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Abraham Lincoln must be rolling over. When did we become a society that supports a government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation?!
The major provisions of The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 were to reduce corporate and personal income taxes. Personal brackets fell about 10 percent relatively, i.e., brackets in the 30 percent range dropped about 3 percent each and those in the 20s dropped about 2 percent each while the top corporate rate dropped from 35 percent to 21 percent or a relative 40 percent!
The Congressional Budget Office put 2017 federal personal tax receipts at about 49 percent of federal tax revenue and corporate taxes at 9 percent of federal tax revenue. One year later, the CBO estimated for 2018 federal tax revenue was 51 percent from personal taxes and only 6 percent from corporations! Moreover, the corporate breaks were permanent while the individual reductions were temporary!
S&P reports between 2018 and 2024 corporations have repurchased over $6 trillion worth of their shares, funded in part by tax savings. The collective values of S&P 500 companies have more than doubled since the 2017 tax cut legislation and many now enjoy massive tariffs on foreign competitors.
We’re cutting Medicaid, SNAP etc., and the full benefit age for Social Security has risen while corporations are asked for relatively nothing.
As politicos debate a budget whose annual interest expense went from about $450 billion in 2016 to about $1 trillion today, with about $900 billion targeted for defense, much of which will go to corporations, thus adding much more to our indebtedness, why are big corporations exempt from sharing the burden?
Mike DelTergo
Falmouth
