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The Republican Tax Plan is a Complete Corporate Sellout

The Republican Tax Plan is a Complete Corporate Sellout

Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen

Note: U.S. House Republicans today released a tax-reform bill that would slash the corporate tax rate to 20 percent from 35 percent. After defeats on health care, Republicans are scrambling to deliver legislation to President Donald Trump by the end of the year.

Welcome to tax policy by conflict-of-interest. The Republican tax scheme is a plan made for billionaires – exactly like the one in the White House. Provisions on the estate tax, pass-through corporations and the alternative minimum tax would directly benefit Trump and his family, easily saving them a billion dollars or more.

The most pernicious element of all may be the move to a so-called territorial tax system for some foreign profits, which will encourage multinational corporations to outsource jobs to lower-tax jurisdictions. Even more seriously, despite weak attempts to insulate the scheme from accounting trickery, it still will facilitate tax manipulation on a monumental scale. This tax sham is the product of the fundamentally corrupt system against which Candidate Trump ran: A rushed and secretive process, driven by connected insiders, stuffed with favors for the Big Donor class and potentially delivering the greatest transfer of wealth from regular people to the superrich in the history of the nation. America cannot permit this bill, or any variant of it, to become law.

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