Corporations paid $91 billion less in taxes under GOP tax code overhaul: report

As the mid-April deadline for filing 2018 tax returns was approaching, accountants and tax preparers had their share of clients who were angry over some of the deductions that the GOP-sponsored Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 took away. But giant corporations made out much better than individual taxpayers with modest incomes, and in a new report for Yahoo Finance, journalist Kristin Myers offers some details on how little mega-corporations paid for fiscal year 2018 compared to previous years.

Analyzing data from the research firm Oxford Economics, Myers reports that “corporations lowered their effective tax rate to just 7 percent — the lowest since 1947.”

The Economic Policy Institute has reported that most U.S. workers saw little or no benefit from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And some middle-class taxpayers in blue states, after losing valuable deductions, complained that their taxes had increased thanks to the Republican tax law.

However, the United States Treasury Department brought in less revenue. Considering the “net figures,” Myers writes, “big businesses paid $91 billion less in 2018 than it had the year prior.”

Myers also points out that “while companies were able to avoid paying taxes thanks to the new Republican tax law, the IRS pulled in roughly $2 trillion from individual tax returns — a leap of nearly $100 billion from the amount collected in 2017.”

Myers discussed the effects of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act with Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). And Wamhoff told her, “People, when they think of tax reform, think the government is going to fix the tax code and get rid of breaks and loopholes and get rid of tax dodging. What we got at the end of 2017 was not that. It was the opposite of that. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act left a lot of special breaks and loopholes in place and created some new ones.”