As Democrats and Republicans in Washington continue to negotiate over an infrastructure bill, President Biden is reportedly considering dropping his demand to roll back the 2017 Trump tax cuts — which primarily benefited corporations and the richest people in the country — in order to gain support for infrastructure spending of at least $1 trillion. Biden is offering to keep Trump’s tax cuts and shrink the size of his infrastructure proposal in exchange for a minimum 15% corporate tax rate for all companies. Economist Jeffrey Sachs says a capitulation on the Trump tax cuts would be a huge mistake for the Biden administration. “The corporations have had an unbelievable run of unjust and unaffordable tax cuts,” he says.
I was shocked and dismayed, and I hope that it doesn’t go anywhere. But the corporations have had an unbelievable run of unjust and unaffordable tax cuts. That’s true for decades. The corporate taxes right now collect a little bit more than 1% of GDP in a booming period of corporate profits. In other words, we’ve given away the store. The Republicans, especially, gave away the store in 2017.
President Biden said, “OK, we’ll restore half of what was given away.” It’s still leaving the companies effectively with a tax cut from 35% to 28% under Biden’s plan. And then, yesterday, apparently, he said to the Republicans, “Well, maybe we’ll leave it at 21%.” God, I hope that this doesn’t happen. It would be the biggest single defeat for basic social justice and affordability of what we need to do through government that I can imagine, because everybody that looks at
— source democracynow.org | Jun 04, 2021