A Wednesday report from The Intercept spotlighted the role of a top Joe Biden adviser in pushing Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts.
While working as a lead lobbyist for Apple, Cynthia Hogan allegedly helped push Trump’s 2017 Republican tax law — the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — which decreased the previous 35 percent corporate tax rate to 21 percent. The cut purportedly benefitted the wealthiest 1 percent of America. Notably, the Center for Public Integrity found that the cut drove Apple’s stocks to record highs and lined the pockets of shareholders.
As reported by Forbes , the decreased taxes also paved the way for an all-time record in America — billionaires paid lower taxes than the working class in 2018.
According to The Intercept , disclosures revealed that Hogan worked as an Apple lobbyist who pushed the Senate, House, and Treasury Department on various issues, including corporate and international tax reform, as well as “issues related to state sales tax, mobile workforce, and taxation of digital goods.”
Hogan left the technology giant this year to work on Biden’s presidential campaign and was allegedly influential in his selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his vice president. However, the president-elect’s transition team claimed Hogan’s current role in the campaign has nothing to do with policy and instead focuses on “personnel.”
Before working at the technology giant, Hogan was the head of the NFL’s lobbying division. The Intercept claimed she worked to protect the league during the concussion and domestic violence scandals and rehabilitate its image using her connections to the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Violence Against Women Act.
“She successfully shielded the NFL from congressional action on a number of issues, weakening Congress’s oversight abilities by ending the NFL’s tax-exempt status and fighting calls for a zero-tolerance policy on domestic assault.”
According to Forbes , the president’s 2017 tax revision was financed with deficits, which William Gale — the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy at Brookings — claimed will come at the expense of today’s working-class and future generations.
“If nothing else, it’s clear that there’s a taxation problem in America and the current solution is only making it worse,” the publication reported.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz previously warned that Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act contained a secret tax spike for the middle-class. He noted that while the legislation initially lowered taxes for the majority of Americans, it includes automatic and stepped tax increases every two years beginning in 2021. Stiglitz claims that the increases would affect almost all citizens of the country — with the exception of the top earners — by 2027.