John,
The Trump administration is handing out secret tax breaks for the country’s richest and most powerful corporations.
The Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT) was designed to end one of the most outrageous forms of inequality in the tax code: allowing corporations that make more than $1 billion a year in profits to tell shareholders one story — record earnings — while telling the IRS another, paying nothing in federal income taxes.
President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act finally sought to close that gap by requiring those giant corporations to pay at least a 15% tax on the profits they publicly flaunt, closing loopholes carved out through many years of high-powered lobbying. It was expected to raise $222 billion over a decade and put an end to the era of trillion-dollar companies skating by tax-free.
But now, Trump’s Treasury Department and IRS are busily rewriting enforcement rules, raising income thresholds, and creating massive exemptions for favored industries, effectively signaling to America’s biggest corporate tax dodgers that the coast is clear again.
Send a message to Congress to enforce the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax and stop Trump from handing out billion-dollar tax breaks to America’s richest companies.
Trump-favored industries, such as cryptocurrency, private equity, and multinational firms, are being handed freshly designed loopholes to avoid even the modest 15% minimum.
This is gargantuan inequality in action: corporations posting billion-dollar profits to shareholders while paying pennies — or nothing at all — to the country they profit from. Every exemption and loophole is a windfall to billionaire investors and corporate insiders, allowing them to walk away tax-free while workers and families shoulder the burden.
Congress can, and must, stop this egregious backflow of billions into bulging corporate coffers. Lawmakers must hold hearings to expose the full extent of these secret deals, and require the Treasury Department and IRS to enforce the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax exactly as Congress wrote it.
When corporations cheat, the public pays. When billionaires avoid taxes, essential services like nutrition assistance for children, Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act are starved for resources. Working families are left holding the bag, saddled with rising prices, medical debt, and skyrocketing healthcare premiums.
Tell Congress to enforce the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax and stop Trump from letting the biggest corporations evade their responsibilities to the American people.
Thank you for standing up for just and fair taxation for the good of our country.
Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action
