Lobbying for Tax Breaks: Congressional Consideration of Miscellaneous Tax Bills

• In Event: Lobbyists and Lobbying, Strategies and Goals

Abstract

For decades, the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees have granted individual corporations waivers that temporarily exempt specific chemical compounds from import duties. The corporations significantly benefit from these “miscellaneous tariff bills,” (MTBs) and simultaneously most also lobby the members of these committees. As such, studying these bills, which have long flied under the radar of both the lobbying and Congress literatures, offers an opportunity to search for lobbying effects. In this first report based on data we compiled from forms submitted by Members of Congress to the U.S. International Trade Commission, combined with lobbying disclosure reports, industry classifications coded by the Center for Responsive Politics, and other sources, we examine the who, how, and how much surrounding the process of requesting and securing miscellaneous tax breaks by U.S. corporations. We examine, among other questions, which members sponsor these bills (including as a function of corporate fundraising and donations activity), which bills get the farthest, how much opposition the bills encounter and how much do they cost the federal treasury. We also explain the origin and development of MTB legislation, and develop a theory explaining why In 2016, Congress shifted the burden of considering MTBs from Congress to a bureaucratic agency, the International Trade Commission. We draw both micro-level conclusions about the relationship between business and legislators on low-salience legislation and macro-level conclusions about the power and incentives facing different branches of government.

Authors

• Jeffrey Lazarus, Georgia State University

• Amy Melissa McKay, University of Exeter