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patriotic millionaires
Trump Allies Launch $20 Million Effort to Convince Working Class to Back Tax Scam 2.0
"Don't be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me," said the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires.
Jan 13, 2025
A right-wing advocacy group founded by the billionaire Koch brothers announced Monday the launch of a $20 million campaign to promote an extension of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited the rich and large corporations.
But in a 60-second ad that debuted over the weekend, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) characterizes the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as a boon to "hardworking Americans" and small businesses—and warns that allowing provisions of the law to expire at the end of this year as scheduled would be disastrous for the working class.
"This year, Congress is facing a countdown to a crisis that threatens family budgets nationwide," Ross Connolly, AFP's regional state director, said in a statement Monday. "We are proud to partner with the incoming Trump administration to protect prosperity and ensure that Congress acts."
AFP is a 501(c)(4) organization that describes itself as a "grassroots" movement despite being launched by Charles Koch and his late brother, David—two of the most notorious right-wing billionaire in U.S. politics.
The group said its new 50-state campaign represents "the largest effort by a conservative organization" to support President-elect Donald Trump's legislative agenda as he prepares to take office next week. The campaign, according to AFP, will include "over 1,000 meetings" at congressional offices, "in-district events" with activists and lawmakers, and "roundtables with job creators."
The campaign aims to "reach millions of voters on the phone and at their doorsteps," AFP said.
"The Trump tax giveaways passed in 2017 did not help working-class Americans. In fact, the top 1% of corporations received almost all of the benefits."
AFP's description of the impacts of the 2017 tax law flies in the face of resounding evidence showing that wealthy Americans—not ordinary workers—were the chief beneficiaries and are poised to reap most of the rewards once again if Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress extend the measure's soon-to-expire provisions.
"Americans for Prosperity is spending $20 million on a new ad campaign that champions the 2017 Trump tax law as a win for working families," Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, told Common Dreams. "But don't be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me."
"I'm in favor of tax relief for working people, but not yet another huge and unnecessary windfall for America's rich," Pearl added. "If Congress wants to help working families, they should make tax rates on labor income the same as tax rates on profits made by investors."
AFP is one of a number of right-wing, corporate-tied organizations pushing for an extension of the Trump tax cuts, which Republicans are planning to fund by slashing Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other key programs.
The progressive watchdog group Accountable.US noted in a recent analysis that one of the groups pushing for an extension of the 2017 law is Advancing American Freedom, an organization "run by corporate consultants, lobbyists, lawyers, and executives, including former Trump administration officials who were directly responsible for the TCJA."
Accountable also observes that Club for Growth, a group funded by wealthy conservatives, "has pushed a deeper corporate tax cut plan as an 'opening salvo' in the current tax debate."
"The billionaire funders of the group's action arm have benefited enormously from the TCJA, saving hundreds of millions of dollars from a single obscure tax break for pass-through entities," the watchdog added.
In response to AFP's new nationwide campaign, Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk told Common Dreams that "a glitzy ad campaign from a far-right organization won't change the fact that the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress are paying for giveaways to billionaires, wealthy tax cheats, and price-gouging corporations by cutting critical services for working families, like Medicaid and SNAP."
"The Trump tax giveaways passed in 2017 did not help working-class Americans," said Carrk. "In fact, the top 1% of corporations received almost all of the benefits."
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New Campaign Urges Biden to Commute Sentence of 'Public Hero' Who Leaked Trump Tax Data
Patriotic Millionaires and Revolving Door Project are leading the push for Biden to reduce IRS whistleblower Charles Littlejohn's prison term.
Dec 16, 2024
Update:
Patriotic Millionaires senior vice president for tax policy Bob Lord and Revolving Door Project senior researcher Kenny Stancil on Wednesday published commentary in Rolling Stone highlighting the campaign urging Biden to commute Littlejohn's sentence. This, a day after the campaign launched a website where people can add their voices to the chorus of calls for commutation.
Earlier:
With just over a month left in U.S. President Joe Biden's term, a pair of advocacy groups this week launched a campaign urging the outgoing Democrat to commute the sentence of an Internal Revenue Service contractor serving five years in prison for exposing tax dodging by wealthy Americans including Republican President-elect Donald Trump.
