President Biden’s National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard and senior administration officials announced yesterday that the Biden administration is pursuing a 21% global minimum tax for American businesses.
The transcript of a press call with Brainard and officials was released by the White House today and contains details of Biden’s push for a 21% global minimum tax.
Biden’s global minimum tax would be a devastating blow to U.S. competitiveness and sovereignty, effectively eliminating tax competition between countries and outsourcing control of the U.S. corporate tax rate to an international cartel.
Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform issued the following statement reacting to Biden’s push for a 21% global minimum tax.
“Joe Biden wants America to surrender its sovereignty and have bureaucrats in Brussels and Paris decide how heavily American businesses will be taxed. International bureaucrats will set our minimum tax rate. We should compete by having lower taxes, less regulation, lower energy costs and less government spending. Instead, Biden wants American workers to have lower pay.
Senior administration officials also announced that the Biden administration will seek to hike the corporate alternative minimum tax (book tax) from 15% to 21%. The 15% book tax was only recently implemented in the dishonestly named Inflation Reduction Act and now Biden is pushing to increase the tax rate before the ink is even dry on the legislation.
“Our global minimum tax proposal — would put in place a 21 percent rate there. So, we’d have both the 21 percent global minimum tax. We’d have 21 percent corporate minimum tax for the domestic corporate minimum tax as well,” a senior administration official announced on the call.
“We’re going to be in a place where we’ll put forward the 21 percent proposal. We’ll call on other countries as well to continue to put forward measures like that,” the official continued when asked if the administration would push for other countries to raise their corporate tax rate to 21%.
The Biden administration has for years been pursuing a misguided international tax agreement to change international tax rules with fellow members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). These negotiation led to a framework agreement known as the “Two-Pillar Solution,” in which pillar 2 of this plan is the implementation of a global minimum tax.
The OECD plan for a global minimum tax was to create an effective minimum tax with a 15% rate. Biden’s plan would go well beyond the OECD’s framework for a 15% global minimum tax and instead increase the rate to 21%.