(Photo: Flickr/Michael Fleshman)
Wall Street had a bang-up week in Washington.
Two of their own, former Goldman Sachs executives Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin, had the honor of unveiling the outlines of President Trump’s tax plan on Wednesday. Cohn now heads up the National Economic Council and Mnuchin is Treasury Secretary.
Not surprisingly, the tax plan is a huge giveaway to the big banks and corporations.
That same day, House Republicans held a hearing on their big Wall Street deregulation bill. The Financial CHOICE Act would roll back many of the 2010 Dodd-Frank provisions aimed at preventing another financial crisis and shielding consumers from abuse. Less than a decade after the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Wall Street is once again riding roughshod over the public interest.
The choice of Cohn and Mnuchin as the faces of Trump’s tax plan really says it all. Their former employer, Goldman Sachs, is already a champion tax dodger.
When Cohn stepped down as the bank’s president to join the administration, Goldman had $31 billion in untaxed offshore profits and 987 tax haven subsidiaries, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
If President Trump has his way, banks and corporations will enjoy a deep discount on such offshore funds if they shift them to the United States. While the Cohn-Mnuchin duo declined to say just how deep this discount might be, the plan Trump released during his campaign proposed a 10 percent tax on “repatriated” earnings, less than a third of the current 35 percent corporate tax rate.
That would save Goldman Sachs an estimated $4.4 billion on their IRS bill.