Republicans Are On The Wrong Side Of The American People On Raising Corporate Taxes

So much for the alleged breakup between the Republican Party and newly “woke” corporate America. Republicans are still the servile lickspittle lackeys for the corporatocracy, protecting corporation’s low tax rates. Even though corporations have been demanding an infrastructure bill for years, the catch is that these freeloaders want someone else to pay for it, or to just put it on Uncle Sam’s credit card and run up the debt. Americans do not want this.

President Joe Biden says he’s willing to negotiate on both the size and scope of his infrastructure and jobs package, but congressional Republicans are already saying they won’t budge on higher corporate taxes. There’s your “bipartisanship” for you. Republicans Say No To Raising Taxes On Corporations To Pay For Infrastructure:

The American Jobs Act would spend over $2 trillion to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure by renewing roads and bridges, electrifying transit systems, expanding broadband, boosting rail, and spending billions on home care and housing. The proposal, if signed into law, would be the biggest investment in the nation’s infrastructure in decades.

The Biden administration proposes offsetting the huge cost by permanently increasing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, which is still lower than the 35% rate before the 2017 GOP tax law took effect. Administration officials claim such a tax hike, combined with other steps such as closing tax loopholes, would pay for the package in full in eight years.

Note: IRS chief says some $1T in taxes going uncollected annually. IRS research indicates $175 billion in underpayments just among the wealthiest Americans.

But Republicans are lining up against repealing parts of their tax law, which they consider their signature legislative achievement under former President Donald Trump. The tax cuts, they claim, cut unemployment and ignited the economy ― at least before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

See Republican tax cuts to fuel historic U.S. deficits: CBO (2018), and CBO Confirms GOP Tax Law Contributes to Darkening Fiscal Future (2019), and Two Years after Republican Tax Windfall for
Wealthy, Corporations, Broken Promises for Middle-Class Families (2019), and A New Congressional Study Finds Little Economic Benefit From The 2017 Tax Cuts (2019). This is what they call a “signature legislative achievement”? Well sure, if you were a member of the Plutocrat class or a corporation whom Republicans gave an undeserved tax windfall.

“I don’t think there will be any” support among Senate Republicans to undo the 2017 tax law, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday at a weekly press conference.

[S]enate Republicans who are part of a bipartisan working group that had little success negotiating a deal on coronavirus relief earlier this year also panned the idea of financing infrastructure investment by raising taxes on corporations.

“This is the last thing we need at a time when our economy is just starting to recover,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said.

Pro Tip: It is never the right time to raise corporate taxes in Republican orthodoxy. They must always lower taxes in a race to the bottom, to “drown the government in the bathtub” as the GOP Tax Fairy Grover Norquist used to say (he was one of the original insurrectionists).

Corporations know better than the government how to spend money, according to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), another working group member. [Stock buybacks?]

“They’re kind of making the case that it makes more economic sense for the government to decide how to spend money to stimulate the economy, as opposed to the market to decide where to spend the money,” Cassidy said.

This guy was a doctor, so what the hell does he know? He probably never even saw the inside of an economics class. Governments decide when to stimulate the economy, and where to build public infrastructure like roads, bridges, airports, schools, etc., and how to pay for it. Governments contract with corporations to do the work.

Cassidy and several other Republicans told HuffPost the 2017 GOP Tax Cuts and Jobs Act dramatically strengthened the economy – wrong! – but various experts, including those at the Congressional Budget Office, have said the law had only a modest effect on economic activity. The law’s tax windfall spurred corporations to buy back massive amounts of stock. [Not invest it in new public infrastructure.]

Some Republicans prefer paying for infrastructure spending in other ways, such as through user fees and gas taxes [regressive taxes with a disproportionate impact on the poor]. The federal gas tax, in particular, hasn’t been raised in nearly 30 years. Such forms of revenue have funded infrastructure projects for decades, but in recent years, the model has failed to adequately sustain federal transportation programs like the Highway Trust Fund. As a result, Congress has had to dip into the federal Treasury to keep it afloat.

“You have electric vehicles coming out more and more that pay nothing into the Highway Trust Fund because they don’t use any gasoline,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said Monday when asked about the gas tax.

Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration oppose raising the federal gas tax because, they say, it would disadvantage working people who would have to pay more to gas up their cars. They want Republicans to put their money where their mouth is and compromise on other payfors — revenue to offset spending — such as corporate taxes. (One Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has already floated a 25% corporate tax rate as a possible option).

Republicans “need to put their counter-proposals on the table. I haven’t even heard of a payfor from a Republican yet,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Tuesday.

Just as they did with the COVID-19 Relief bill, Republicans are crafting a ridiculously small counter-proposal which will be woefully inadequate in size and scope to address the actual need, and will insure that “someone else” besides their corporate masters pays for it. In other words, an unserious proposal that will be dead on arrival. And then they will piss and moan that Democrats are not being “bipartisan” when they reject the GQP’s ridiculous offer. The lazy media villagers will be stenographers parroting right-wing talking points about “bipartisanship” rather than explaining how the GQP counter-proposal is an unserious proposal.

Politico reports, Republicans prepping smaller counteroffer to Biden’s infrastructure plan:

Republicans are preparing a counteroffer to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal, a plan that’s likely to be in the range of $600 to $800 billion, more targeted in scope and funded by unspecified user fees, according to several GOP senators.

For some time Republican talking points around Biden’s $2 trillion-plus plan, which would fund everything from roads to broadband to schools, has centered on panning it for its expansive definition of infrastructure and for proposing a hike on corporate taxes to fund it. And Republican senators interviewed about the counter suggest it will stick to that script.

