Democrat Blanche Lincoln helps large company keep away from paying taxes

The former chairman of a powerful Senate body that served with President Joe Biden in Congress is now working on behalf of a corporate front group to block Democrats’ efforts to raise the corporate tax rate.

Blanche Lincoln, a two-term Conservative Democrat from Arkansas, was fired from office on the 2010 tea party wave after chairing the Senate Agriculture Committee that oversees Wall Street’s financial derivatives. She has since started her own lobbying firm, the Lincoln Policy Group, which has represented companies like Pfizer, Comcast, and Monsanto. Lincoln is the public face of the RATE Coalition, which leads the fight against Biden’s plan to increase the corporate tax rate.

Biden has proposed increasing the business rate from 21 percent to 28 percent to fund his $ 2 trillion infrastructure investment plan. Republicans cut the tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent in 2017 under Donald Trump’s tax bill.

“American employers will struggle to build better than global competitors like China with an even higher corporate tax rate,” Lincoln said in a recent statement from the RATE Coalition. The group, whose name stands for “Reforming America’s Taxes Equitable”, represents corporate giants such as AT&T, CVS Health, FedEx, Lockheed Martin and Walt Disney.

At least one company in the coalition she represents – the shipping company FedEx – has not paid federal taxes in the past three years.

According to the Library of Congress, Lincoln sees an infrastructure bill as her main legislative achievement – bipartisan legislation she co-authorizes to create the Delta Regional Authority (DRA), a state and federal partnership that operates in states along the Mississippi Delta invested. Half of the DRA’s funds are intended for fundamental improvements in transport and public infrastructure.

Now, two decades later, Lincoln is trying to torpedo Biden’s own infrastructure spending plan, which relies heavily on a corporate tax rate hike to protect powerful, highly profitable business interests that are filling their pockets.

The RATE Coalition was formed in 2011 to push for corporate tax cuts under President Barack Obama. “A lower corporate tax rate would enable US companies to better compete in today’s global marketplace.”

In 2017, the coalition welcomed Republican tax legislation, claiming it would “boost GDP, create new jobs, increase middle-class families’ after-tax incomes, and encourage greater investment in our country.”

The law had no real economic impact – economic growth slowed after an initial boom, and companies spent much of the money buying back shares to boost their share prices.

The greatest beneficiaries of tax law have been corporate CEOs. According to a recent study by Grinnell College economist Eric Ohrn, the pay for the company’s highest-paid executives increases by 15 to 19 cents for every dollar a company’s tax breaks generate.

Between 2017 and 2018, the largest payments by the RATE Coalition went to Cavalry LLC, a consulting firm led by former Senate Chief of Staff Mitch McConnell.

After Biden won the presidency, Lincoln acted as an advisor to the RATE Coalition.

“Tax increases in the midst of economic turmoil would only help keep the economy down,” Lincoln wrote in a November column announcing her approval of Biden’s campaign. “Instead, Democrats – led by Biden – should heed the lessons of our history and keep our country’s tax system competitive.”

Rather than hike the corporate tax rate, Lincoln is now calling on her “former colleagues in Congress and friends in administration to fill the gaps that allow profitable corporations to pay little or no taxes.”

Lincoln recently submitted a written testimony to the Senate Finance Committee, where she previously served, for a hearing entitled “How US International Tax Policy Affects American Workers, Jobs and Investments.”

“At a time when American employers and workers are trying to recover from an historic public health and economic crisis, I urge my former colleagues on the committee to fill in wasteful gaps, rather than our new competitive corporate rate Country and related jobs, “she wrote.

FedEx, a member of the RATE Coalition, is a profitable company that regularly pays little or no taxes thanks to the 2017 GOP tax cut and various tax loopholes. According to a report by the Institute for Taxes and Economic Policy (ITEP), FedEx’s tax rate between 2018 and 2020 was -12.8 percent. The report said, “FedEx zeroed its federal income tax on $ 1.2 billion in pre-tax income in 2020 and received a $ 230 million discount.”

Another member of the RATE Coalition – Liberty Media, which controls satellite radio company SiriusXM and the Atlanta Braves baseball team – had an effective tax rate of 1.4 percent in 2018, according to a separate ITEP analysis.

Four other coalition members – Verizon, Capital One, AT&T, and Disney – filed for tax breaks totaling $ 4.7 billion in 2018 thanks to Trump’s tax bill.

Last month, Lincoln also campaigned for JBS, a Brazilian meat packing conglomerate, which has drawn national attention to the failure to contain COVID outbreaks in its meat packing operations.

The company is currently under a Congressional investigation following widespread COVID-19 outbreaks at its plants that resulted in at least eighteen deaths.

In Greeley, Colorado, JBS kept its meat packing facility open when the pandemic started, urging workers to keep turning up after people got sick. At least six workers at the plant died. The company denied three compensation claims made by their family members’ workers, claiming that their COVID cases were not work-related.

As part of its investigation into JBS and other meat packaging companies, the House’s selected subcommittee on coronavirus crisis called on JBS to provide extensive documents and information regarding the treatment of workers during the pandemic, as well as data on how many of its employees were infected with the virus or died .

“Public reports indicate that meat packers, including JBS, have refused to take basic precautions to protect their workers, many of whom earn extremely low wages and do not have adequate paid vacation, Clyburn, D-SC, subcommittee chair, wrote to the company. “These actions appear to have resulted in thousands of meat packers becoming infected with the virus and hundreds dying.”

The company settled a price fixing last month. Last fall, the company agreed to pay $ 280 million to the Justice Department to settle claims that violate foreign bribery laws. Another worker died last month at the Greeley plant after being hit by a machine and falling.

The same day their company began lobbying for the company, JBS hired Lincoln to promote a program to help their employees attend community college.

“I am delighted that JBS USA is offering this opportunity to our colleagues and their families,” said Lincoln in a company press release. “This commitment is perhaps the most extraordinary example of great corporate citizenship I’ve heard of in a long time.”