The corporate tax-cut party President Donald Trump kicked off will soon be over if his successor proves able to enact proposals to roll back half of the 2017 domestic income-tax reduction and to radically revamp levies on profits earned abroad.
President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure-centered plan, laid out by the White House Wednesday, relies on higher corporate levies to pay for it. The proposals would change tax benefits that were at the center of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed solely with Republican votes. Along with boosting the corporate income tax rate to 28% from 21%, businesses would pay significantly more on their global earnings than they did before Trump took office, experts said.
“They’re not just rolling back the tax cuts from 2017,” said David Noren, a former legislative counsel to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation who now advises corporate clients on tax planning. “They are putting companies in a much much tougher spot than even before TCJA.”
The administration is also proposing to eliminate all fossil-fuel tax breaks and repealing incentives to move assets and jobs offshore.
The plan would largely revamp the complicated matrix of carrot-and-stick incentives implemented in 2018 that govern how U.S. companies pay taxes on foreign profits—which critics have said did little to spur U.S. investment or stop companies from shifting income and assets abroad. In its place, Biden has proposed a 21% global minimum tax. That would be an increase from the roughly 13% that corporations currently owe on offshore earnings.
Trump’s tax law intended to make it easier for American companies to compete with foreign competitors in countries where taxes were lower and international tax regimes were more permissive.
Repatriation Disappointed
While the law lowered tax bills for some foreign profits, other changes—like deductions to benefit U.S. manufacturers who sell abroad and rules to prevent companies from moving intellectual property offshore—didn’t work as well as some Republicans who drafted the law had hoped.
Companies ended up repatriating only a fraction of the foreign profits envisioned by the reform and uncertainty about the longevity of a law passed with GOP votes only led some companies to adopt a wait-and-see approach.
Biden’s proposals face significant changes, given the 50-50 split in the Senate and the Democrats’ narrow majority in the House, which gives extra power to individual lawmakers to shape the final legislation.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden said that he and Biden “are rowing in the same direction,” but that he plans to release his own international tax plan, along with Democratic Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Mark Warner of Virginia, next week.
“While the proposals are distinct, our plans share the same goals of ending incentives to ship jobs overseas and rewarding companies that invest in the United States and its workers,” Wyden said in a statement Wednesday.
Republican Defense
Republicans have defended the 2017 tax law, saying that it reformed an archaic international tax system that made American companies prime targets for takeovers and inversions.
An increase in the federal corporate rate to 28% would raise the average combined state and federal rate to 32.34%, which would be the highest among the G-7 countries, according to the right-leaning Tax Foundation. Republicans say this would harm economic growth and increase the cost of investment in the country.