Make sure everyone pays their fair share of taxes
No one becomes a billionaire alone. Every fortune is built on roads we all drive on, the utilities, bandwidth, energy, and natural resources companies consume, and on the backs of the workers who create value. Yet while the wealthy amass fortunes beyond measure, teachers buy classroom supplies from their own paychecks, families struggle to afford rent, and hospitals ration care. This is not the price of prosperity—it is the cost of injustice.
The working class pays taxes on nearly every dollar earned. Meanwhile, billionaires stash fortunes in loopholes, paying less, percentage-wise, than a nurse or firefighter. A just economy must ensure that those who have made the most money contribute the highest percentage of their income in taxes, while those who bring in the least amount of income receive the most significant tax relief.
A society where billionaires hoard while millions struggle is not a democracy—it is a feudal state in disguise. To build the future Americans deserve, we must demand policies that require extremely wealthy individuals and corporations to pay their fair share and provide tax relief for lower-income Americans. A modest tax increase on extreme wealth is essential to closing the federal deficit and securing critical funding for education, healthcare, and infrastructure. These investments in our country’s fiscal health and its people lift everyone, not just the privileged few. To advance these goals, Project 2029 supports:
Rejoining the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Tax Deal, which aims to establish a 15% global minimum corporate tax rate and new rules allowing countries to tax large multinational companies based on where they operate, not just where they are headquartered. These measures are designed to make it harder for corporations to dodge taxes by shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions.
Rescinding the "Defending American Companies and Innovators From Overseas Extortion and Unfair Fines and Penalties" Presidential Memorandum, which undermines ongoing efforts to develop a coordinated global digital tax framework through OECD, by directing U.S. agencies to investigate and potentially retaliate against countries that impose such taxes on American companies.
Directing the Secretary of the Treasury and the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service to reprioritize audit and enforcement resources toward high-wealth individuals. The IRS's own analysis estimates that in recent years, there has been a nearly $700 billion annual gap between legally owed taxes and taxes actually collected, with the top earners accounting for a disproportionate share of noncompliance.
Restoring and directing the full deployment of the Inflation Reduction Act's IRS enforcement funding toward high-wealth compliance operations. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 appropriated approximately $45.6 billion in new funding for IRS operations over ten years, with the funding designated for enforcement activities focused on wealthy households and corporations whose complex financial arrangements have historically received insufficient scrutiny. Subsequent budget clawbacks have significantly reduced this funding to just $3.5 billion spent. A future administration must work to restore these appropriations, ensuring that enforcement resources are concentrated where the tax gap is largest.
Directing the Secretary of the Treasury to finalize and expand rulemaking to address abusive partnership basis-shifting transactions, which allow wealthy investors to manipulate the tax basis of assets transferred between related parties within partnerships to generate artificial tax losses, offsetting legitimate income without any real economic loss. The Treasury initiated rulemaking on this practice in 2024, identifying it as one of the most pervasive and costly forms of high-wealth tax avoidance, with estimates suggesting that closing these arrangements through the Treasury's existing regulatory authority under 26 U.S.C. § 482 and related provisions could raise $50 billion over a decade. A future administration must restore, finalize, and expand this rulemaking to eliminate the principal abusive structures that allow partnership arrangements to be used as vehicles for tax avoidance unavailable to ordinary wage earners.
Directing the Secretary of the Treasury to revive and finalize rulemaking under Section 2704 of the Internal Revenue Code to curtail the use of valuation discounts that allow wealthy households to systematically undervalue assets transferred to heirs through family limited partnerships and similar structures, reducing estate and gift tax liability far below what the assets would fetch in an arm's-length transaction. The Treasury Department proposed regulations addressing these discounts in 2016, and the underlying statutory authority remains intact. The inequity these discounts create, where the estate tax falls heavily on families whose wealth is held in straightforward assets while those with access to sophisticated legal structures pay a fraction of their legal obligation, has only grown more pronounced since then.
Directing the Secretary of the Treasury to finalize and implement regulations governing the 1% excise tax on corporate stock buybacks established by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, closing the avoidance mechanisms that have allowed corporations to restructure buyback programs in ways that reduce their taxable exposure under the statute. Treasury's rulemaking authority over the implementation of this excise tax, grounded in 26 U.S.C. § 4501, determines how broadly the tax applies to funding arrangements, foreign private issuers, and netting provisions that corporations have used to minimize their liability. Finalizing these regulations without changing the statutory rate would bring the tax's actual revenue yield into closer alignment with the Congressional Budget Office's original estimate of $74 billion over ten years, much of which has been forfeited through permissive implementation.
Issuing an Executive Order conditioning eligibility for federal contracts and procurement awards on disclosure of effective tax rates, country-by-country tax reporting, and certification of compliance with federal anti-avoidance standards. The federal government's annual procurement budget of approximately $750 billion represents the single largest source of purchasing power available in the nation, and the conditions attached to that spending are entirely within presidential authority to set. Requiring companies seeking federal contracts to publicly disclose their effective tax rate relative to their statutory obligation, the jurisdictions in which they report profits relative to where they conduct business operations, and whether they utilize financial arrangements that the IRS has formally identified as potentially abusive, will serve as a powerful incentive. While this requirement does not raise revenue directly, conditioning federal contracting eligibility on this level of tax transparency creates strong compliance incentives among the largest recipients of federal procurement dollars. These recipients often fall under the same category of corporations whose complex financial arrangements the IRS has consistently identified as the primary source of the corporate tax gap.
