President Biden has announced two ambitious, entwined economic policy agendas: raising the corporate tax rate and other taxes on large businesses to pay for a significant increase in spending on a broadly defined set of infrastructure objectives. While the case for at least some increase in infrastructure spending is sound, the case for unwinding the corporate tax reforms enacted in 2017 is not.
In his Forbes article, Personal Finance Contributor Ted Knutson discussed Tuesday’s Senate Committee on Finance hearing that focused on climate change tax reform. During the hearing, leaders on both sides of the aisle asserted that new clean energy laws should be technology neutral, so that no one industry “wins.”
On Tuesday, American Enterprise Institute resident fellow and MGA founder and CEO Alex Brill testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance. The topic of the hearing was the tax treatment of energy. Brill spoke of the criticality of a “broad, efficient, technology-neutral tax policy geared toward encouraging less energy consumption and more renewable energy production” to working toward a reduction in U.S. reliance on fossil fuels—and ensuring a reduction in CO2 emissions.
The Senate is poised to consider President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, an elaborate bill recently passed by the House of Representatives through the budget reconciliation process at an estimated cost of $1.9 trillion over the coming decade.
We recently had the honor of testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee on the effects of inaction on coronavirus fiscal legislation. One of us was invited by the Republicans and the other by the Democrats. The basis of the hearing was the Heroes Act, a $3 trillion bill that passed the House in the spring on a party line vote with about $1 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in new spending.
“But Alex Brill of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute said Congress shouldn’t approve more costly economic recovery payments because they aren’t well targeted toward households directly impacted by the pandemic.”
My testimony begins with an overview of the economic impact of the pandemic and our current economic situation.
Congress faces several critical choices before departing for their August recess. Should the $600-per-week additional unemployment insurance (UI) benefit (which has resulted in five of six workers earning more in unemployment benefits than wages) be extended, modified, or allowed to expire at the end of July?
Alex Brill was quoted in Fast Company for his research on tax policy effects on business:
“… [Brill] has found that employees in ESOPs “get better at the job, and instead of quitting as soon as they get skills, they stay and get more skills.” Companies with ESOPs require fewer managers, as AEI’s Brill discovered in his research, because workers are given more freedom and are better able to manage themselves.”