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americans for tax fairness
Watchdogs Argue 'Narrow Profit Interests' Drive Corporate Tax Debate in US
"It is the American people who lose when corporations succeed in keeping their taxes low," according to the report's authors.
Jan 23, 2025
With portions of President Donald Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that favored high income households and corporations set to expire in 2025, the watchdog group Accountable.US and the coalition Americans for Tax Fairness released a report Wednesday detailing how top corporations benefited from corporate tax law in the five years following the 2017 reform.
These corporations, which include household names such as Apple, Bank of America, Microsoft, Meta, and General Motors, make a disproportionate share of national profits and pay a big chunk of total corporate taxes, though at low rates, according to the report—as in, the "corporate tax ten" identified by the report have a lot at stake when it comes to corporate tax policy.
Ahead of the coming debate around taxes in 2025, "the American public should be aware that the debate over corporate tax policy is less about national economic impact—as corporate lobbyists tend to insist—and more about the narrow profit interests of a few mammoth corporations," according to the report's authors.
While Trump's 2017 tax law permanently lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%—and this provision is not among those set to expire this year—Trump and House Republicans have expressed interest in dropping the corporate tax rate further, to 15%. Researchers at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that even after Trump dropped the corporate tax rate to 21%, most profitable corporations paid considerably less than that, "mainly due to loopholes and special breaks that the 2017 tax law left in place and, in some cases, introduced."
"We've seen how Trump's tax scam played out before—after promising to deliver for Main Street, he turned around and gave trillions in tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and mega-corporations," said David Kass, ATF's executive director in a statement Wednesday. Regular American families "will be hurt by Republicans' plans to give trillions in additional tax cuts to make the rich richer and pay for it by cutting essential programs," he added.
Citing the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the report notes that of the hundreds of billions in total subsidies received by corporations from 2018 through 2022—defined as "the difference between what they would owe over that period without special breaks in the tax code and what they actually paid with them in place"—over $150 billion of those total tax breaks were claimed by just 25 corporations, with Bank of America topping the list at nearly $24 billion in subsidies over those five years
Those breaks help explain how Bank of America paid a federal income-tax rate of just 3.8% on almost $139 billion in profits over that time period, according to the report.
Trump's 2017 legislation also lowered the tax rate for corporate income that comes from intangible assets that are held in the U.S. but generate sales overseas, so-called Foreign Derived Intangible Income (FDII) earnings, according to the report. The authors report that "of the over $50 billion the top 15 corporate beneficiaries of the FDII loophole have received over the first six years of the Trump law, almost one-quarter was reaped by Alphabet"—the parent company of Google.
The authors also note that if the 15% corporate tax rate was already in effect, Apple alone would have saved $3.5 billion on its taxes in the most recent annual reporting period.
The report gives other examples of how these top ten corporations benefit from subsidies already in place and how much they stand to gain from a potentially lowered corporate tax rate.
The report's argument that corporations approach tax policy first and foremost with their own profit margins in mind "is an important realization because it is the American people who lose when corporations succeed in keeping their taxes low: through cuts to public services because of the lost revenue; widening income and wealth gaps from increased corporate profits and stock prices; and in the growth of concentrated corporate power," the authors write.
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Little-Noticed Hearing Lays Bare GOP Push for 'Massive New Giveaway to the Ultra-Wealthy'
"American families are set up to lose because President-elect Trump and his congressional allies are eager to raise our costs in order to help their wealthy donor friends."
Jan 15, 2025
Republicans on the House's chief tax-writing committee made clear during a hearing Tuesday that their top priority is making permanent the massive giveaway to the rich that Donald Trump and the GOP pushed through in 2017.
Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said during his opening remarks at Tuesday's hearing that "we must make the Trump tax cuts permanent as soon as possible."
While most of the corporate tax breaks in the 2017 law were made permanent from the start, provisions impacting individuals—including the cut to the top marginal tax rate—are set to expire at the end of this year without congressional action. Trump and Republicans have also called for a further reduction of the statutory corporate tax rate.
"As of today, we have only 142 legislative days before taxes will go up for every single American if Congress fails to act," Smith declared Tuesday.
Smith characterized the 2017 tax cuts as a boon for ordinary Americans, but the law's benefits were heavily skewed to the wealthiest.
The same would be true of an extension of the individual tax cuts, which is expected to be part of a sprawling party-line reconciliation bill. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy noted in a recent analysis that "Trump's plan to make most of the temporary provisions of his 2017 tax law permanent would disproportionately benefit the richest Americans."
"No amount of misinformation can hide the truth: This massive new giveaway to the ultra-wealthy and giant corporations comes at the expense of working and middle-class Americans."
Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the committee, said at Tuesday's hearing that "when Republicans inevitably tell you that the GOP tax scam gave everyone in America a tax break, remember this one contextualized fact: Extending the law gives people making over $1 million a year a $78,717 average tax cut—288 times higher than the $273 those earning under $50,000 would receive."
"Those millionaires won't feel the effects of cuts to Medicare or Medicaid, or higher premium costs, but America's working families sure will," Neal added, referring to the GOP's plan to slash key aid programs to help offset the enormous cost of extending the 2017 tax breaks.
.@RepRichardNeal is right. Congressional Republicans are standing up for the strongest and wealthiest, all at OUR expense. We need relief from the 2017 Trump tax code, not more of it. pic.twitter.com/8gd6KvfFnb
— Accountable.US (@accountable_us) January 14, 2025
Tuesday's committee hearing was overshadowed by the closely watched Senate questioning of Trump's nominee to lead the Pentagon, but it confirmed that Republicans intend to waste no time delivering another round of tax cuts to rich Americans who saw their wealth explode under the 2017 law.
