Business Group Taps Brady For Tax Fights
BUSINESS GROUP TAPS BRADY FOR TAX FIGHTS: Former House Ways and Means Chair Kevin Brady — one of the chief architects of the 2017 GOP tax overhaul — is wading into corporate America’s fight to save large swaths of that bill from expiration next year.
— The Texas Republican has joined the Alliance for Competitive Taxation as a senior adviser and chief spokesperson for the coalition, whose members are tax directors for top U.S. companies like Boeing, General Electric, Google, Cisco, Procter & Gamble and Walmart. Brady won’t be registering to lobby, but will shape debate around the talks to extend key individual and business tax breaks he helped usher in.
— Brady told PI he’ll also work on international tax policy, in particular the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 15 percent global minimum tax on large multinational corporations. “The world’s changed in the last six years,” he said, noting the coming fiscal cliff provides a “rare opportunity” to assess further tweaks to the tax code.
— While the 2017 tax bill didn’t receive a single Democratic vote, Brady said he sees reason to believe next year’s tax fight will be more bipartisan, pointing to the tax proposal currently languishing in the Senate and bipartisan support for portions of the 2017 bill, like the 20 percent deduction for pass-through businesses, increasing the standard deduction and indexing it, and enhancing the child tax credit.
— There will be areas of contention between the parties, he conceded. “Without knowing exactly how the elections will go, I do think lawmakers are going to seek those bipartisan areas as top priorities,” Brady said.
— The tax fight will also have to contend with the growing influence of populism and antagonism of the business community in both parties on the Hill since 2017. Even though ACT’s members are some of the biggest companies in the world, their fortunes are intertwined with tens of thousands of small- and medium-sized suppliers, Brady noted.
— “I think one big truth that everyone understands, that I think will help drive lawmakers and both parties to a solution, is the simple fact of: If they don’t act, you know, families, workers, small businesses will all see a crushing $4 trillion tax hike,” he argued.