Two stories in flagship newspapers. Same topics, same day. Very different conclusions. In alphabetical order by author’s last name:
Jesse Drucker, How the Trump Administration Is Giving Even More Tax Breaks to the Wealthy, N.Y. Times (Nov. 8, 2025) (quoting Kyle Pomerleau, Daniel Hemel, Kimberly Clausing, and Monte Jackel):
The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, through a series of new notices and proposed regulations, are giving breaks to giant private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors, insurance providers and a variety of multinational corporations.
The primary target: The administration is rapidly gutting a 2022 law [the new corporate alternative minimum tax, or CAMT] intended to ensure that a sliver of the country’s most profitable corporations pay at least some federal income tax. . . .
With its various tax relief provisions, the administration is now effectively adding hundreds of billions of dollars in new breaks for big businesses and investors. The Treasury is empowered to write rules to help the I.R.S. carry out tax laws passed by Congress. But the aggressive actions of the Trump administration raise questions about whether it is exceeding its legal authority.
Richard Rubin, Trump’s Tax Cuts Are Exposing Companies to Biden’s Tax Hike, Wall St. J. (Nov. 8, 2025):
Large companies are running into a problem as they try to claim some of the tax cuts that the Republican Congress passed this summer: They can’t escape the corporate tax increase that Democrats passed three years ago. . . .
[The OBBB Act] included tax cuts that companies have been cheering—but those changes exacerbate the CAMT challenge. Notably, the law lets big companies accelerate deductions for research expenses into 2025 and 2026. It also expands a tax deduction for exporters that is often used by technology and aerospace companies . . . . For some companies, those changes are driving their regular taxes down so far that they are pushed into CAMT. As a result, they can’t get all the benefits they would otherwise claim.
This is exactly what CAMT was designed to do, the tax’s defenders say.
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