Washington is a strange city. You’re confronted with billboards for things normal humans can’t buy, like fighter jets. Small groups of lobbyists cluster in corners of office buildings and swap inside information in hushed tones. And there are the invites. Loads upon loads of invites to seminars and open-bar events and celebrations, all for obscure reasons. Washington trades on these invites. While at a glance they can seem confusing or meaningless, they typically have an ulterior motive. You can build a story around the real and sometimes insidious reasons for the gathering. The Prospect gets a lot of these emails, and each week, we’re going to share one of them with you, and take you inside what might be going on behind the scenes.
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Yes, this already happened, but it’s so perfectly This Town that we couldn’t resist. Tax Prom is put on by a center-right non-profit think tank called the Tax Foundation, assembled in the New Deal era as a repository for tax panic by corporations and the wealthy. The heads of General Motors, Standard Oil, and Johns-Manvillle inaugurated the Tax Foundation, and its Tax Prom fundraising event has been held continuously since 1937.
Today, Tax Prom features an almost absurd level of commiseration between business and government. According to statistics at the Tax Prom website, last year’s version of the event brought together 187 congressional staffers, seven members of Congress, 456 tax policy professionals from the private sector, and 58 corporate sponsors.
This year’s version went off last Thursday at the National Building Museum near the Capitol. Tickets went for up to $2,500 for “premium seating with senior Hill staffers.” Sponsors paid up to $30,000 for a table. And the list of sponsors comprises a who’s-who of the Washington influence game.
It included (deep breath): lead sponsors the Business Roundtable, H&R Block, and Intuit (makers of TurboTax, which has worked tirelessly to prevent Congress from making tax preparation easier and cheaper); corporate giants Abbott Labs, AbbVie, Amgen, AT&T, Boeing, The Carlyle Group, Coca-Cola, Emerson, PepsiCo, Aflac, Allergan, Altria, Caterpillar, FedEx, Horizon Therapeutics, HP, InterDigital, Iron Mountain Inc., Linde, Lockheed Martin, Lyft, Mass Mutual, Microsoft, New York Life, Pfizer, T-Mobile, and United Technologies; Big Four accounting firms Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, and KPMG; law/lobby shops Akin Gump, BakerHostetler, Baker McKenzie, Brownstein Hyatt, Capitol Counsel, DCI Group, Federal Policy Group, Glover Park Group, K&L Gates, McDermott Will & Emery, Miller & Chevalier, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, and Squire Patton Boggs; and trade groups the American Bankers Association, the American Wind Energy Association, the Distilled Spirits Council, Nareit (a lobbyist for real estate investment trusts), and the Wine Institute.
Oh, and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget was there too, because there’s nothing more responsible, from a budget standpoint, than a “prom” that puts special interests in close proximity to tax policymakers. The Tax Foundation even bills the event as “the one night a year that brings together every major tax policy decision-maker in the country.”
On its surface, it was a perfectly pleasant event for those in the D.C. tax world. Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, took home a Distinguished Service Award. But the whole event, with its focus on VIP seating and closeness to power, smacks of the worst kind of Washington glad-handing and mind-sharing. The policymakers and those who benefit from their decisions break bread together, toast cocktails together, and share the same friendly perspectives and experiences. If you’re at this event, you’re on the inside, and your voice matters.
So if you wonder why tax policy always drifts in the same direction, why the same loopholes always crop up, why the same businesses always manage to find a way to keep their tax bill low, and why the same inequities in the tax code always remain, well, I’d argue part of the reason is Tax Prom.
Do you have a ridiculous D.C. invite you want to share? Email us at DCinvites@prospect.org
