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**APRIL 6, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Biden, Wyden, and Yellen: Bring Investment Home!

The Democrats' new proposals for taxing global corporations should
enable them to address two distinct and pressing problems: how to expand
the rule of law from the national level to the planetary; and how to win
back a share of the working class that's been moving into the
Republican column.

For nearly half a century, America's leading corporations have
offshored both work (to lands where labor is cheap) and profits (to
lands where tax rates are low). By so doing, they and their European
counterparts have been able to end-run the worker rights and labor
standards, and the taxes that fund them, that the nations of North
America and Western Europe had been able, in their social democratic
moments, to establish.

In short, big business went global before government did. This was not
an unprecedented development. In the second half of the 19th century,
railroads, steel companies, and meatpacking firms went national at a
time when the federal government had no laws to regulate them, when
government was largely confined to state and local entities that
couldn't cope with nationwide businesses. It took decades-arguably,
not until the 1930s-for the federal government to enact national rules
of the road.

We may now be at the moment when the governments of many nations agree
on a common set of standards for the behemoths that dominate the global
economy. At the European level, the EU has already enacted a light set
of labor standards. Now, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is proposing
that nations that belong to the OECD establish a global minimum tax for
those corporations, so that they can't direct their profits to such
low-tax havens as Ireland, Luxembourg, or the Bahamas. Not accidentally,
the Biden administration's tax plans call for raising the corporate
tax rate here to 28 percent, which is roughly the average tax rate of
OECD members.

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Just yesterday, moreover, three Senate Democrats-Ohio progressive
Sherrod Brown, Oregon liberal Ron Wyden, and Virginia centrist Mark
Warner-introduced a bill that aspires to tax offshore income at higher
rates and provide benefits for companies that do their R&D and
production here in the States (though parts of the Biden proposal may do
this more effectively).

This is all popular stuff. Poll after poll

has shown large majorities of Americans favor raising taxes on the rich
and on big corporations, and the majorities on these issues are likely
to grow even more lopsided as corporate tax evasion comes under a
brightening spotlight. ITEP, the Institute on Taxation and Economic
Policy, has released a study

documenting that 55 corporations on the Fortune 500 paid no federal
income tax last year on profits that came to roughly $40 billion.
Twenty-six of those corporations have paid no federal income tax since
the enactment of the Trump tax cuts in 2017; they include FedEx and
Nike.

In their campaign for tax hikes to fund infrastructure and the caring
economy, these are arguments that Democrats will surely highlight if
their political synapses are firing at all. Since the advent of
corporate offshoring in the 1970s, there have been no even remotely
effective proposals to bring investment back home. The proposals by
Biden, Wyden, and Yellen, and the funding for domestic R&D and
manufacturing in the infrastructure bill, will, if enacted, actually do
that-almost surely, over the opposition of a unified Republican Party.

So, the GOP votes against bringing investment home? I can't think of a
better way to arrest the drift of our working class into the Republican
column.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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Why Democrats Won't Overturn Many Trump-Era Rules

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Pre-hiring personality screening and ongoing employer monitoring
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First 100: Public Investment Can't Be a Jackpot for Private Thieves

Plus, Senate Democrats find an extra way around the filibuster. BY DAVID
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