Lowering the corporate tax rate for businesses has been proposed by Donald Trump, but he may have a hard time getting unanimous GOP support from some the party's most conservative lawmakers.
Trump has embraced lowering the corporate tax rate from 21% -- where it landed after his tax reform in 2017 – to 15%.
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanently reduced the U.S. corporate tax rate which had been at 35%.
“A 15 percent corporate rate would improve U.S. competitiveness and grow the economy,” TaxFoundation.org wrote last fall.
But some House Republicans are wanting to see Big Business earn that tax cut.
“This has become a little bit of a lightning rod,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said on Washington Watch Wednesday. “There’s no rate that’s sacrosanct. I think everything should be on the table.”
Roy favors making American businesses more competitive globally. What he and other socially conservative Republicans do not favor are fake females on beer cans, or "tuckable" bathing suits in a retail store, which are being pushed relentlessly in corporate messaging to please homosexual and transgender activists.
Last summer’s boycotts of Bud Light and Target indicate that Roy’s position is not unique.
Many of these same corporations who push woke policies and products in social engineering are growing richer through federal subsidies, Roy said. Dropping the tax rate to 15% would be significant, he agreed.
"I support that generally," he said, "but I am tired of corporations taking this for granted, tired of corporations going and taking subsidies to go out and enrich themselves, whether it's (through) Obamacare and insurance subsidies or the Inflation Reduction Act, so-called subsidies for the energy policies.”
Roy says it’s time for House Republicans to push back and work to lessen the impact of Environmental Social Governance, or ESG, in American business.
ESG is a framework used to assess an organization’s business practices and measure its performance on certain environmental, social or governmental issues.
Translation: A low ESG score could threaten a business’ standing with, for example, the LGBTQ community if it doesn’t celebrate Pride month.
Taking on the ESG score
“I want us to use leverage to force corporations to start being American first, making sure they're delivering products, drop all this ESG crap, stop all your woke nonsense where June is like selling me gay M& Ms or whatever you're trying to do, and just do your job. Then come back and talk to me about a competitive corporate tax rate,” Roy told show host Tony Perkins.
Rethinking the corporate tax rate could be a benefit for smaller, local businesses.
“You don’t see local businesses when they buy banners at Little League parks, they’re not making them reflect Pride month. Why? Because that’s not what local businesses do,” Roy said.
“We need to do our part to make sure we have good, competitive tax rates, but what I don’t want to do is just rubber stamp this stuff and not use it to hold big businesses accountable to stand up for America.”
