing that "something has to be done" about the investments, Tuberville said, "The one thing that can't be done is we can't raise the corporate income tax."

"We raise that, surely, we're going to lose them to other countries, not just China," he added.

The Biden administration has proposed an increase in corporate taxes to pay for infrastructure and jobs.

Tuberville said, "We can't tax them to death, because if we do they're going to leave."

"We can't put laws on private companies," he noted, before continuing to discuss his proposed law regulating investments in private companies.

From the May 18 edition of Fox Business' "Mornings with Maria":

TOMMY TUBERVILLE: Now private companies, something has to be done with that, but the one thing that can't be done is we can't raise the corporate income tax. We raise that, surely, we're going to lose them to other countries, not just China.
But we've got to take care of our own companies in the United States. We've got to keep their headquarters here, we can't use the inversion process, we've got to keep them here, we've got to make sure we take care of them, but we can't tax them to death, because if we do they're going to leave. And you can't blame them.
But we can't put laws on private companies. We just need to let them understand what they're doing, how it's going to affect them in the future. The bottom line today might not be the bottom line tomorrow in some of these corporations if we continue to invest in China.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.