Our Tax Code Is Designed To Create Donald Trump
In 2011, The New York Times published what was, at the time, the most shocking expose on tax policy in decades. General Electric, the largest American corporation, had notched a $14.2 billion profit in the previous year ― and paid no federal income tax.
GE had achieved this financial miracle through creative accounting, ferocious lobbying and years of corporate hiring that lured top tax officials away from just about every government agency, office or committee with jurisdiction over the matter.
The GE story touched off a furious debate by the standards of its day. The company’s defenders took to CNBC to insist that under a more flexible definition of tax liability, GE had paid quite a bit. Others insisted the firm was an outlier and that most corporations were paying plenty of taxes, if not too much.
But critics and admirers alike agreed on one thing: GE’s practices were unusually aggressive, but it hadn’t done anything illegal, in part because GE and its lobbying allies had persuaded Congress and regulators to write rules in the company’s favor.
In the nine years since, public opinion on tax policy has been remarkably consistent. Overwhelming majorities of the public, including large swaths of the Republican Party, think that big corporations and the wealthy should be paying more. And yet the opposite has occurred. In 2013, the Obama administration cut a deal with then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to give households making over $250,000 a tax break. And in 2017, President Donald Trump signed into law his signature policy achievement, a sweeping $1.5 trillion tax law that slashed the tax obligations of the rich and large corporations, hacked away at federal revenues and exacerbated economic inequality.
Trump’s tax law has always been deeply unpopular. In March 2019, a survey from the Pew Research Center showed that just 36% of Americans approved of it. A month later, a Monmouth University poll put approval at 34%.
In short,...
