CAN IT GET UNSTUCK? Pretty big news from the international tax scene on Friday — the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development announced that its new tax policy director would be Manal Corwin, a former top Treasury official. By all accounts, Corwin will have no shortage of challenges in trying to replace Pascal Saint-Amans, the former OECD tax chief known for jetting around the world to try to arrange big international tax deals — and then traveling some more to try to keep them together and implement them. For its part, the business lobby in the U.S. sounded like it thought it was about time for an American to get that post, as our Bjarke Smith-Meyer and Brian Faler noted. But the decision to choose Corwin also raises this question — how much is this about prodding the U.S. toward implementing the global tax deal, something that Republicans in Congress increasingly sound dug in against? Want to receive this newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to POLITICO Pro. You'll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day's biggest stories. MORE ON THIS IN A BIT — but, first, thanks for coming to the "what did you say, Pokemon?" edition of Weekly Tax? But far from the last: Today marks 217 years since James Madison Randolph — the grandson of then-President Thomas Jefferson — became the first child born in the White House. Help this here newsletter deliver. Send your best tips and feedback. Email: bbecker@politico.com, bfaler@politico.com, bguggenheim@politico.com and teckert@politico.com. You can also reach us on Twitter at @berniebecker3, @tobyeckert, @brian_faler, @ben_guggenheim, @POLITICOPro and @Morning_Tax. WE'LL SEE ON OECD: Itai Grinberg, who recently left the Biden administration after playing a key role in crafting the international tax deal, said last week that he believed the U.S. would eventually implement at least the minimum tax portion of that agreement — though probably not within the next couple years. That's in large part because the EU finally decided to move forward with the 15 percent minimum tax on corporate profits — something which gives new avenues for European countries to tax American multinationals, which supporters of the agreement in turn believe will at some point nudge the U.S. toward getting aboard. Corwin has at least sounded open to that theory in the past. But the overall sense of people closely watching the international tax scene from over here is that having Corwin as the OECD's lead tax official won't move the needle on lobbying Republicans about the minimum tax. (The other pillar of the global tax deal seeks to rearrange where companies are taxed, based more on where their sales and business are located.) Looking ahead: It's not clear how much Corwin's potential influence on domestic American politics was a factor in her appointment, though some of the chatter in tax circles suggests it played some role. Either way, there aren't many doubts about how well suited Corwin, who is known for being a master on the technical side of tax policy, is for the job. (At least one tax person noted they can't imagine the Paris-based OECD could have come with a better selection.) But she also doesn't appear to be a miracle worker, and that's what at least some people think it would take to get Republicans on board with the global minimum tax. There's also this issue, too: Corwin served in the Treasury Department under both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. That in and of itself could make it harder for Corwin to convince Republicans about the minimum tax. But on top of that, Corwin also helped on a couple of international tax items that Republicans aren't particularly fond of while in the Obama administration — the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, and a previous OECD initiative, the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting plan, or BEPS. In fact, Republicans lobbed some of the same criticism at BEPS that they're currently tossing toward the international tax deal, including that it gave other countries a path toward collecting more taxes from American companies. THE TCJA BATTLES CONTINUE: Democrats and Republicans will be sparring plenty in the next several years about the individual tax cuts from the GOP's 2017 tax law — which are set to expire in just under three years. But five years later, even the permanent parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are still coming under criticism from Democrats. The latest: GAO released a report on Friday that found a pronounced drop in effective corporate tax rates in 2018, the year after the GOP tax law cut the corporate rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The effective rate for profitable corporations dropped down to just under 9 percent that year, a decrease of 40 percent from 2017. Top Democrats like Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said GAO's findings spoke to how Republicans plan to govern moving forward, too — with Wyden knocking the GOP for trying to roll back the new $80 billion in IRS funding and Sanders accusing them of trying to kneecap Medicare and Social Security to try to get the federal debt under control. "Republicans made it shockingly easy for profitable corporations to wave a magic wand and eliminate their tax liability. That's why Democrats passed a new 15 percent minimum tax in the Inflation Reduction Act," Wyden added. But from Republicans' point of view, the findings might be far less nefarious — a 40 percent drop in effective tax rates, after all, mirrors the 40 percent cut that the GOP made in the statutory corporate rate. Republicans maintained that the corporate tax cut helped spur a strong economy under former President Donald Trump, at least until the appearance of the coronavirus. JUST IN TIME FOR DAVOS: Oxfam released a new report on Monday that found that wealth inequality — which had already been on the rise in recent decades — only grew worse over the last couple years. In fact, the group found that the top 1 percent collected basically twice as much wealth over the last two years as the other 99 percent. And how to deal with that? Oxfam wants governments to hit the very rich with big tax increases on both their ordinary income and capital gains, essentially calling for the top 1 percent to pay 60 percent effective rates on their combined income. At the same time, the group also criticized countries for increasingly relying on value-added taxes, which Oxfam said fall disproportionately on the poor.
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