John,

Since the Trump/GOP Tax Scam was passed in 2017, the rich and corporations have made off with trillions of dollars in tax breaks.

Given a choice of increasing compensation for their already ultra-rich top executives, or passing some of the windfall along to workers and consumers, which do you think most corporations chose?

It may not surprise you to find that a new report by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, titled “More for Them, Less for Us,” found that over the past 5 years, many corporations paid their top 5 executives more than the entire company paid in federal income taxes.  

This report focuses on 36 large, high-profit corporations, including Tesla, T-Mobile, Netflix, MeLife, and Duke Energy. These 5 corporations received tax refunds totalling $2 billion, and the lion’s share of these new funds went straight to the already-highest-compensated people in the companies.

That’s why we’ve partnered with our friends at Americans for Tax Fairness to fight against excessive executive pay. Tell Congress it’s time to pass new policies that tax corporations and CEO pay now.

There are a number of solutions available to fix the skewed tax code, to limit excessive executive pay, and to bring big corporations in line with the share of taxes owed on their increasing profits.

For example, one approach is to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. This would bring in an additional 1.3 trillion in revenue to Uncle Sam over the next 10 years, which could be used to subsidize housing, healthcare, and even food for those who need more assistance.

Stock buybacks are a steal today, where a company buys back some of its own stock from shareholders, artificially boosting the stock’s value with higher prices. Only the wealthy benefit from these schemes, but raising the stock buyback tax from 1% to 4% would both discourage the use of this cynical technique, and bring in an additional $20 billion just in the next year.

Finally, as outrageous as it sounds, the Trump boondoggle even created new tax breaks to corporations for moving their jobs and their profits out of the country. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Lloyd Doggett have introduced the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act to counter this disturbing trend.

Their legislation will encourage companies to reinvest in the United States, bringing back lost jobs and profits. It will tax corporate earnings the same whether they are foreign or domestic, and it will prevent the merger of large US corporations with small foreign corporations to avoid taxes.

Taken together, these three reforms will go a long way toward helping to prevent corporate tax dodging schemes and to bring executive pay in line. Click here to sign the petition and tell Congress to pass these solutions!

Thank you for helping us undo the damage from the 2017 tax scam.

- DFA AF Team