Browse by Media Hit and Tax Reform

"By moving their small cars to Mexico, which has skilled but cheaper labor, Ford hopes to break even or make a little profit off of them” said Merrill Matthews.

"No one has any idea what the Trump campaign's positions are on communications policy," Giovanetti told us. "There's no evidence at this point that there is anything approaching a policy process on the Trump campaign -- which is part of why I thought the platform was more important in this peculiar year."

"We salute the Congressional Republicans who have legislatively impeded [Obama's] plans to turn over the Information Freedom Highway to regulators and tyrants," the platform said. It included language similar to what IPI recommended last week: "We will consistently support internet policies that allow people and private enterprise to thrive, without providing new and expanded government powers to tax and regulate so that the internet does not become the vehicle for a dramatic expansion of government power."

Institute for Policy Innovation President Tom Giovanetti tweeted that the 2016 draft GOP platform's language on "protecting Internet from taxation and regulation is INADEQUATE" and proposed language that IPI would prefer.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s trade policy speech this week was misleading on the actual state of U.S. trade, a scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation said in a Rare op-ed published on Friday.

Congress has voted to permanently bar state and local governments from taxing access to the Internet. For 17 years, the ban on Internet taxes has benefited millions of Americans by empowering them to conduct transactions on the Internet free from the fear of additional tax burdens. "This is a tremendous victory for America's Internet economy, and for all of us who participate in this economy", said Institute for Policy Innovation president Tom Giovanetti.

Passage of PITFA as part of HR-644 now "intensifies" S-698 opponents' push to "stave off the attempt" to pass that bill, said IPI president Tom Giovanetti in a statement. S-698 "has never had committee scrutiny on the Senate side and [has] never been subject to amendment on the floor." Senate Republican leaders "must commit to first submitting this legislation to the same procedures, hearings and scrutiny appropriate to any and all legislation, especially since this proposal has serious Constitutional questions," Giovanetti said.

Fans of the just-passed permanent Internet Tax Fairness Act (PITFA), which bans taxes on Internet servcie, were weighing in Thursday (Feb. 11), including warning about the Internet sale tax legislation whose future consideration was a tradeoff for that passage.

Tom Giovanetti, president of the freedom-oriented IPI, recently wrote “Now that Texas Republican Kevin Brady chairs the Ways & Means Committee, he will have more to say about the details of any eventual tax reform than will the future president. So what really matters is Brady’s priorities…and they are encouraging”.

Bartlett Cleland of the Institute for Policy Innovation writes: The VAT is attractive to those who…[w]ant to grow government… Whether or not those proposing such taxes are interested in expanding the scope of government is almost irrelevant, because once the tools for such expansion are in place they can be used by future politicians to grow government subtly.  Similarly, whether a tax is labeled as a VAT or not is also irrelevant if the function is the same—for example by not allowing companies to deduct wages.