The campaign, which is a collaboration between the Revolving Door Project and Patriotic Millionaires, is planning a week of action to push Biden to commute the five-year sentence of Charles Littlejohn—who was also ordered to pay a $5,000 fine after pleading guilty in October 2023 to unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and return information to media outlets—to 10 months, the maximum term of imprisonment he was supposed to receive under the federal guidelines.
On Monday, the campaign letter to Biden from four tax law professors calling on Biden reduce Littlejohn's sentence, which the experts called "particularly harsh in comparison with some recent sentences meted out to blatant tax evaders."
The letter asserts that Littlejohn—who gave The New York Timesinformation on Trump and shared with ProPublica data on Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others—acted "out of a sincere belief in the public's right to know."
"I've been a tax lawyer for 40 years. For the past decade, I've been pretty outspoken about the various maneuvers that the ultra-rich deploy to avoid tax," Bob Lord, the senior vice president for Tax Policy at Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement. "But despite my best efforts, I fully recognize that no technical explanation that I could give about any of the myriad tax loopholes that the rich exploit would ever stick in the public conscience the same way that Charles Littlejohn's leaks did about billionaires like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos paying $0 in income tax."
"Littlejohn did break the law, but at the end of the day, he actually did the country a great service by exposing the full degree to which our tax code privileges the wealthy and well-connected," Lord added. "And if lawmakers are inspired by Littlejohn's leaks to finally take meaningful steps to reform our tax system and rein in extreme wealth, he will have undoubtedly done more to save American democracy than harm it."
University of Michigan law professor Reuven Avi-Yonah, the letter's lead signer, has called Littlejohn a "public hero."
According to the professors:
There are many cases that involve massive tax evasion and do not lead to a criminal indictment. Consider for example the case of Alon Farhy, who transferred more than $2 million to a sham foreign entity, which then transferred the funds to a bank account in the name of a Belize-based corporation Mr. Farhy created solely for that purpose. Mr. Farhy's scheme violated a variety of tax-related obligations beyond his duty to correctly report and pay the income tax he owed. The [U.S. Department of Justice] entered into a nonprosecution agreement with Mr. Farhy immunizing him from criminal prosecution in exchange for paying his taxes plus interest and penalties.
"Many other cases involving tax evasion do not result in jail time," the letter notes. "For example, Raj Mukhi ran a business that manufactured and sold professional uniforms in many countries. He was indicted in 2014 for hiding the proceeds in a private bank based in Zürich. He pleaded guilty to one count of filing a false tax return and one count of failing to disclose a foreign bank account and was sentenced to three years of supervised release."
"Even if there is a prison sentence, it is usually much shorter than five years," the professors stressed. "To mention just some cases from this year, an Oklahoma man who instructed a payroll company working with his business to falsely characterize over $2.6 million as reimbursements rather than income was sentenced to 30 months."
"An Indiana woman who electronically filed false income tax returns for clients that reported fictitious businesses and also filed a false tax return for herself that underreported gross receipts from her business was sentenced to 21 months," the letter adds. "A New Jersey man was sentenced to 29 months for evading taxes and not filing income tax returns while earning over $2.5 million in wages. All of these cases involve conduct that is much more culpable and less public-spirited than Mr. Littlejohn's."
"There is a big difference between leaking tax information and tax evasion in the size of the universe of potential violations and the number of violators escaping punishment," the professors said. "The universe of potential violators leaking tax information is infinitesimal compared to the universe of potential tax evaders. And the number of potential violators escaping punishment for leaking tax information is close to zero, whereas the number of evaders escaping punishment is huge."
As his term winds down, Biden has issued approximately 1,500 commutations and 39 pardons, including controversial clemency for his son Hunter Biden and Michael Conahan, a former Pennsylvania judge convicted in a "kids-for-cash" scheme in which he and a colleague funneled thousands of juveniles into private detention centers in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks.
With the looming return of Trump—who presided over more federal executions during his first term than numerous presidents did over several preceding decades—advocates are pushing Biden to commute the sentences of 40 federal death row inmates. Advocates are also calling on Biden to pardon figures including Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier and environmental attorney Steven Donziger.
