Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 18, 2024 • 03:11 PM

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Biden Tax Plan Would Give the U.S. the World’s Highest Corporate Tax Rate Print
By Timothy H. Lee
Thursday, April 22 2021
Under his proposal, the U.S. federal corporate tax rate would rise back to 28%, which would take the U.S. to a 32.3% rate when combined with state corporate taxes. That would once again give the U.S. the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate, undercutting our global competitiveness and making investment here much less attractive.

Believe it or not, until 2017 the United States imposed the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate.  

If the Biden Administration has its way, we’ll regress to that punitive rate and inglorious status under his tax proposal.  

In an increasingly competitive global economy, and as the U.S. struggles to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, that’s a recipe for disaster that Congress and American citizens should reject out of hand.  

To put the issue in context, between 1980 and 2020, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the average corporate tax rate among 177 measured nations declined from 46.5% to 26%.  During that period of international tax-cutting, however, the U.S. federal rate remained at 35%.  Combined with various state taxes, our 39.2% rate was the highest in the developed world, and over 50% above the global average.  

Making matters worse, in addition to suffering the developed world’s highest statutory corporate tax rate, U.S. companies faced the burden of being taxed twice on profits earned overseas.  Whereas companies across the world pay taxes according to the laws of the nations in which profits are actually earned, American companies were then subject to an additional domestic tax on those same profits when repatriated, or brought home.  Virtually no other nation on Earth engaged in that punitive practice.  

With U.S. companies facing that deepening and unsustainable competitive disadvantage, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law by President Trump reduced the federal rate to 21% from the old 35%.  Combined with state taxes, that brought the U.S. rate to approximately 25.8%, still above the current developed world average of 23.6%, but a dramatic improvement.  

The positive impact was immediate and profound.  

Within two years, the nation emerged from the protracted malaise of the Obama years, surging to record levels of employment, unemployment rates unseen in 50 years and approximately one million more open jobs than unemployed Americans for an extended stretch of time, which had never happened before.  

Perhaps most impressively, and most inconveniently for class warriors of the political left, lower-income Americans benefited most.  During the Trump presidency prior to the coronavirus pandemic, wages for the bottom 10% rose almost 6% each year, compared with just 2.4% during Obama’s second term leading into it.  Wages for the middle classes also increased a full percentage point higher under Trump than under Obama, and the income gap narrowed rather than widened as it had under Obama.  

The statistics get even more inconvenient for leftists, as former Senator Phil Gramm and economist Mike Solon highlight:  

More impressive is that, even after 10 years of economic expansion, the 2019 gains shattered all records as real household income leapt $4,379 in 2019 alone, 13 times the average annual gain since data were first collected, almost half again more than the next highest annual income gain, and a quarter more in 2019 alone than in the eight years between 2009 and 2016. Black household incomes in 2019 surged by a record $3,328. Hispanic incomes leapt $3,731—a third higher than their next best year ever recorded—and Asian-American incomes surged $9,400, about two-thirds more than the previous high.  Record income gains, especially among lower-income Americans, caused the poverty rate to plummet 11% in 2019, the most in 53 years. The poverty rate fell the most for Asians since records began in 1987 and for children the most in over half a century. The poverty rate for blacks and Hispanics hit historic lows.

Joe Biden, however, would reverse that progress.  

Under his proposal, the U.S. federal corporate tax rate would rise back to 28%, which would take the U.S. to a 32.3% rate when combined with state corporate taxes.  That would once again give the U.S. the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate, undercutting our global competitiveness and making investment here much less attractive.  

How do we know that?  Because even the Biden Administration implicitly acknowledges it.  

In promoting Biden’s tax increase plan, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen imperiously calls for a new international minimum corporate tax rate, because that would prevent other countries from boosting their competitiveness by lowering their rates.  You can’t lose an international tax competition if other nations are artificially prevented from competing.  

Meanwhile, the same leftists who demand higher tax rates hypocritically seek to restore federal income tax deductions for state and local taxes (SALT).  That overwhelmingly favors uber-rich Americans living in “blue” states, because those states impose higher state and local taxes subject to deduction.  In other words, they demand restoration of pre-2017 tax breaks for the wealthy while simultaneously and shamelessly sloganeering to TV cameras about “income inequality” and “tax breaks for the rich.” 

American voters shouldn’t tolerate such brazen hypocrisy, and they should demand that elected leaders reject Biden’s plan to once again make America inhospitable for companies and their employees and the public that ultimately pays by reimposing the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate.  

Notable Quote   
 
"It's a rematch.President Biden and former President Trump each hit a key marker last week, clinching enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee of their respective party.The outcome of the general election will come down to a handful of states, as usual.The map maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ lists seven contests as toss-ups."Read the entire article here.…[more]
 
 
— Niall Stanage, The Hill
 
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