First person | MBA candidate, spring 2026

I am finishing my second year at a great business school. I have spent twenty-four months learning capital allocation, IRR, net present value, and the art and science of opportunity cost analysis — the discipline of asking not just what a decision produces, but what it forecloses.

I want to apply that framework to something my professors have not assigned. And probably won’t. And that’s unfortunate. The things we are missing because special interests have invaded learning is incalculable. Honesty, market forces and pure thinking are apparently also for sale. 

Here’s a great example. 

As a result of the tax policies approved by President Trump and the Republican Congress, all but the richest Americans are paying higher taxes on average in 2026 than they did last year.  At the same time, the corporations whose lobbyists helped write those policies are paying less. Sometimes nothing.

Case study 1 of many. Yum! Brands — the parent company of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut — reported $1 billion in pretax U.S. profits last year and paid zero federal income taxes on those profits. 

Zero. On a billion dollars. In the United States of America. In 2026.

This is not illegal, is the first thing my tax law professor would say. She is correct. It is the product of decades of deliberate legislative architecture — GILTI rates, FDII deductions, check-the-box accounting rules that allow a corporation to tell different stories to different governments until the profit effectively belongs to no jurisdiction and is taxed by none.

The Big Beautiful Tax Bill currently moving through the House would cancel 94% of the planned increases to offshore profit tax rates — locking in exceptionally low rates permanently at a cost of approximately $164 billion over the next decade. 

$164 billion. Over ten years. Permanently. To a class of actors who have already demonstrated they will deploy that capital into share buybacks, executive compensation, and the lobbying infrastructure required to pass the next round of cuts.

Now let discuss the opportunity cost analysis my professors also taught me.

$164 billion over ten years is $16.4 billion annually. Here is what $16.4 billion annually purchases in 2026 dollars, drawn from peer-reviewed budget estimates and multilateral institutional projections.

It ends child hunger in America. The USDA estimates that eliminating food insecurity for every child in the United States costs approximately $18 billion annually. The offshore tax giveaway in this single bill gets you 91 cents of every dollar required to feed every hungry American child. Every year. Permanently. 

The choice being made here is not between corporate competitiveness and some abstract public good. It is between the Taco Bell offshore structure and whether a seven-year-old in Appalachian Ohio eats breakfast before school.

It closes the Alzheimer’s research gap. The NIH funding shortfall for Alzheimer’s research — the disease that will affect one in three Americans over 65 and for which we have no meaningful treatment — sits at approximately $3.5 billion annually. The offshore giveaway covers that gap four times over. Four complete Alzheimer’s research programs, fully funded, from the tax revenue of one legislative provision.

It can finance the malaria eradication endgame. The funding required to push malaria — a disease that kills a child every two minutes, that has killed more human beings than any other cause in recorded history — to zero is approximately $10 billion over a decade. One billion a year. The offshore rate cuts cost sixteen times that. We could eradicate the leading cause of childhood death in human history and still havebillions left from this single provision.

Let’s be clear about what we are advocating.

I am not arguing that corporations should not operate efficiently or that tax planning is inherently corrupt. I took the same corporate finance courses everyone in this building took. I understand the fiduciary logic.

What I am arguing is that the opportunity cost of this specific legislative choice — in this specific moment, with this specific bill, in this specific country — is not an abstraction. It is 13 million children going to school hungry. It is an Alzheimer’s patient whose family will spend their life savings on a disease we could have cured. It is a child in sub-Saharan Africa dying of a parasite that $1 billion a year would eliminate.

This administration has at the same time cut the IRS enforcement workforce by 25%.  Which means the offshore structures that were already difficult to audit are now effectively unauditable. The architecture of avoidance and the architecture of non-enforcement are being built simultaneously, by the same legislative session, in the same bill.

Countries that once looked to the United States for direction on global tax policy have concluded they need to form alliances without us. The global minimum tax framework — negotiated painstakingly by 136 countries — is proceeding without American participation.  We are voluntarily removing ourselves from the one mechanism capable of ending the race to zero.

The business school case study question is usually: given these facts, what decision maximizes long-term value?

The answer, in every framework I have been taught, is not this one.

What I mean is we are choosing between a permanent $164 billion subsidy to offshore accounting structures and the literal eradication of the most solvable crises in human history.

That is the opportunity cost.

I am finishing my MBA in three weeks. I have been taught to follow the capital.

I am watching where it is going.

And I am deciding, right now, what I want to do with what I know.