Why Republicans are pretending to hate corporate America now

The Rubio op-ed, much like what we’ve seen of this nascent Republican pussyfooting with taking on corporate America, was ridiculous. He doesn’t like Amazon’s cultural politics and doesn’t like Jeff Bezos, and so he supports this one bargaining unit’s efforts to organize at this one corporation. That’s not a labor policy, and he shares no thoughts on other pressing federal issues swirling around Amazon, like its negligible tax contributions. If Republicans want to array themselves as the anti-corporate party, it takes more than op-ed potshots complaining about how a hypothetical multinational company bowed to woke leftists by scrapping, say, its ketchup brand’s racist mascot. And there are some policy opportunities afoot for Republicans to demonstrate a more meaningful break from corporate America’s ownership of the party. Unfortunately, those policies would require them to work with Joe Biden. The president, for example, has proposed a broad, multitrillion-dollar infrastructure plan to be paid for by a partial rollback of the corporate tax rate that Republicans instituted in 2017, a doubling of the corporate minimum tax Republicans instituted, and a crackdown on international tax havens. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, meanwhile, is working with allies to create a global minimum corporate tax rate to stop the “race to the bottom” among countries seeking to lure corporations. The Biden administration, separately, is looking to pass a law increasing the federal minimum wage for workers, a change that hasn’t been made in 14 years due to complete Republican opposition. And if Republicans want to show that they’re ready to break the backs of corporate monopolies that are using their leverage to wage culture war, they could support some of Biden’s more adversarial nominees for Senate confirmation.
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