Republicans Reject Corporate Tax Increase, Propose Paying for Infrastructure by Repealing Child Tax Credit Expansion
GOP leaders’ repeated bad faith “compromise” offers to President Biden’s American Jobs Plan (AJP) reveal they are more interested in preserving corporate tax cuts than investing in people and communities — and children.
The AJP would create jobs and shore up our communities with a bold $1.7 trillion investment in roads, bridges, clean energy, modernizing public buildings, manufacturing research and development, and home care (which our aging population increasingly needs), among other things. To partly pay for these critical investments, the president proposes raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent.
From the start, GOP leaders haven’t discussed the merits of the proposal, choosing instead to deflect and cling to a narrow definition of infrastructure while also trotting out hackneyed, disproven trickle-down arguments that seek to preserve tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, even if it means increasing taxes for lower-income people.
The latest counteroffer is $928 billion — less than a third of which is new spending — and it strips out investments in what Republicans have decided doesn’t meet the definition of infrastructure. Most egregiously, it appears they are proposing to halt the 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit, included in the American Rescue Plan, to pay for it. To be clear, the so-called compromise would be paid for in part by repealing a tax credit reform that would cut child poverty in half.
GOP leaders have already made clear that they do not want corporate tax increases.
This even though profitable corporations continue to get away with tax avoidance.
Anti-tax lawmakers continue to evoke the needs of the middle-class as they stand firm against tax increases for corporations and the wealthy. Yet one of their most recent “compromise” infrastructure proposals called for tax increases that would disproportionately affect working people, signaling yet again that the instinct of Republican lawmakers is to maintain a system in which the richest 1 percent receives the lion’s share of the benefits from our collective investments while everyone else pays the bill.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell admits that 100 percent of his focus is on blocking the Biden agenda, and House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy has turned his back on a bipartisan commission negotiated by a Republican he deputized, so it is hard to take any of these Senate negotiations on a jobs package seriously. But if this is what counts as a serious offer from the Republican side of the aisle, as Sen. Shelly Moore Capito claims, the joke is on the rest of us.
