Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is now proposing an increase in the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% in order to raise 2.5 trillion dollars over the next 15 years to supposedly pay for Biden’s ‘infrastructure plan’:
NY POST – Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday unveiled a plan to hike corporate taxes that would raise $2.5 trillion over 15 years — to pay for the $2.3 trillion infrastructure overhaul proposal introduced last week by President Biden.
The plan is underpinned by an increase of the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, and it also features a global minimum tax rate of about 21 percent and a “minimum book tax” of 15 percent that all big companies would pay, Yellen said.
Biden last week proposed a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan that would largely be funded by an increase in the corporate tax rate to 28 percent and an expanded global minimum tax set at 21 percent.
Yellen said the plan would double-down on workers’ skills and traditional infrastructure such as roads and bridges as well as modern infrastructure such as broadband. The increases would produce roughly $2.5 trillion in revenues over 15 years, enough to cover the eight years’ worth of infrastructure investments being proposed.
Addressing reporters on a conference call, Yellen disputed the idea that tax hikes have to come at the expense of everyday Americans.
“Tax reform is not a zero-sum game,” she said. “Win-win is an overused phrase, but we have a real win in front of us now.”
I think a corporate tax hike like this is a zero-sum game for some companies, because what it will do is drive companies out of America and back overseas where the cost of doing business is cheaper, benefiting foreign workers over American workers.
Trump and Republican policies have helped make America a much more competitive business environment, luring companies back to the US from other countries, including China. But this tax increase will undoubtedly have the opposite effect.
And while this corporate tax hike may seem like it’s increasing only halfway to what it was before, Former Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett explains to Maria Bartiromo that it will be much worse, describing it the biggest corporate tax hike in history:
Hassett, who says the infrastructure bill is really the Green New Deal, predicts that if they ram this tax hike through, companies will “flee the US like a stampede”.
This is why the reconciliation decision by the Senate Parliamentarian the other day is such a big deal, because Schumer and Pelosi could potentially ram a bill like this through with just 51 votes. This is also why voices like Manchin and Sinema matter so much, because they could easily oppose the bill and prevent it from passing.