GOP senators oppose corporate tax hike as a 'red line' and float taxes on drivers to pay for infrastructure

• Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said Republicans were strongly opposed to corporate tax hike.
• "I think that's a non-negotiable red line," she said, and other top Republicans around her agreed.
• Republicans are drafting an infrastructure plan that may be mostly financed with taxes on drivers.

Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said that GOP senators won't budge from their resistance to hiking corporate taxes, a key element in President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan.

"I think that's a non-negotiable red line," Capito told reporters on Thursday of her party's opposition to increasing corporate taxation.

-JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) April 15, 2021

Other Republican senators at the news conference said they agreed with Capito. The group also included Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming, Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Deb Fischer of Nebraska, and John Cornyn of Texas.

Democrats assailed the Republican comments. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, called the red line a "completely unreasonable" position.

"Republicans' insistence that the most profitable companies in the world shouldn't contribute a single penny to investments in roads, schools and our clean-energy future is simply not acceptable," Wyden said in a statement.

A faction of Senate Republicans in recent days appeared to be prepping a $600 billion to $800 billion infrastructure counterproposal to Biden's $2.3 trillion package. Several lawmakers suggested financing the plan with a vehicle mileage tax on electric vehicles or raising the gas tax.

"I think we still haven't defined what we mean by infrastructure and what's going to be included and so how much it's going to be, we don't really have an idea," Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told reporters on Thursday. "It's a very early process that we've engaged in."

Still, other Democrats described the $800 billion indicated by Capito as too meager to address the country's infrastructure needs. "We're going to do whatever it takes. If it takes $4 trillion, I'd do $4 trillion but we have to pay for it," Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia told reporters on Thursday.

A JPMorgan economic research note on Thursday found that, although the corporate tax rate was higher than the global average before former President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cut, the US had a lower ratio of corporate tax revenues to GDP dating back to 2000.