The Trump tax law overhaul cut the federal corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but during the first five years it has been in effect, most profitable corporations paid considerably less than that.| ITEP
Compared to its House counterpart, the Senate bill makes certain tax provisions more generous, including corporate tax breaks that it makes permanent rather than temporary. But the bottom line for both is the same. Both bills give more tax cuts to the richest 1 percent than to the entire bottom 60 percent of Americans, and both bills particularly favor high-income people living in more conservative states.| ITEP
The nation’s corporate tax system has been dysfunctional for decades. Unfortunately, the recently enacted Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) fails to solve fundamental problems facing the corporate tax and, in some ways, makes these problems even worse.| ITEP
Read as PDF Note: This report is adapted from written testimony submitted by Amy Hanauer before testifying in person to…| ITEP
Key Findings To avoid taxation, American corporations use accounting gimmicks that make profits appear to be earned in foreign jurisdictions…| ITEP
The deduction for Foreign-Derived Intangible Income (FDII), one of the tax cuts included in former President Trump’s signature 2017 tax law, provides a lower effective tax rate on income earned from intangible assets, such as patents, trademarks, and other forms of intellectual property. Since the law went into effect in 2018, 15 corporations have separately reported more than $1 billion in tax benefits. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) reported the most, at more than $11 billion in ...| ITEP
The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 would ostensibly provide a tax break on charitable donations to organizations that give out private K-12 school vouchers. Most of the so-called “contributions,” however, would be made by wealthy people solely for the tax savings, as those savings would typically be larger than their contributions.| ITEP
The U.S. House Ways & Means Committee has advanced a new school voucher bill. H.R. 9462—the Educational Choice for Children Act of 2024—would create an unprecedented tax incentive designed to fund private, mostly religious, K-12 schools.| ITEP
Today the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released its final regulations cracking down on a tax shelter long favored by private…| ITEP
Read as PDF Re: Recommendation for Inclusion of Section 1001 Regulation in 2023-2024 Priority Guidance Plan To Whom It May…| ITEP
The IRS recently proposed a commonsense improvement to the federal charitable deduction. If finalized, the regulation would prevent not just the newest workarounds to the $10,000 deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), but also a longer-running tax shelter abused by wealthy donors to private K-12 school voucher programs. ITEP has submitted official comments outlining four key recommendations related to the proposed regulation.| ITEP
Netflix's 2021 financial report shows it doubled its profits to $5.3 billion from the previous year and reported an effective federal corporate income tax rate of 1.1 percent.| ITEP
Nearly two dozen of America’s largest corporations together received roughly $50 billion in tax breaks from 2018 through 2021 under a Trump tax law provision that many lawmakers now want to extend. Corporate lobbyists are even asking Congress to extend this “accelerated depreciation” tax break as part of a possible year-end tax bill.| ITEP
If lawmakers believe it’s worthwhile to extend corporate tax breaks, then it would be entirely unreasonable for them to not conclude the same about tax provisions that help low-income children.| ITEP
Amazon avoided about $5.2 billion of federal income tax on its record $36 billion in U.S. pretax income for fiscal year 2021.| ITEP
The push by Congressional Republicans to make the provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent would cost nearly $300 billion in the first year and deliver the bulk of the tax benefits to the wealthiest Americans.| ITEP
The trio of tax bills that cleared the House Ways and Means Committee in June include tax cuts that would mostly benefit the richest one percent of Americans and foreign investors.| ITEP
The Trump Administration’s plan to turn IRS agents into deportation agents will result in lower tax collections in addition to the harm done to the families and communities directly affected by deportations.| ITEP
From 2021-2023, child poverty has more than doubled from 5.2 to 13.7 percent. The latest Census data make clear that lawmakers have the tools to help millions of children and their families – and it’s beyond time they take action.| ITEP
The Trump megabill hands the richest 1% a trillion-dollar windfall while gutting funding for health care, education, and disaster relief — leaving communities to pick up the pieces. State and local leaders must step up, tax the wealthiest fairly, and safeguard the essentials that keep America healthy, educated, and safe.| ITEP
Last week, President Trump fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in apparent retaliation for weak jobs numbers. The move drew sharp criticism for spooking investors and weakening trust in official data. But it also reflects a deeper problem: the ongoing erosion of the federal data infrastructure.| ITEP
Congress permitted full expensing only for five years, which will encourage businesses to speed up investments they would have made later. Republicans in Congress have discussed making the expensing provision permanent. This report argues that Congress should move in the other direction and repeal not just the full expensing provision but even some of the permanent accelerated depreciation breaks in the tax code, for several reasons.| ITEP
The stock option rules in effect today create a problem because they allow corporations to report a much larger expense for this compensation to the IRS than they report to investors. The result is that corporations can report larger profits to investors but smaller profits to the IRS, undermining the fundamental fairness of the tax system.| ITEP
Thirty-nine profitable corporations in the S&P 500 or Fortune 500 paid no federal income tax from 2018 through 2020, the first three years that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was in effect. Besides the 39 companies that paid nothing over three years, an additional 73 profitable corporations paid less than half the statutory corporate income tax rate of 21 percent established under TCJA. As a group, these 73 corporations paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 5.3 percent during th...| ITEP
