The number of companies paying no taxes has risen for two main reasons. First, the Trump tax law expanded some corporate tax breaks, such as the one for the purchase of machinery and vehicles. Second, the law reduced the top-line corporate tax rate, which means that some companies now have a low enough tax bill that they can wipe it out entirely with tax breaks.

Altogether, the law led to a 31 percent decline in corporate-tax revenue last year. That decline has helped cause an increase in the deficit. As the law professors Rebecca Kysar and Linda Sugin have written, the Trump tax cut is financed “on the backs of future generations.”

I think some decline in the top-line corporate-tax rate — which was higher than in most other countries — was justified. But the Trump tax cut didn’t go about it in the right way. It cut the rate too steeply and kept, or expanded, too many tax breaks. A better bill would have paired a more gentle decline in the rate with a tougher approach to tax breaks, essentially trying to level the playing field among companies. Even before the law change, American companies weren’t actually paying very much in taxes.

“At a time when the public’s confidence in our elected officials and our institutions is especially low, the specter of big corporations avoiding all income taxes on billions in profits sends a strong and corrosive signal to Americans: that the tax system is stacked against them, in favor of corporations and the wealthiest Americans,” writes Matthew Gardner, the lead author of the Institute on Taxation report.

BuzzFeed response

Ben Smith, the editor of BuzzFeed News, emailed me Friday, taking objection to that day’s newsletter, in which I described one of BuzzFeed’s Trump-Russia stories as dubious. I was referring to BuzzFeed’s January story that claimed Trump “directed” and “personally instructed” Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer, to lie about talks about a Trump Tower in Moscow.