How the Trump Administration Is Giving Even More Tax Breaks to the Wealthy
The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service are issuing rules that provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax relief to big companies and the ultrarich.
nytimes.com
With little public scrutiny, the Trump administration is handing out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to some of the country’s most profitable companies and wealthiest investors.
The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, through a series of new notices and proposed regulations, are giving breaks to giant private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors, insurance providers and a variety of multinational corporations.
The primary target: The administration is rapidly gutting a 2022 law intended to ensure that a sliver of the country’s most profitable corporations pay at least some federal income tax. The provision, the corporate alternative minimum tax, was passed by Democrats and signed into law by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. It sought to stop corporations like Microsoft, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson from being able to report big profits to shareholders yet low tax liabilities to the federal government. It was projected to raise $222 billion over a decade.
But the succession of notices the Treasury and I.R.S. have issued beginning this summer means the tax could bring in a fraction of that.
These breaks come in addition to the roughly $4 trillion package of tax cuts that President Trump signed into law in July. The legislation, passed entirely by Republicans, heavily benefits businesses and the ultrawealthy. It is projected to add trillions of dollars to the federal deficitand came with steep cuts to health care for the elderly and food stamps for the poorest Americans.
With its various tax relief provisions, the administration is now effectively adding hundreds of billions of dollars in new breaks for big businesses and investors. The Treasury is empowered to write rules to help the I.R.S. carry out tax laws passed by Congress. But the aggressive actions of the Trump administration raise questions about whether it is exceeding its legal authority.
Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have attacked federal workers as instruments of the “deep state,” exercising power beyond anything authorized by the law. Now the administration is doing the same thing, several tax experts said, undermining laws that hit the ultrawealthy and big companies.
“Treasury has clearly been enacting unlegislated tax cuts,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a tax economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “ Congress determines tax law. Treasury undermines this constitutional principle when it asserts more authority over the structure of the tax code than Congress provides it.”
The alternative minimum tax isn’t the administration’s only effort to roll back taxes on large businesses and wealthy individuals. Last month, the Treasury and I.R.S. granted new tax relief to foreign investors in U.S. real estate. In August, they withdrew regulations to prevent multinationals from avoiding taxes by claiming duplicate losses in multiple countries at once. And, as The New York Times previously reported, the Treasury and I.R.S. have rolled back a crackdown on an aggressive tax shelter used by big companies, including Occidental Petroleum and AT&T. That amounts to another $100 billion in cuts — and likely far more, according to tax advisers.
Changes like these are not widely publicized by the Treasury, but are closely followed by tax planners for the country’s biggest corporations — who are applauding the new guidelines. In notes to clients, advisers at KPMG celebrated the new “ array of choices” available for investors seeking to avoid the corporate alternative minimum tax. They noted that the Treasury’s moves provided “significant flexibility” for clients to trim their bills, allowing them to “cherry-pick” the rules that best suit their needs.
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