Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, while it was being built. Earlier this year, workers there rejected an attempt to unionize.

Let Big Corporations Keep Their Tax Cuts

If they bring jobs back to the US

Otherwise, any infrastructure bill has got to raise taxes on corporations to help pay for it. President Biden kind of is and isn’t budging on that in negotiations with Republicans. In meetings with Republicans, he’s now proposing a kind of flat floor on corporate taxes, so big corporations can’t get away with paying nothing or next-to-nothing, as many do now. That might maybe be preferable to Republicans than reversing their gigantic, multi-trillion dollar corporate tax cut, which was, after all, their biggest legislative achievement of the Trump years.

So either way, it’s all good.

But there’s another way, or at least an additional way: tell corporations if they add a job in this country, or bring back a job, they get a tax break.

And keep in mind Biden even at first wasn’t proposing anything more dramatic for corporate tax rates than raising them back to 28%: where they were before Trump and Republicans cut them. So in some ways it’s also understandable that Republicans would not like the idea of undoing a lot of what they so enthusiastically did in the first place.

Tossing proposals back and forth kind of looks like old-fashioned political horse-trading. Is it? One significantly overlooked aspect to this story as…