Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
The Trump administration quietly used loopholes built into the 2017 tax cuts to give big corporations an even bigger tax savings.
The tax cut bill passed by Republicans in 2017 overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and big corporations, according to a House Budget Committee report issued earlier this year. The law gave individuals a modest short-term tax cut while permanently slashing corporate taxes from 35 percent to 21 percent. The new law has greatly contributed to the 50 percent growth in the budget deficit since President Trump took office.
But that was not enough for big corporations, which launched intense lobbying efforts to carve out even bigger breaks in the bill’s loopholes. The effort led the Treasury Department to quietly change rules to hand big companies an even bigger tax break, according to The New York Times, costing taxpayers billions in lost revenue.
“Treasury is gutting the new law,” University of Houston tax law professor Bret Wells told the Times. “It […]
Shocking. Really. Truly shocking. To live a placid life any more you have to drop out of the culture, which may no longer be possible. Sometimes I think the world ended somewhere back there around 1988-89–maybe it was ’91 when Poppy Bush destroyed our civilization’s roots in the ruins of Babylon–and now we’re just drifting into a bardo of valueless chaos leading, perhaps, to a new creature motivated by intellect alone, human emotions having proven disastrous to the flowering of civilized life. (“It cain’t be this way everywhere.”–Bob Dylan)