Bloomberg's Tom Moroney spoke with MIT President L. Rafael Reif about the tax bill's impact. Describing the tax as a "budget cut" for MIT, Reif emphasized higher education's vital role in America's innovation economy and said it's counterproductive, "to hurt the institutions that create innovation, create startups, and prepare people for those jobs."
In a Financial Times article, Senior Lecturer Robert Pozen details how the proposed tax plan would encourage employers to relocate US jobs to foreign countries. As a result of the foreign profits minimum tax, countries could “offer a corporate tax rate at 10 percent to US companies if they would relocate their manufacturing or research facilities,” explains Pozen.
Writing for The New York Times, graduate student Erin Rousseau examines how the House tax bill would negatively impact graduate students in the U.S. The bill, “would make meeting living expenses nearly impossible, barring all but the wealthiest students from pursuing a Ph.D. The students who will be hit hardest are those from communities that are already underrepresented in higher education.”
Ike Brannon writes for Forbes about a survey he conducted with Prof. Michelle Hanlon asking equipment manufacturing companies what they want from tax reform. The majority of respondents in this diverse industry were in favor of removing all business tax breaks to “achieve a corporate income tax in the vicinity of 20 percent that is fully ‘paid for’,” writes Brannon.
Graduate student Erik Duhaime writes for Forbes about his research with Prof. Evan Apfelbaum on political polarization over taxes. Duhaime and Apfelbaum found that, “giving people personalized taxpayer receipts significantly reduced polarization over taxes, even if it didn’t make everyone suddenly thrilled about paying them.”
Senior Lecturer Robert Pozen writes for Fortune about how the Trump administration could reform corporate tax code. Pozen writes that “to be competitive with most industrialized countries, the US needs a corporate tax rate in the range of 20% to 25% — with a US tax credit for corporate taxes paid to a foreign country.”
Current tax laws do not encourage U.S. corporations to invest foreign profits in this country, writes senior lecturer Robert Pozen in the Boston Herald. Senator Paul Ryan’s plan to make all U.S. exports exempt from corporate taxes is “a bold effort to reform corporate taxes in a way to keep more facilities and jobs in the U.S.,” Pozen writes.
Senior Lecturer Robert Pozen writes in The Boston Globe about how to fix the nation’s system for taxing foreign profits of U.S. corporations. Pozen writes that politicians should “find a way to reduce the US corporate tax rate and bring back foreign profits to the United States, while helping rebuild our infrastructure and create jobs.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Adam Creighton writes about a study co-authored by MIT researchers that found taxing wealth leads to a decrease in declared wealth. The authors found “a 0.1 percentage point increase in the rate of wealth tax prompts a 4% jump in the probability of a taxpayer’s reported net wealth dropping below the wealth tax-free threshold.”
MIT researchers have developed an algorithm that detects tax evasion, writes Lynnley Browning for The New York Times. “The goal is to give the I.R.S. a better way to investigate sophisticated tax shelters that strip tens of billions of dollars from federal coffers each year,” writes Browning.
Kyle Clauss reports for Boston Magazine on an algorithm, created by MIT researchers, which can detect efforts by corporations to evade taxes. “The findings are a promising development in the ongoing struggle against tax evasion of the most sophisticated sort,” writes Clauss.
Boston Business Journal’s Mary Moore writes that, “A researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management has measured the billions of dollars in tax payments that U.S taxpayers are avoiding, using offshore accounts and through an investment scheme known as ‘round tripping’.”
NPR’s Jim Zarroli reports on new MIT research that explores how tax evasion techniques like round-tripping can hurt the U.S. economy.