Corporate taxes would go back up

Sanders: Corporate taxes would go back up if Democrats retake Senate

By MARTIN MATISHAK

Sen. Bernie Sanders said Sunday that corporate taxes would likely roll back up if Democrats retake control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections.

Congress is poised this week to pass a sweeping tax overhaul that would drop the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. But Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, said that would change under a Democratic majority.

"Absolutely, yes. In my view, absolutely," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"We’re going to take a very hard look at this entire tax bill and make it a tax bill that works for the middle class and working families, not for top 1 percent and large multinational corporations," he said.

Opponents of the bill, Sanders said, "did everything that we could" to stop it.

"Our job is to pay attention to the needs of working families," he said.

Sanders predicted that next year congressional Republicans would propose cutting entitlements — such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare — to pay for the tax overhaul, which some analysts project will add over $1 trillion to the national deficit.

The programs would be subjected to "terrible cuts" in 2018, he said.