SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin answers questions at a White House press briefing. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Trump, Granting Lobbyist Demands, Quietly Handed Billions More in Tax Breaks to Huge Corporations: Report
"Trump is the most corrupt president in history, and here's the latest example of how that corruption helps giant corporations."
Dec 29, 2019
A "disturbing" New York Times story published Monday detailed how President Donald Trump's Treasury Department, led by former Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin, has quietly weakened elements of the 2017 tax law in recent months to make it even friendlier to wealthy individuals and massive corporations.
Lobbyists representing some of the largest corporations in the world, the Times reported, targeted two provisions in the original 2017 law designed to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from companies that had been dodging U.S. taxes by stashing profits overseas.
"A tax law already disproportionately benefiting the richest of the rich has become an even greater windfall for the world's largest companies and their shareholders."
--David Enrich, New York Times
"The corporate lobbying campaign was a resounding success," the Times noted. "Through a series of obscure regulations, the Treasury carved out exceptions to the law that mean many leading American and foreign companies will owe little or nothing in new taxes on offshore profits... Companies were effectively let off the hook for tens if not hundreds of billions of taxes that they would have been required to pay."
The two provisions are known by the acronyms BEAT (base erosion and anti-abuse tax) and GILTI (global intangible low-taxed income). Shortly after Trump signed the $1.5 trillion tax bill--which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%--lobbyists from major American companies like Bank of America and General Electric as well as foreign banks swarmed the White House in an effort to gut the BEAT and GILTI taxes.
Trump's Treasury Department largely granted the lobbyists' wishes, turning what was already a massive corporate handout into an even more generous gift to big companies and banks.
The Times reported:
The Organization for International Investment--a powerful trade group for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestle and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell--objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT... This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.
The lobbying surrounding the GILTI was equally intense--and, once again, large companies won valuable concessions... News Corporation, Liberty Mutual, Anheuser-Busch, Comcast and P.&G. wrote letters or dispatched lobbyists to argue for the high-tax exception. After months of meetings with lobbyists, the Treasury announced in June 2019 that it was creating a version of the exception that the companies had sought.
David Enrich, financial editor for the Times, said the newspaper's estimate that major companies received tens of billions of dollars in additional tax breaks thanks to the Treasury Department is "conservative."
"The cumulative effect," said Enrich, "is that a tax law already disproportionately benefiting the richest of the rich has become an even greater windfall for the world's largest companies and their shareholders."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted in response to the Times story that "Trump is the most corrupt president in history, and here's the latest example of how that corruption helps giant corporations at the expense of small businesses and working families."
"Too many corporations are cashing in on all the benefits of America while skipping out on the bill," said Warren. "Companies that make massive profits shouldn't be paying less in federal income taxes than working families."
As Hunter Blair of the Economic Policy Institute noted on the two-year anniversary of the passage of Trump's tax cuts last week, "the $4,000 annual boost to average incomes that the White House Council of Economic Advisers promised to working families because of the [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] did not--and will not--happen."
"While it's been worse-than-advertised for working families," Blair wrote, "the TCJA has been an even bigger boon to large corporations and rich households."
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
A "disturbing" New York Times story published Monday detailed how President Donald Trump's Treasury Department, led by former Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin, has quietly weakened elements of the 2017 tax law in recent months to make it even friendlier to wealthy individuals and massive corporations.
Lobbyists representing some of the largest corporations in the world, the Times reported, targeted two provisions in the original 2017 law designed to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from companies that had been dodging U.S. taxes by stashing profits overseas.
"A tax law already disproportionately benefiting the richest of the rich has become an even greater windfall for the world's largest companies and their shareholders."
--David Enrich, New York Times
"The corporate lobbying campaign was a resounding success," the Times noted. "Through a series of obscure regulations, the Treasury carved out exceptions to the law that mean many leading American and foreign companies will owe little or nothing in new taxes on offshore profits... Companies were effectively let off the hook for tens if not hundreds of billions of taxes that they would have been required to pay."
The two provisions are known by the acronyms BEAT (base erosion and anti-abuse tax) and GILTI (global intangible low-taxed income). Shortly after Trump signed the $1.5 trillion tax bill--which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%--lobbyists from major American companies like Bank of America and General Electric as well as foreign banks swarmed the White House in an effort to gut the BEAT and GILTI taxes.
Trump's Treasury Department largely granted the lobbyists' wishes, turning what was already a massive corporate handout into an even more generous gift to big companies and banks.
The Times reported:
The Organization for International Investment--a powerful trade group for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestle and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell--objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT... This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.
