Home/The Washington Wire Archive

Bad Data

Jack Salmon, Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and author of the Substack The Unseen and The Unsaid (and recent podcast guest!) has a great piece out this week that tears down the myth popular among tax hike advocates these days.

The writeup was inspired by a post on X from Tom Steyer, billionaire and California gubernatorial candidate, making a familiar argument: top tax rates were sky-high in the postwar decades, and all that revenue built the middle class.

This claim surfaces reliably in every tax debate, deployed to suggest that

(Read More)

2026-05-28T16:49:27+00:00May 28, 2026|

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 the flawed wealth inequality narrative underpinning much of today’s tax-hike movement:

What’s happening here is politicians are using… this age old technique of, you know, picking

(Read More)

2026-05-22T19:56:21+00:00May 22, 2026|

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 of the new jobs in this country. And a lot of Americans’ first jobs were at a small business, mine included…There’s nothing small about the

(Read More)

2026-05-18T18:23:46+00:00May 18, 2026|

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 for all.

The letter was led by the S Corporation Association and comes as the CTA faces mounting legal and political pressure from the business community.

(Read More)

2026-05-15T12:18:48+00:00May 15, 2026|

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 shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Warren’s latest proposal also includes a 40 percent “exit tax” on the net worth of any American worth more than $50 million

(Read More)

2026-05-14T17:36:46+00:00May 14, 2026|