Washington Wire
Billionaire Brake Check
Jeff Bezos sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin this week and spent the better part of an hour challenging the political dogma that taxing the rich is the answer to all our country’s economic problems. It’s worth watching, if only to see Sorkin, who specializes in interrupting his guests, barely get a word in during the entire interview.
Right out of the gate, Bezos addressed …
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Thune Talks Main Street Tax Relief
As part of National Small Business Week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune took to the Senate floor to highlight how provisions like permanent Section 199A, bonus depreciation, estate tax relief and other provisions from last year’s Working Families Tax Cuts are helping Main Street employers hire new workers and reinvest in their communities.
As Thune put it:
Nearly half of Americans in the private sector work for a small business. Small businesses are responsible for a majority …
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Main Street Supports SCOTUS Review of CTA
More than 90 trade associations sent a letter today urging the federal government to support Supreme Court review of the Corporate Transparency Act. The letter calls on Treasury and DOJ to back the two pending cert petitions currently before the Court — National Small Business United v. Bessent and Texas Top Cop Shop, Inc. v. Blanche — so that the fundamental constitutional questions raised by the CTA can be resolved once and …
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Blood from a Stone
While most people were trying to file their taxes last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren was busy trying to raise them. Her reintroduced Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2026 would impose a 2-percent annual levy on individual net worth above $50 million, a 3-percent rate on billionaires, and generate what its proponents claim will be over $6 trillion. That estimate is the economist equivalent of drawing blood from a stone – it doesn’t exist and it …
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Greater Fool Markets
In economics, the “Greater Fool” theory holds that investors buy overpriced assets expecting others will pay more for them later. So a stock or real estate bubble will continue until the proverbial “last fool” jumps in, at which point there’s nobody left to keep the bubble going and it bursts.
We need an analogous theory for tax policy these days. States like California, New York, and Washington continue to raise taxes and otherwise create an environment …
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Senate Joins CTA Relief Effort
More good news on the CTA front. Fresh on the heels of the House Financial Services Committee advancing CTA relief, the Senate has stepped up with legislation of its own. Senators John Kennedy (R-LA) and Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced a bill this week that mirrors the House approach, codifying Treasury’s March 2025 rule limiting beneficial ownership information reporting to foreign entities only, while also requiring FinCEN to delete the personal data already collected …
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Tax Day Headlines Miss the Full Story
Recent news coverage suggests that the Working Families Tax Cut Act was a bust. Here’s Politico’s Bernie Becker when asked if this tax filing season has lived up to expectations:
The short answer is no… it wasn’t just one person promising $1,000. It was a key line they said over and over again. When you get refunds a third of the way there, there’s no way to suggest anything but that they overpromised.
But the promise …
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House Panel Moves CTA Relief
As we previewed recently, the House Financial Services Committee yesterday advanced legislation that would repeal the Corporate Transparency Act’s reporting requirements for over 30 million American businesses. The measure – as amended and approved by the panel – codifies a Treasury Department rule limiting the CTA’s scope only to foreign entities, while protecting sensitive information already collected under the state by requiring a purge of the beneficial ownership database.
It’s a huge win for the …
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