PRIORITIES • Fight Corruption • Policy to

Make Corporations Pay Their Fair Share

Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.

Some of the biggest companies in America spend more on lobbyists to avoid taxes than they would ever pay in taxes. The nurse who hands you your medication pays more in federal income tax than the company that made it. That’s cheating.

Here’s how the scam works. The largest drug companies, insurers, and tech giants fund the same handful of politicians who sit on the committees that write our tax laws. Those politicians carve out the loopholes. Then the companies license their patents to a subsidiary in Ireland, book their profits offshore, sell the product right back to us, and tell the IRS they barely made a dime, while you pay every cent you owe, on time. Pfizer pulled in tens of billions in U.S. sales and posted a negative federal tax rate in 2023. It got money back. And it isn’t just the drugmakers: Amazon paid zero in federal income tax as recently as 2018, some years getting money back. Big Tech and the big insurers run the same playbook: book the profit somewhere else, send the bill to you. The code didn’t glitch. It’s what they paid for.

It isn’t fair, and it isn’t complicated. A corporation has more money and more power than any person alive, and instead of paying its share, it spends a sliver of that money buying the politicians who let it off the hook. You can’t do that. The plumber, the teacher, the small business down the street can’t do that. They pay full freight and play by the rules. The deal is simple: you get the roads, the courts, the protection of the most powerful government on earth, and in return you pay your fair share. These companies get all of that — often more than the rest of us. They just don’t want to pay for it.

I’m not out to give America the highest taxes in the world, and I’m not anti-business — I’ve built businesses and created jobs. A fair corporate tax is actually pro-growth. When a company can pour every last dollar into stock buybacks and executive bonuses tax-free, that’s exactly what it does. Tax those payouts fairly, and suddenly the smart move is to reinvest — in research, in new products, in higher wages, in growing the company. I’m pro-growth. I’m just not pro-paying-a-CEO-a-billion-dollars while wages stay flat. There’s a difference, and our tax code should know it.

Here’s what I’ll do — and why

Go after the corporate tax cheats — and close the zero-tax loopholes. The offshore shell game is the whole trick: park your patents in Ireland, book your profits there, sell back home, and claim you lost money. I’d shut those loopholes, restore real IRS enforcement to claw back the fraud and unpaid billions the biggest filers get away with, and make the companies that earn their money here pay their taxes here.

Restore a fair corporate rate — the same deal the rest of us live by. The same rule every worker and small business already follows: if you make your money in America, you pay your share. Done right, it rewards the companies that reinvest and grow over the ones that just extract and buy back stock.

Put that money to work for you — with no new debt. This is the engine that pays for everything else on my platform. What these corporations finally owe funds a real tax cut for working families, lets the government use its buying power to drive down drug prices, funds critical healthcare expansion, and helps first-time buyers get into a home. Their fair share becomes your lower costs.

Cut the cord between the tax writers and the lobbyists. The companies dodging taxes are the same ones funding the politicians who write the tax code — and too often those politicians leave office and cash in as lobbyists for the industries they shielded. As I lay out in Get Money Out of Politics and Term Limits & Real Accountability, I’d shut that revolving door and bar officials from cashing in on the industries they once regulated. Here it comes down to one thing: get the corporate money out of the committees that decide what everyone else pays.

What this means for Our District

You don’t have to look far to see the machine at work. Our own congressman sits on the Ways and Means Committee — the very committee that writes the nation’s tax laws — and Big Pharma has paid him accordingly. He’s taken $30,000 from Pfizer, a company that posted a negative federal tax rate in 2023 — the Treasury effectively paid Pfizer. Add up just the seven biggest drugmakers and they’ve given him about $181,500 over his career, while their combined federal income tax for 2023 and 2024 came to zero. The average California family, meanwhile, pays around $20,000 in federal taxes every year. And even now, with a tax fight in front of us, he’s still cashing checks from Amazon’s and Google’s PACs. He’s not the exception — nearly the whole committee runs on this money. When the people writing the tax code are paid by the people dodging the taxes, this is exactly what you get.

The bottom line

This is about fairness, plain and simple. Government is supposed to serve you, not Big Pharma, the insurance industry, and Big Tech. Make the biggest companies finally pay what they owe, and everything opens up: real tax relief for working families, lower costs, and the schools, roads, and healthcare our kids deserve — without adding a dime to the debt. This is the America I believe in — where hard work pays off, everyone plays by the same rules, and the next generation inherits more than we did. That’s the future I’m fighting for, and together, it’s ours to build.

All Policies
Next Policy
Return to Top

SOURCES

Join the Fight
Contribute