News
Corporations and their lobbyists are pressuring Congress to reinstate Bush's tax holiday for corporations to bring home offshore profits at a lowered 5.25 percent tax rate.
Apple would like to shake $12 billion from their offshore tree. Microsoft's offshore accounts compute to around $29 billion, and ask Google if they want to retrieve their $17 billion out there in cyberspace.
Money is power, so it just might happen again as it did in 2005 when President Bush and Congress appeased corporations with a tax holiday at a one-year 5.25 percent tax rate.
Companies with huge assets offshore were offered the opportunity to return $312 billion back to the United States at a much lower tax rate and stimulate the job market.
However, the majority of the money that returned into this country, a whopping 92 percent, was returned back to stockholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Hiring and job creation remained flat.
The truth is that the companies pushing the hardest for the next tax break are the ones sitting on billions in cash right here in the United States that they could readily use to hire, if they so chose.
According to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, between 1980 and 2011 the American economy has doubled in size, but where has all that money gone?
Almost all the gains have gone to the super rich.
1. The top 1 percent who used to take home 10 percent of the wealth, now take home more than 20 percent. The super rich now hold 40 percent of the nation's wealth.
2. The super rich have had the political power to lower their tax rates from 70 percent to less than 35 percent.
But because much of their income is capital gains, they are taxed at only 15 percent. According to the Internal Revenue Service, the richest 400 Americans pay only a 17 percent income tax rate.
3. Wages have barely increased with adjustments for inflation.
4. Revenues are down to less than 15 percent resulting in huge budget deficits.
“This is about creating jobs,” Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas said when reintroducing the Tax Holiday bill this spring.
Jobs. The word that was dangled like a canister of oxygen before a gasping population of unemployed in order to pass the extension of tax credits for the 2 percent of the wealthiest Americans who live up where the air is rarefied.
It was supposed to create jobs and resuscitate the economy. We're still wheezing out here.
Because statistics prove that as long as stockholders, executives and politicians continue to grow record profits and accumulate wealth in the exclusive dynamic of the last 30 years, there will be little effect on jobs, the working middle class, or the economy.
The Tax Holiday is just one more corporate conciliation, one that rewards companies, once again, for moving jobs and investments overseas.
Take a deep breath and contact Tom McClintock.
Apple would like to shake $12 billion from their offshore tree. Microsoft's offshore accounts compute to around $29 billion, and ask Google if they want to retrieve their $17 billion out there in cyberspace.
Money is power, so it just might happen again as it did in 2005 when President Bush and Congress appeased corporations with a tax holiday at a one-year 5.25 percent tax rate.
Companies with huge assets offshore were offered the opportunity to return $312 billion back to the United States at a much lower tax rate and stimulate the job market.
However, the majority of the money that returned into this country, a whopping 92 percent, was returned back to stockholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Hiring and job creation remained flat.
The truth is that the companies pushing the hardest for the next tax break are the ones sitting on billions in cash right here in the United States that they could readily use to hire, if they so chose.
According to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, between 1980 and 2011 the American economy has doubled in size, but where has all that money gone?
Almost all the gains have gone to the super rich.
1. The top 1 percent who used to take home 10 percent of the wealth, now take home more than 20 percent. The super rich now hold 40 percent of the nation's wealth.
2. The super rich have had the political power to lower their tax rates from 70 percent to less than 35 percent.
But because much of their income is capital gains, they are taxed at only 15 percent. According to the Internal Revenue Service, the richest 400 Americans pay only a 17 percent income tax rate.
3. Wages have barely increased with adjustments for inflation.
4. Revenues are down to less than 15 percent resulting in huge budget deficits.
“This is about creating jobs,” Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas said when reintroducing the Tax Holiday bill this spring.
Jobs. The word that was dangled like a canister of oxygen before a gasping population of unemployed in order to pass the extension of tax credits for the 2 percent of the wealthiest Americans who live up where the air is rarefied.
It was supposed to create jobs and resuscitate the economy. We're still wheezing out here.
Because statistics prove that as long as stockholders, executives and politicians continue to grow record profits and accumulate wealth in the exclusive dynamic of the last 30 years, there will be little effect on jobs, the working middle class, or the economy.
The Tax Holiday is just one more corporate conciliation, one that rewards companies, once again, for moving jobs and investments overseas.
Take a deep breath and contact Tom McClintock.
