The Biden Administration’s sales pitch for their proposed business tax hikes goes something like this: Rates were too high prior to 2017 but Republicans overshot the mark and set them too low.  Democrats want to find a happy middle ground. President Biden said as much in his remarks last week:

We’re going to raise the corporate tax rate. It was 35 percent for the longest time, which was too high.  Barack and I thought it was too high during our administration.  We all agreed five years ago that it should come down somewhat, but the previous administration reduced it all the …

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As we previously mentioned, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing yesterday to discuss various proposals to “make the wealthiest people and largest corporations pay their fair share of taxes.”  It was predictably dull and partisan.  There was, however, one moment of “Oh, that’s interesting.”

It started when Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) spoke about the concept of good tax policy, and where the tax code should go:

I think there’s a lot of big ideas about tax reform that are out there…I hope we might get into a big, structural tax reform discussion. 

I’m a little bit nervous – I think we’ll …

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With impeachment over, congressional Democrats are turning their attention to their $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill. House committees spent prior weeks marking up pieces of the bill, which will be consolidated into a single “reconciliation” package by the Budget Committee today and then considered by the full House later this week.

For the Main Street business community, the process here is as important as the policy.  The congressional majority chose to use reconciliation to move their COVID relief package, which raises several issues worth highlighting.

Senate Rules Under Pressure

The primary benefit of using reconciliation in the Senate is the ability to pass …

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Where does fairness lie? At a time when Main Street is struggling to stay open while Wall Street flies high, you might be surprised that Bloomberg thinks it’s private companies organized as S corporations and partnerships that have the advantage, at least when it comes to taxes.

The Bloomberg story at issue reviewed the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and whether it lived up to the promises made by its sponsors, including the goal of balancing out the tax treatment of private and public companies. Here’s the key graph:

“Just in …

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Congress is on the cusp of passing a truly bipartisan assistance package to help the families and employers through the last months (yeah vaccines!) of the COVID-19 pandemic.  As part of this package, the entire business community and its Hill allies support expanding and extending the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) while clarifying congressional intent on the tax treatment of PPP loans.

As we’ve written before, getting the tax treatment of PPP loan forgiveness correct would avoid a surprise $120 billion tax hike on the five million employers who took out PPP loans.  Those employers were promised tax-free forgiveness when …

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