The House of Representatives’ recently passed tax bill changes course on taxing multinational corporations engaged in shifting U.S. profits overseas, offering massive tax giveaways that weaken American revenues and risk sending more American corporate investment offshore.| ITEP
Former President Donald Trump has proposed a wide variety of tax policy changes. Taken together, these proposals would, on average, lead to a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups.| ITEP
The House tax plan cuts charitable giving tax incentives for donors to most nonprofit groups while roughly tripling the incentive available to donors to groups that fund private K-12 school vouchers. The bill would also allow private school voucher donors to avoid capital gains tax on their gifts of corporate stock, creating a profitable tax shelter for wealthy people who agree to help funnel public funds into private schools. The bill would reduce federal tax revenue by $23.2 billion over th...| ITEP
Two parts of Trump’s 2017 tax law that are particularly expensive and beneficial to the richest individuals are the changes in income tax rates and brackets and the special deduction for “pass-through” business owners. Lawmakers should not extend these provisions for high-income households past the end of this year, when they are scheduled to expire.| ITEP
Private equity is doing fine on its own and does not need another tax break. Congress should keep the stricter limit on deductions for interest payments —one of the few provisions in the 2017 tax law that asked large businesses to pay a little bit more.| ITEP
The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 would provide donors to nonprofit groups that distribute private K-12 school vouchers with a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit in exchange for their contributions. In total, the ECCA would reduce federal and state tax revenues by $10.6 billion in 2026 and by $136.3 billion over the next 10 years. Federal tax revenues would decline by $134 billion over 10 years while state revenues would decline by $2.3 billion.| ITEP
If Congress creates a tax break to encourage businesses to conduct research that benefits society, should Netflix be eligible for…| ITEP
The federal estate tax has reached historic lows. In 2019, only 8 of every 10,000 people who died left an estate large enough to trigger the tax. Legislative changes under presidents of both parties have increased the basic exemption from the estate tax over the past 20 years. This has cut the share of adults leaving behind taxable estates down from more than 2 percent to well under 1 percent.| ITEP
Since TCJA expanded tax breaks for “accelerated depreciation” starting in 2018, it has reduced taxes by nearly $67 billion for the 25 profitable corporations that benefited the most. Congress is now looking at extending this policy.| ITEP
Congressional Republicans have floated a proposal to strip the Child Tax Credit from millions of children who are U.S. citizens and legal residents in situations where their parents do not have Social Security numbers. Approximately 4.5 million citizen children with Social Security numbers would lose access to the credit under this proposal.| ITEP
Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Providing access to work authorization for undocumented immigrants would increase their tax contributions both because their wages would rise and because their rates of tax compliance would increase.| ITEP
Regardless of future Child Tax Credit developments at the federal level, state policies can supplement the federal credit to deliver additional benefits to children and families. State credits can be specifically tailored to meet the needs of local populations while also producing long-term benefits for society as a whole| ITEP
Expanding the federal Child Tax Credit to 2021 levels would help nearly 60 million children next year. It would help the lowest-income children the most and would particularly help children and families of color.| ITEP
In his latest budget proposal, President Biden proposes enhancing the Child Tax Credit (CTC) based on the temporary credit that was in effect for 2021 as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. In this report we analyze how that proposal would help children and families.| ITEP
The Child Tax Credit expansion led to a 46 percent decline in childhood poverty. That it could be accomplished during the largest economic disruption in most of our lifetimes underscores a basic fact: thoughtful, decisive government action to combat poverty works.| ITEP
Contact: Jon Whiten (jon@itep.org) Immigration policies have taken center stage in public debates this year, but much of the conversation…| ITEP
Keeping the Kentucky income tax on a march to zero would mean tax hikes for working families or widespread cuts to education, health care, and other public services. Reversing course is certainly the wiser course of action.| ITEP
More than one in four dollars of wealth in the U.S. is held by a tiny fraction of households with net worth over $30 million. Nationally, we estimate that wealth over $30 million per household will reach $26 trillion in 2022 with roughly one-fifth of that amount ($4.5 trillion) held by billionaires.| ITEP
Wealthy families are overwhelmingly the ones using school voucher tax credits to opt out of paying for public education and other public services and to redirect their tax dollars to private and religious institutions instead. Most of these credits are being claimed by families with incomes over $200,000.| ITEP
At least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States. This continues a decades-long trend of corporate tax avoidance by the biggest U.S. corporations, and it appears to be the product of long-standing tax breaks preserved or expanded by the 2017 tax law as well as the CARES Act tax breaks enacted in the spring of 2020.| ITEP
Who Pays? is the only distributional analysis of tax systems in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This comprehensive 7th edition of the report assesses the progressivity and regressivity of state tax systems by measuring effective state and local tax rates paid by all income groups.| ITEP
