Democrats in Congress began building the policy case for sharp corporate-tax increases, arguing that Republicans went too far with their 2017 tax cuts. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said he and Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) will soon release a more detailed framework for how multinational corporations should be taxed, the Wall Street Journal reported. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the Budget Committee chairman, released a plan Thursday that would raise $1 trillion over a decade. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said she is writing legislation to impose a minimum tax on profitable companies. Versions of some of those ideas are expected to appear in the tax-and-spending agenda that President Biden will unveil next week, and Congress is poised to act on them this year to help pay for infrastructure spending. In all, Democrats are planning significant reversals of the 2017 tax law signed by then-President Donald Trump, though they aren’t calling for returning to the previous status quo. They are particularly eyeing features of the law that they say give companies incentives to move activity outside the U.S. There are countervailing incentives in the law, and it is far from clear that companies have actually moved production outside the U.S. for tax reasons in the past three years. Some companies have brought intellectual property to the U.S., and corporate choices often have nontax purposes.
