With Republicans in both chambers of Congress pushing their own tax bills, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said a primary goal of tax reform, and particularly cutting corporate taxes, is to help American workers.
“This is as much about bringing jobs back to America as anything else,” Mnuchin told Yahoo Finance in an interview in New York on Thursday.
Despite this assertion, both the the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and Joint Committee on Taxation (the official scorekeepers) found the House tax reform bill largely favors higher-income taxpayers.
‘A huge incentive to invest money here at home’
In his interview with Yahoo Finance, Mnuchin said lowering the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% would benefit workers by boosting hiring, wages and investment.
Mnuchin cited analysis from the Council of Economic Advisers, which notes that workers bear 70% of the burden of corporate taxes. But the author of that analysis, Kevin Hassett, told Yahoo Finance it could take at least three to five years to get to the middle class and workers. Meanwhile, there is economic literature disputing the assertion that reducing the corporate tax burden helps the middle class. That includes a 2012 Office of Tax Analysis paper that shareholders pay over 80% of corporate tax while workers pay just 18%; the Treasury Department removed that paper from its website.
Still, Mnuchin says he is convinced that corporate tax cuts and repatriation would spur investment.
By Nicole Sinclair.
Full story at Yahoo News.
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