"Last time Trump and the GOP held a trifecta, they moved fast to create new tax breaks rewarding wealthy corporations for moving jobs overseas and harming hard-working families across the country," David Kass, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness, said in a statement Tuesday. "Now, they're working to pass new tax breaks that will allow these same powerful corporations to evade paying their fair share and eliminate American jobs."
"The disastrous effects of the Trump tax scam are not theoretical—they're reality," Kass added. "It didn't raise wages for everyday people or protect our jobs and it certainly didn't pay for itself. Instead, it doubled billionaire wealth and added over $1.5 trillion to the deficit. No amount of misinformation can hide the truth: This massive new giveaway to the ultra-wealthy and giant corporations comes at the expense of working and middle-class Americans."
Trump and the GOP's aggressive push for a new round of tax cuts received a boost from the deep-pocketed Koch network, which is pumping tens of millions of dollars into a nationwide campaign to build support for a proposal that would predominately reward a small sliver of the U.S. population.
"If asked to choose between healthcare and food for low-income kids or tax cuts for giant corporations, Chairman Jason Smith and the Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee are proving that ten times out of ten, they'll choose the corporate giants," said Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US. "American families are set up to lose because President-elect Trump and his congressional allies are eager to raise our costs in order to help their wealthy donor friends."
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Why Can't We Fund Universal Public Goods? Blame the Tax-Dodging Billionaire Nepo Babies
"In 2024, these billionaire families used their enormous wealth to make record-breaking political contributions to secure a GOP trifecta," reads a new report.
Dec 13, 2024
The children of the richest families in the U.S. are well-known for spending their vast wealth on frivolous luxuries—constructing a replica of a medieval church on their acres of property, in the case of banking heir Timothy Mellon, or starting a brand of T-shirts described by one critic as "terrible beyond your wildest imagination," as Wyatt Koch, nephew of Republican megadonors Charles and David, did.
But a report released by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) on Thursday shows how "billionaire nepo babies" don't just waste their families' fortunes. They also benefit from "a rigged system" that allows them to "pass that wealth down over generations without being properly taxed–often without being taxed at all."
In addition, the heirs of the country's biggest fortunes spend vast sums "to elect politicians who protect their unearned wealth and manipulate the country's economy in their favor," said ATF.
Along with Mellon and Koch, the report profiles Samuel Logan of the Scripps media dynasty; Nicola Peltz-Beckham, daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz; Gabrielle Rubenstein, whose family has made its fortune in private equity; and President-elect Donald Trump's son, Eric Trump.
The nepo babies are part of a small group of billionaire families in the U.S. who benefit from tax loopholes that ensure little of their immense wealth ever goes to benefit the public good.
At least 90 billionaires have passed away over the last decade, leaving their beneficiaries $455 billion in collective wealth.
But according to ATF, "$255 billion (56%) of that amount was likely entirely exempt from the capital gains tax because of a special break called 'stepped up basis.'"
"Trump and his allies in Congress are doing their donors' bidding by rigging the system in their favor and pushing a $4 trillion giveaway to wealthy elites and giant corporations."
Without loopholes included the stepped up basis tax cut, the current estate tax on billionaires and centimillionaires would yield enough revenue to fund universal childcare, preschool, and paid family leave for U.S. workers, with hundreds of billions of dollars left over, according to ATF's report.
The wealthy heirs profiled in the report and their families are some of the Republican Party's top donors—contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to candidates including Trump in the hopes of securing even more tax cuts.
Mellon, for example, is Trump's "biggest supporter, giving $140 million to a pro-Trump PAC in 2024 alone," reads the report.
A previous analysis by ATF found that as of late October, just 150 billionaire families had spent $1.9 billion on the 2024 elections.
As the Center for American Progress found earlier this year, Trump's plan to extend the tax cuts that he pushed through in 2017 would cost $4 trillion over the next decade.
"The vast wealth inherited by centuries-old billionaire families is staggering. While these heirs and their billions go undertaxed, enormous sums are squandered on lavish mansions, private jets, and vanity projects instead of funding crucial public investments," said ATF executive director David Kass. "In 2024, these billionaire families used their enormous wealth to make record-breaking political contributions to secure a GOP trifecta. Now, Trump and his allies in Congress are doing their donors' bidding by rigging the system in their favor and pushing a $4 trillion giveaway to wealthy elites and giant corporations—all while advocating for cuts to vital programs that working and middle-class Americans depend on."
The report calls for Congress to pass "proven, pragmatic proposals to unrig the tax system that enjoy high levels of popular support," such as the Ultra Millionaire Tax Act that was proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) this year. The bill would tax fortunes between $50 million and $1 billion at 2% and wealth above $1 billion at $1 billion.
The small tax on enormous wealth would generate "a whopping $3 trillion over 10 years," said ATF.
The estate tax could also be "restored so that it can play a meaningful role in promoting fairness and equal opportunities" through the passage of the For the 99.5% Act, which was introduced in 2023 by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.).
Under the bill, the estate tax exemption would be lowered to $7 million per couple and the current 40% flat rate would be replaced with a sliding scale that would charge higher rates as a family's wealth grows.
"None of these tax reforms would impoverish the ultra wealthy, nor even inconvenience them in any meaningful way–but they would reduce the concentration of wealth that is so corrosive to society," reads the report. "At the same time, they would raise trillions of dollars that could be used to reduce inequality and improve the lives of families that can only dream of the kind of security and opportunity enjoyed by the nation’s richest clans."
"And if rich families ever did need to tighten their belts a bit to pay their taxes," the report continues, "the economizing might begin by reducing the flow of money funding the extravagant lifestyles of America's Billionaire Nepo Babies."
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