Republican Tiberi has introduced a bill that would allow corporations that have excess Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) credits to use those credits like bonus depreciation--i.e., they can free up the credits to reduce tax dollar for dollar if they are investing in new depreciable property. And they would of course use those credits on whatever investments they were making anyway.
The claim is that freeing up even more money to corporations through reduced taxes will get them to invest even more and thus will create new jobs. But the problem with jobs isn't that corporations don't have cash. They currently are cash-rich and can make all the expansionary investments they want. They aren't investing because they don't have customers. The way to create customers is to get money in the hands of lower class and middle class Americans, not to put more money into the hands of corporations.
The problem with making industrial planning decisions through the tax code is that it is harder to get the evidence needed, and Congress has a tendency to pass these provisions with puffery about what they will accomplish. Maybe the way to fix these endless proposals for tax breaks so corporations "can" create jobs would be to do some empirical investigation to see if corporations that got similar tax breaks before created jobs with them. We do have some evidence from the poor record of job creation in the Bush administration, even though the various tax bills passed included multiple measures, like bonus depreciation , claimed to provide stimulus for job creation. Yet in spite of throwing in all kinds of corporate giveaways in the name of economic stimulus, the Bush administration had a rather pitiful record of job creation throughout (with the disaster of the financial conflagration at the end).
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