There is a very old joke about a man who was looking for his car keys under a streetlight after having dropped them across the street, near his car. When asked why he was looking across the street instead of where he had dropped the keys, he explained, “Because the light is better here.”
Our Congress Critters are using the same logic.
It’s time to do taxes, right?
As we prepare our returns we should give some collective anger to those who don’t pay.
While Congress debates cutting essential programs that affect our future, let’s look at why we have a deficit and a debt problem. It’s simple, actually. We need to reverse huge tax cuts for the wealthy and deadbeat corporations. The rapid increase in the national debt started when we began allowing large corporations and individuals to contribute less than their share.
Our tax code is full of loopholes created and exploited by big corporations and the wealthy who don’t pay their fair share. They spend the millions that they don’t pay in taxes to control our government with misleading commercials, political donations, and an army of lobbyists.
We know Republicans Have an Infinite Supply of Crazy Ideas to Distract the Public from Dealing with the Country’s Pressing Issues.
Guns in churches, schools and bars. Immigrants expelled to solve financial problems. When are we going to get wise to their tactics?
All we need to do is Tax the Wealthy and Deadbeat Corporations to Close Budget Gaps. If corporations and households with $1 million income paid at the same levels they did in 1961, the Treasury would collect an additional $716 billion a year.
See How Big Business Gets a Free Ride by Lobbying to Raise Your Taxes and take the message seriously,
“Politicians never actually cut spending, so every time corporate America lobbies for another tax break, they’re effectively raising taxes on the rest of us.”
Well, consider this: in the 1940s, corporations paid 43 percent of all the federal income taxes collected in this country. In the 1950s, they picked up the tab for 39 percent. But by the time the 1990s rolled around, corporations were paying just 18.9 percent of federal income taxes, and they forked over the same figure in the first decade of this century. We – working people – paid the difference.
That’s because the share of our economy represented by government spending has varied by only a small margin since the 1950s, regardless of which party held Congress or the White House. With a pretty consistent picture on the spending side, every time corporate America lobbies for another tax break or loophole for the benefit of their shareholders, they are effectively raising taxes on American households – on the 90-plus percent of the population who get most of their income from wages rather than investments.
The whines and cries you hear from the right wing that is constantly broadcast by our media saying that “American companies face some of the highest taxes in the world” is a Big Fat Lie. It’s not what the rate is that counts, it’s what you pay! What US companies actually pay in taxes is among the lowest figures in the developed world.
the U.S. ranked 28th out of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (which includes most of the world’s leading economies) in terms of the share of the economy corporations pay in income taxes. At 1.8 percent, our government actually collects around half of the OECD average (PDF).
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Now ask yourself how many times you’ve encountered some talking head on a cable news show blathering on about how we need to cut taxes on corporations or they’ll move jobs overseas. And then consider this: between 1999 and 2008, while corporations paid about half of the OECD average on their profits, U.S.-based multinationals jettisoned a net total of 1.9 million workers here at home while creating 2.3 million net jobs overseas.
Mark Engler laments in I Just Paid More Taxes Than Most of Corporate America
A 2008 study by the Government Accountability Office showed that the majority of U.S. corporations did not pay federal income taxes in the period between 1998 and 2005.
I’m not aware of a more recent study, so I can’t confirm that this is true for 2010. But there’s no reason to think the trend has changed. If anything, corporations are getting ever more skilled at using offshore shelters and other tax dodges to avoid their obligations. For 2010, Senator Bernie Sanders put out a list of the top tax corporate tax cheats, and Joshua Holland has compiled a similar list over at Alternet.
This corporate tax avoidance should be at the fore of budget debates. Then again, as has been often noted, the Republican budgets being aggressively pursued at both the state and federal level really have little to do with balancing the books. Instead, they represent a clear strategy of upward redistribution.
And it’s not just the corporations that don’t pay. Its the highest earners that avoid paying through loopholes as well. Les Leopold makes some excellent points in Hedge Fund Gamblers Earn the Same In One Hour As a Middle-Class Household Makes In Over 47 Years
We live in a very, very rich country. Yet we seem to be utterly consumed by a collective hysteria that we’re about to go broke. Historians are certain to look back at this period and wonder why the richest country in history consumed itself in a struggle over how many teachers to fire.
Just take a look at the latest reports on what the top hedge fund managers haul in. In 2010 John Paulson led the list with a record $4.9 billion in personal earnings. That’s a whopping $2.4 million an HOUR. Here’s a factoid to make you wretch: It would take the median US household over 47 years to earn as much as Paulson pocketed in just 60 minutes. And, every hedge fund manager pays a lower tax rate than the average family.
The top 25 hedge fund earners took in $22.07 billion in 2010. Thanks to a generous tax loophole these billionaires will pay a top tax rate of 15 percent instead of 35 percent. Closing that loophole on just those 25 individuals – just 25 guys who wouldn’t miss a penny of it — would raise $4.4 billion, which is enough to rehire 126,000 laid-off teachers.
Leopold goes on to suggest a “financial speculation tax” (also known as the Robin Hood tax) proposed by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and points out that similar ideas are being enacted across the pond (On March 8, a coalition of progressives succeeded in getting the European Parliament to endorse this Robin Hood tax by a vote of 529 to 127) while in the USA the billionaire bankers are fighting hard to keep it off the agenda.
By taxing financial speculation in real time, we reclaim some of the ungodly accumulation of speculative wealth in the financial sector. Everyone knows that the financial sector has grown too large for the good of our nation. Everyone knows that its size allows it to play fast and lose with our implicit guarantee of its bets. (Correction: everyone knows but Tim Geithner, who actually believes the financial sector should get even larger so it can provide more speculative services to emerging markets all over the world.) The financial speculation tax is the perfect way to put that money back to work for the common good.
Don’t fall for the malarkey the corporatist lackeys and billionaires are are pushing and the media is repeating. Tax cuts for the rich is exactly what created the problems we are having. It’s not the teachers, government employees and the unions as they would like you to believe.
It’s time for the deadbeats to pay up.
Turning Texas Blue 
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