[T]he cost of the infrastructure plan that Republicans are developing for would be “probably into 600 or 800 billion,” Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said — although on Capitol Hill later Wednesday, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who is also involved in the conversations, said that $800 billion “seems a little high.” “Can’t we just do it on the cheap?“

Another central principle that Republicans are focused on is maintaining user fees as a pay-for, Romney told reporters, though he wouldn’t elaborate on what kind.

“The pay-for ought to come from the people who are using it,” he said. He also suggested that the infrastructure plan should include a mileage charge to ensure that electric vehicle drivers are paying into the system.

I would agree that as America shifts to an electric vehicle fleet over the next decade, we will need to develop a practical and enforceable mileage tax to replace the outmoded gas tax. It is not clear that Romney even understands what he is talking about.

Earlier this week, Romney had suggested that the gas tax should help pay for an infrastructure bill, but it was unclear whether he was referring to an increase in the tax or if he was speaking more generally about maintaining it as a funding mechanism.

Asked Wednesday, he said he would “have to look at all the numbers and see how much we need and where we are.”

“Clearly by bringing in additional revenue from actual miles driven is going to create some additional revenue. I’d have to see how much that would be,” Romney said.

Already DOA: No new gas taxes: White House rejects corporate ask on infrastructure funding: The White House rejected the idea of raising gas taxes as a way to pay for President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan. Sorry Mitt, did you just not get the memo?

Romney said that it’s not clear yet if the counter will be offered just by Republicans or by a bipartisan group. A few Democrats have criticized the Biden plan’s size or substance, and some have expressed concerns about corporate tax hikes as the funding source.

I hate how reporters are always vague about who are these Democrats. If they actually exist, name names. This “access” style of reporting at Politico where everything is on background and sources remain anonymous is misleading. For all we know, there are no such Democrats, only Republicans claiming that there are.

There is a bipartisan so-called “Group of 20,” but does anyone seriously believe that there are ten Republican votes for anything Democrats propose? How naive does one have to be to fall for this? Media villagers, anyone? Anyone?

In any case,  Almost Two Thirds of Voters Back Joe Biden’s Corporate Tax Rise Plans:

A Morning Consult/Politico poll released [last week] found that voters were mainly in favor of the proposals. It found that 65 percent of registered voters support increasing corporate taxes over the next 15 years to fund the president’s plan, while 21 percent said they somewhat or strongly oppose it.

The New York Times reports, Voters Like Biden Infrastructure Plan; G.O.P. Still Sees an Opening on Taxes:

President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan has yet to win over a single Republican in Congress, but it is broadly popular with voters nationwide, mirroring the dynamics of the $1.9 trillion economic aid bill that Mr. Biden signed into law last month.

The infrastructure proposal garners support from two in three Americans, and from seven in 10 independent voters, in new polling for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey. Three in 10 Republican respondents support the plan, which features spending on roads, water pipes, the electrical grid, care for older and disabled Americans and a range of efforts to shift to low-carbon energy sources.

30% of Republicans is a sizable chunk of the party, who are not being represented well by the Seditious Republicans they sent to Congress. I’d call that bipartisan support among the public.

That support is essentially unchanged from a month ago, when SurveyMonkey polled voter opinions on a hypothetical $2 trillion Biden infrastructure package, despite Republican attacks since the president outlined his American Jobs Plan in Pittsburgh at the end of March. And there is near-unanimous support for the plan from Democrats, whose confidence in the nation’s economic recovery has surged in the first months of Mr. Biden’s administration.

“What we’ve seen with all our polling so far this year is that these proposals that the Biden administration has been rolling out have met with widespread approval,” said Laura Wronski, a research scientist at SurveyMonkey.

Republican leaders are hoping they can ultimately turn some voters, particularly independents, against the plan by attacking Mr. Biden’s proposal to fund it with tax increases on corporations. Those increases include raising the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent and a variety of measures meant to force multinational corporations to pay more in tax to the United States on profits they earn or book abroad.

Survey says! Axios reports, with an oddly biased headline, Focus group: Red flags for Biden infrastructure plan: “Some swing voters say President Biden needs to better explain who’ll pay for his $2 trillion infrastructure plan — and they’ll only back bipartisan legislation that’s paid for by corporations, not the middle class.” This is the Biden plan. It seems more accurate to say the “red flags” are for the GQP counter-proposal to protect their corporate masters from having to pay anything more in taxes.

Eight out of the 13 swing voters said infrastructure in America is in need of immediate attention. But 11 said getting bipartisan support for infrastructure legislation is very important to them. And 12 said it’s very important that the bill be paid by corporations rather than middle-class Americans.

None said Biden is doing a good job of explaining to the public how he’ll pay for his plan. None wants the federal government borrowing money to pay for it.

Seems to me that Axios pulled a baker’s dozen of low-information voters who blame someone else for their own lack of knowledge. Low-information voters should not dictate public policy: their certitude is inversely related to their expertise.

The bottom line: Engagious President Rich Thau, who moderated the focus groups, said swing voters “need these three assurances: Both parties in Congress will support the final infrastructure bill; it won’t be financed by more borrowing, and wealthy Americans and large corporations will pay the tab — not them.”

This bullshit “bipartisan” issue is only because of the lazy media villagers harping on this issue, but as I noted at the top of this post, Republicans are not interested in bipartisanship. Republicans cannot claim that there is a lack of bipartisanship when it is they who are the ones who have withdrawn from any good faith negotiation at the bargaining table. To paraphrase Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are not bipartisan.”

The lazy media villagers really need to stop being stenographers parroting right-wing talking points about “bipartisanship” rather than explaining that it is the the “Party of No” that is to blame.