President Trump reserved a few minutes of his State of the Union address to praise his tax reform law, which turned a year old last month. Mr. Trump ... promised Americans that drastically lowered corporate tax rates would bring home large sums of capital that had been stashed overseas and finance a surge of domestic investment. The White House argued they wanted a system that encourages companies to stay in America, grow in America, spend in America, and hire in America." Yet the bill he signed into law includes a sweetheart deal that allows companies that shift their profits abroad to pay tax at a rate well below the already-reduced corporate income tax. Now that a full year has passed since the tax bill became law, we have hard numbers. There is no wide pattern of companies bringing back jobs or profits from abroad. The global distribution of corporations' offshore profits ... hasn't budged from the prevailing trend. Eliminating the complex series of loopholes that encourage offshoring was a major talking point ... but most of them are still in place. The craftiest and largest corporations can still legally whittle down their effective tax rate into the single digits. (In fact, the new law encourages firms to move "tangible assets" - like factories - offshore). Overall, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act amounted to ... sleight of hand. According to the Treasury Department's tally for fiscal year 2018, corporate income tax receipts fell by 31 percent, an unprecedented year-over-year drop in a time of economic growth.
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