Firms, Industry Lobby Gave $23M to GOP & Allied Groups Pushing Cuts’ Extension
Just one expiring Trump-GOP tax cut may have handed the CEOs of America’s six top fossil-fuel companies over $15 million in personal tax savings during its first seven years, according to a new analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF)and Evergreen Action. That’s reason enough for several of those Big Oil bosses to have directed their companies and industry to spend over $23 million supporting Republican candidates for office in the 2024 elections, since making those tax cuts permanent was a central plank of the GOP electoral platform.
“Top oil and gas corporation executives should use their energy trying to figure out how to keep their companies from contributing further to catastrophic climate change–not pushing for a huge personal tax cut,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director. “The corporations they run got a two-fifths reduction in the corporate tax rate locked in eight years ago, but the part of the bill that slashed their personal taxes is up for grabs this year. Big Oil bosses are clearly hoping their companies’ campaign contributions will create a gusher of personal tax savings.”
Among the parts of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that are set to expire at the end of this year are cuts in individual tax rates, including the cut in the top rate from 39.6% to 37%. Since oil executives are so extravagantly paid–the six CEOs in the study collectively received over half a billion dollars in compensation in the seven years following enactment of the Trump law–it is this top rate that principally determines the taxes they pay on their ordinary income. (Taxes on key forms of investment income they may have also received are determined on a different schedule featuring lower rates, which the 2017 law did not affect.)
Source: ATF analysis of corporate proxy data
This tax-rate cut alone could have saved these half dozen energy-company CEOs $15.2 million over the first seven years it has been in effect. The House of Representatives recently voted to extend this lower rate, giving the Big Oil bosses (or their successors) the chance to save the same or even more in taxes over the next seven years.
The rate cut is just one part of a total tax cut package that will add over $5 trillion to the national debt while overwhelmingly benefiting wealthy households and big businesses.
SOURCE: Open Secrets
* Chevron CEO Michael Wirth was also chairman of the API during 2022-23.
**Alone among the six companies in this study, Valero is not an API member.
Republicans are hoping to pay for some of their massive tax giveaway mostly to the wealthy by repealing parts of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA made the single largest investment in clean energy in the nation’s history, paying for it with fairer taxes on the largest corporations and an investment in the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to allow the depleted agency to once again collect unpaid taxes from wealthy tax cheats. The fossil fuel industry criticized the IRA for not doing enough to promote fossil-fuel production. Rolling back the IRA’s efforts to make renewable energy more affordable for consumers will help Big Oil sell more climate-destroying hydrocarbons.
The GOP bill also includes other dirty-energy provisions, both to raise revenue and in apparent gratitude for industry campaign contributions. These include opening more public land to drilling, mining and logging; rolling back leasing reforms; and weakening environmental reviews.
Under the House Republican bill, hundreds of millions of acres of pristine wilderness in Alaska, Minnesota and elsewhere must be made available for resource extraction. It would also cancel reforms begun under the Biden administration to update leasing provisions–including rates, bonding requirements and minimum bids–to end sweetheart deals and get American taxpayers a fair return for the use of public land. Polluters would be able to pay for speeded-up environmental reviews that would render the process essentially meaningless.
METHODOLOGY: Public corporations regularly report the compensation of their top executives, but individual tax-return data is not made public. Actual tax savings from the lowered rates would depend on the taxable income of each taxpayer in each year, which in turn depends on deductions, credits and other adjustments to gross income. Tax savings shown here are the maximum possible.