The lobbying surrounding the GILTI was equally intense--and, once again, large companies won valuable concessions... News Corporation, Liberty Mutual, Anheuser-Busch, Comcast and P.&G. wrote letters or dispatched lobbyists to argue for the high-tax exception. After months of meetings with lobbyists, the Treasury announced in June 2019 that it was creating a version of the exception that the companies had sought.
David Enrich, financial editor for the Times, said the newspaper's estimate that major companies received tens of billions of dollars in additional tax breaks thanks to the Treasury Department is "conservative."
"The cumulative effect," said Enrich, "is that a tax law already disproportionately benefiting the richest of the rich has become an even greater windfall for the world's largest companies and their shareholders."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted in response to the Times story that "Trump is the most corrupt president in history, and here's the latest example of how that corruption helps giant corporations at the expense of small businesses and working families."
"Too many corporations are cashing in on all the benefits of America while skipping out on the bill," said Warren. "Companies that make massive profits shouldn't be paying less in federal income taxes than working families."
As Hunter Blair of the Economic Policy Institute noted on the two-year anniversary of the passage of Trump's tax cuts last week, "the $4,000 annual boost to average incomes that the White House Council of Economic Advisers promised to working families because of the [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] did not--and will not--happen."
"While it's been worse-than-advertised for working families," Blair wrote, "the TCJA has been an even bigger boon to large corporations and rich households."
A "disturbing" New York Times story published Monday detailed how President Donald Trump's Treasury Department, led by former Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin, has quietly weakened elements of the 2017 tax law in recent months to make it even friendlier to wealthy individuals and massive corporations.
Lobbyists representing some of the largest corporations in the world, the Times reported, targeted two provisions in the original 2017 law designed to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from companies that had been dodging U.S. taxes by stashing profits overseas.
"A tax law already disproportionately benefiting the richest of the rich has become an even greater windfall for the world's largest companies and their shareholders."
--David Enrich, New York Times
"The corporate lobbying campaign was a resounding success," the Times noted. "Through a series of obscure regulations, the Treasury carved out exceptions to the law that mean many leading American and foreign companies will owe little or nothing in new taxes on offshore profits... Companies were effectively let off the hook for tens if not hundreds of billions of taxes that they would have been required to pay."
The two provisions are known by the acronyms BEAT (base erosion and anti-abuse tax) and GILTI (global intangible low-taxed income). Shortly after Trump signed the $1.5 trillion tax bill--which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%--lobbyists from major American companies like Bank of America and General Electric as well as foreign banks swarmed the White House in an effort to gut the BEAT and GILTI taxes.
Trump's Treasury Department largely granted the lobbyists' wishes, turning what was already a massive corporate handout into an even more generous gift to big companies and banks.
The Times reported:
The Organization for International Investment--a powerful trade group for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestle and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell--objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT... This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.
The lobbying surrounding the GILTI was equally intense--and, once again, large companies won valuable concessions... News Corporation, Liberty Mutual, Anheuser-Busch, Comcast and P.&G. wrote letters or dispatched lobbyists to argue for the high-tax exception. After months of meetings with lobbyists, the Treasury announced in June 2019 that it was creating a version of the exception that the companies had sought.
David Enrich, financial editor for the Times, said the newspaper's estimate that major companies received tens of billions of dollars in additional tax breaks thanks to the Treasury Department is "conservative."
"The cumulative effect," said Enrich, "is that a tax law already disproportionately benefiting the richest of the rich has become an even greater windfall for the world's largest companies and their shareholders."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted in response to the Times story that "Trump is the most corrupt president in history, and here's the latest example of how that corruption helps giant corporations at the expense of small businesses and working families."
"Too many corporations are cashing in on all the benefits of America while skipping out on the bill," said Warren. "Companies that make massive profits shouldn't be paying less in federal income taxes than working families."
As Hunter Blair of the Economic Policy Institute noted on the two-year anniversary of the passage of Trump's tax cuts last week, "the $4,000 annual boost to average incomes that the White House Council of Economic Advisers promised to working families because of the [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] did not--and will not--happen."
"While it's been worse-than-advertised for working families," Blair wrote, "the TCJA has been an even bigger boon to large corporations and rich households."
We've had enough. The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%. Our mission? To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. How? Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported. Free to read. Free to republish. Free to share. With no advertising. No paywalls. No selling of your data. Thousands of small donations fund our newsroom and allow us to continue publishing. Can you chip in? We can't do it without you. Thank you.