Republicans pitch tax cuts for corporations, the wealthy in 2025
Republicans in Congress are preparing to not just extend former president Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts if they win control of Washington in November’s elections, but also lower rates even more for corporations, laying the early groundwork for a ferocious debate over taxes and spending next year and beyond. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) lowered rates for individuals of nearly all income levels, though it cut taxes most for the highest earners, and slashed the maximum corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The individual portions of that law expire in 2025, but Republicans who wrote the law made the business tax cuts permanent. Now GOP lawmakers and some of Trump’s economic advisers are considering more corporate tax breaks — which could expand the national debt by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade, according to researchers at Stanford University and MIT — arguing that they would improve the U.S.’s global competitiveness.
President Biden and congressional Democrats have signaled they’ll draw a sharp contrast with the GOP on taxes in campaigns this year. Biden promises to raise taxes on the wealthiest individuals and corporations, allowing the Trump tax law’s individual rate cuts to expire for people earning over $400,000 and pushing for legislation with taxes on businesses to pay for new investments in child and elder care, affordable housing and education. Extending all of the Trump tax law would add $4.6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s nonpartisan bookkeeper. “Our tax system right now has many, many flaws, and one of them is that we don’t raise enough money from corporations,” a senior administration official told The Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
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