Washington Wire
Americans Trust Main Street
A new Gallup survey has prompted another round of debate over capitalism versus socialism. The headline number is striking: 43 percent of Americans now view socialism positively, the highest share recorded.
Yet socialism still trails capitalism, which 55 percent view positively, and free enterprise, at 77 percent. Small business leads the field by a wide margin, earning a positive rating from 95 percent of Americans. Big business is the outlier at 35 percent.
Chamber of Commerce …
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Pass-Throughs & Inequality
Apollo’s “Daily Spark” had a nice blurb last week featuring the “Everywhere Millionaire.” Here’s what they said:
The income that lifted America’s top 1% did not come mainly from tech or Wall Street, according to The Everywhere Millionaire. More than half of the rise in the top 1% income share since 1985, 5.8 of 10.5 percentage points, flowed through pass-through businesses, see chart below.
The authors, Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, counted roughly 3 million wealthy …
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A Ready Reform for Main Street
Congress is looking at targeted, bipartisan reforms to make the tax code work better for taxpayers. That focus creates an opportunity to address the outdated rules governing S corporations.
S corporations are America’s most popular business structure, with more than 6 million businesses employing tens of millions of Americans. Yet one of the basic rules governing them has been frozen for more than two decades. An S corporation may have no more than 100 shareholders, a …
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Tax Relief Takes Center Stage
Republicans in Dallas had plenty to say about last year’s Working Families Tax Cuts bill. Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith made the case directly, recounting the marching orders he gave his colleagues when he took the committee gavel:
When I was selected by my colleagues to chair the House Ways and Means Committee, I told them that we were done writing tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Our priority was going to the working class, …
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How (Not) To Fix Social Security
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Moreno recently proposed lifting the Social Security wage cap to address the program’s pending insolvency. It’s the lazy solution (i.e., throw more money at a problem, declare victory, move on) and also the wrong approach.
Tax expert (and friend of the podcast) George Callas has an excellent writeup on this, along with his thoughts on what Congress should actually be considering.
Nixing the cap would impose a massive marginal tax …
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US Best for Workers
If you’re looking for a Canadian-themed joke this Labor Day, look past Ryan Reynolds blaming the 1980s on the Cuban Missile Crisis — was he drunk? — and focus instead on senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s claim that if “you want to achieve the American Dream, well, you should move to Canada because it’s twice as likely there.”
That argument is so laughably wrong, even the Canadians disagree with it. A 2024 study by …
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The Expense Cycle
Critics of last year’s tax bill are citing the decline in corporate tax receipts as evidence that the bill was too generous to Wall Street. True, corporate tax collections are down…
Receipts from corporate income taxes totaled $452 billion in 2025, which was lower than their 2024 total of $530 billion…CBO expects corporate tax receipts to decline further in 2026, to $404 billion (or 1.3 percent of GDP).
…even as corporate profits are up:
Profits …
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CTA Deceptions
The wild-eyed response to FinCEN’s recent rollback of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is just the latest example of how some in the media promote an activist agenda at the expense of Main Street.
For those not paying attention, the CTA was a big swing and a miss in the campaign to crack down on the use of shell companies that engage in illicit finance. The idea was to collect better information to reveal the real …
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