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Under the Trump Tax Plan, We Might All Want to Become Corporations - The New York Times

posted onApril 30, 2017
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Article snippet: Corporations are people, Mitt Romney once told us. But if the Trump administration’s tax plan were to become law, in the future a whole lot of people may just become corporations. That’s because of a huge loophole implied by the broad tax ideas the administration recently released. Unless revised in actual legislation, the plan would give millions of Americans the opportunity to cut their taxes by essentially turning themselves into small business entities. This mind-bending curiosity of the tax code could undermine the very idea of a job as we know it — or, arguably, accelerate a shift that has been underway for years. The opportunity to game the system arises from the huge gap between the tax rate paid on individual income — up to 39.6 percent now, or 35 percent under the Trump plan — and the low rate on business income the president proposes, of 15 percent. He seeks to apply that rate to all businesses, including “pass-through” organizations such as limited liability companies and S corporations, and that is where the opportunity for games arises. For example, I am currently an employee of The New York Times, paid a salary every two weeks to write articles about economics. My earnings are labor income; I happen to be in the 28 percent tax bracket. Suppose I instead formed Irwin Scribblings L.L.C., a “company” dedicated to providing economics writing services. Irwin Scribblings could then contract with The Times to provide articles about economics for a rate eq... Link to the full article to read more

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