Corporate Tax-Dodgers Imperil State Budgets
Among the huge and profitable corporations listed in the Fortune 500, many corporate giants managed to pay no state corporate income tax for at least one year between 2008 and 2010. A new report, “Corporate Tax Dodging in the Fifty States, 2008-2010,” from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) and Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), found that tax avoidance costs states some $42 billion in revenues over the course of the past three years, even as states struggle to meet their basic obligations to citizens.
The report is yet another showing how many massively profitable corporations pay little to no taxes. (ITEP’s and CTJ examined the top corporate tax-dodgers on the federal rolls, which we covered here.)
Looking at the tax records of 265 Fortune 500 corporations, the watchdog groups found 68 companies that managed to score, in the arena of state corporate income tax, at least one tax-free year, as well as another 20 whose tax bill averaged zero or less for the entire three-year period covered by the report. Read the rest of this entry »
U.S. Trade Reps in China Need to Ask: What Will Make America Strong?
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When U.S. trade reps meet with their counterparts in China next week for the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, they should keep in mind this frightening fact: Last year, the biggest single U.S. export to China was $7.6 billion of paper and scrap metal, while China’s number one export to the United States was $46 billion of computer equipment.
In short, says Economic Strategy Institute founder Clyde Prestowitz, the entire wealth-producing basis of the U.S. economy has been eroding over the past 30 years, and unless this nation develops an industrial policy soon, the days of family-supporting U.S. jobs are gone.
Prestowitz, who served as principal trade negotiator for the Reagan administration, gave a timely presentation here at the AFL-CIO this week on his new book, “The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America’s Decline and How We Must Combat in the Post-Dollar Era.”
He pointed to China’s currency manipulation as a big factor in the trade imbalance between the two countries ($227 billion in 2009), with China suppressing the value of the yuan in relation to the dollar, a practice that decreases the price of China’s exports and increases the cost of American goods imported into China. (The Alliance for American Manufacturing makes it easy to send a message to President Obama and Congress and urge them to stop China’s currency manipulation. Click here.)
Buy America Will Create U.S. Jobs. We Need Lots of Jobs
The Buy America provision in the economic recovery package Congress now is finalizing has some rich and powerful voices against it.
AT&T, Dow Chemical, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, the Computer and Communications Industry Association and the Consumer Electronics Association sent a letter last week to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saying the provision “will harm American workers and companies across the entire U.S. economy, undermine U.S. global engagement, and result in mirror-image trade restrictions abroad that would put at risk huge amounts of American exports.”
Wrong. Such cries of protectionism are red herrings for the corporate search for the lowest-wage labor possible—at the expense of America’s workers and the U.S. economy.