Earlier this month,
Politico Magazinereported that Biden is weighing preemptive pardons for numerous public officials who could be targeted by Trump—who has vowed to exact revenge on his political enemies—during his second term. Kash Patel, Trump's pick to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has threatened to prosecute the president-elect's political opponents and journalists.
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Tax Groups Warn 'Billionaires and Big Corporations Sharpening Their Knives'
"Billionaires and big corporations are sharpening their knives in anticipation of huge tax cuts, already lobbying and donating to get the tax plan that gives them the biggest windfall."
Nov 08, 2024
Economic justice organizations are bracing for a grueling uphill battle as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress lay the groundwork to swiftly enact another massive tax cut for the wealthy and large corporations, a move that would worsen inequality and add trillions of dollars to the nation's deficit.
With Trump soon to be in the White House, a Senate majority secured, and control of the House in sight, Republicans are wasting no time preparing for a legislative push to extend soon-to-expire provisions of their deeply regressive 2017 tax law and further cut taxes for rich Americans and large corporations.
In the months leading up to Tuesday's election, GOP lawmakers have been discussing plans to use the fast-track process known as reconciliation to dodge the Senate's 60-vote filibuster and ram through another round of tax cuts. Republicans are set to hold at least 53 Senate seats in the new Congress and are currently just seven seats short of a majority in the lower chamber.
Grover Norquist, a longtime anti-tax crusader and informal economic adviser to Trump, predicted that Republicans are going to try to push through tax legislation "very early."
"The House and Senate guys have been working on this together forever," Norquist toldThe Washington Post on Thursday.
During his 2024 campaign, Trump pledged to cut the statutory corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%, a change that would deliver close to $50 billion in tax breaks annually to the nation's largest companies. The president-elect also floated a number of additional proposals, including eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security benefits.
David Kass, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), said Friday that "the incoming Congress faces a generational tax fight on the renewal of the disastrous Trump tax provisions that benefit the wealthiest Americans and corporations."
"Make no mistake, billionaires spent record amounts of money this election cycle to buy themselves a tax cut worth trillions—and the vast majority of Americans will pay the price," said Kass. "ATF and its coalition will fight for a fair tax code where the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share. We'll hold elected officials accountable if they attempt to redirect trillions from working families to the wealthy and big corporations."
"President Trump and his extreme agenda are the embodiment of inequality, fueling the division between the ultrawealthy and the rest of us."
An analysis published ahead of the election by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) found that Trump's economic proposals would cut taxes for the richest 5% of Americans while raising them for the bottom 95%.
In a blog post on Friday, ITEP executive director Amy Hanauer wrote that a tax package that centers proposals Trump floated on the campaign trail "would be disastrous for families, communities, and the country."
"Billionaires and big corporations are sharpening their knives in anticipation of huge tax cuts, already lobbying and donating to get the tax plan that gives them the biggest windfall," Hanauer added. "Those forces have always had tremendous influence in Washington. Now they have more."
Lobbying related to expiring provisions of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law surged in the run-up to Tuesday's election, with corporate giants such as FedEx, Starbucks, Pfizer, and Toyota pressuring Congress to prevent parts of the law from lapsing.
In addition to further cutting corporate taxes and extending elements of the 2017 law, Trump is also weighing an attempt to cut capital gains taxes without congressional authorization.
"Toward the end of his first administration, senior White House officials and Treasury staff held extensive discussions about bypassing Congress with a unilateral $100 billion tax cut that would primarily benefit the wealthy," the Postreported Thursday. "Numerous Trump advisers have hoped to take another shot at it in his second term."
Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, pledged after Trump's victory earlier this week that "we will work to stop any extension of President Trump's tax cuts for billionaires and the ultrarich."
"President Trump and his extreme agenda are the embodiment of inequality, fueling the division between the ultrawealthy and the rest of us," said Maxman. "His policies create chaos and only serve billionaires and corporations, not working people."
Patriotic Millionaires chair Morris Pearl sounded a similarly defiant note.
"This round went to the oligarchs," Pearl said of the 2024 election. "But rest assured, Patriotic Millionaires will rise to the fight. We've only just begun."
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