February, 07 2013, 03:16pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Nicole Tichon, Tax Justice Network USA, nicole@tjn-usa.org, 202-758-9552
Rebecca Wilkins, Citizens for Tax Justice, rwilkins@ctj.org, 202-299-1066 x 32
Dan Smith, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, dsmith@pirg.org, 202-461-3822
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Stop Big Corporations from Shipping Jobs and Profits Overseas
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) introduce Corporate Tax Fairness Act
WASHINGTON
Today, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) introduced a powerful piece of legislation to address the use of overseas tax havens by corporations to avoid paying taxes. The Corporate Tax Fairness Act would end the system that gives corporations tax breaks for shifting operations and profits overseas.
At a press conference with Sen. Sanders earlier today, members of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency coalition, including the AFL-CIO and Citizens for Tax Justice, as well as a Vermont-based small business owner lent their support to the legislation.
The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency coalition also sent a letter to lawmakers today urging them to support the Corporate Tax Fairness Act. An excerpt reads:
Policy solutions such as those in the Corporate Tax Fairness Act would not only raise nearly $600 billion in revenues, but also would level the playing field for domestic businesses, both large and small, and keep jobs right here in the U.S. Additionally, by closing these corporate tax loopholes we send a message around the globe that corporate tax avoidance is unacceptable whether it be in the developing or developed world.
Dan Smith, Tax and Budget Advocate with U.S. PIRG and member of FACT stated, "America's largest companies use accounting gimmicks to make their U.S. profits magically appear on the books of bogus shell companies in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. Everyday taxpayers foot the bill for corporate tax dodging in the form of cuts to public programs, more debt, or higher taxes. This legislation tackles the heart of the problem by ending incentives to shift profits offshore."
It is also clear that there is broad support among American voters for closing offshore tax loopholes to deal with budget problems.
In a December 2012 national poll conducted by the Mellman Group and commissioned by Friends of the Earth U.S., American voters said that they overwhelmingly favor closing offshore tax havens as a way of addressing our national budget problems. Support for this proposal was high across party and ideological lines, as well as gender, race, educational background and region.
Respondents were asked: "To help solve our budget problems, do you favor or oppose closing loopholes that allow corporations to declare profits in foreign countries that have a lower tax rate?" Fully three-quarters of voters favored the proposal with nearly two-thirds favoring it strongly.
Karen Orenstein, international policy analyst at Friends of the Earth U.S. said, "Extreme weather events rooted in climate change -- including flood, drought, fire and superstorms like Sandy -- are destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world, and taking an untold economic toll. Cracking down on corporate tax dodgers would make billions of dollars available for essential public services, including a fair U.S. contribution to help developing countries deal with climate change."
The FACT coalition has made several reports, resources and survey results available that make the case that corporate loopholes are raiding the U.S. Treasury, hurting small businesses and are kept in place by hefty campaign contributions and lobbying.
A copy of the Friends of the Earth poll on offshore tax havens can be found here.
Read the FACT sheet on tax haven abuse by the numbers.
Read Corporate Tax Dodgers -- 2008 - 2010 -- Citizens for Tax Justice.
Read the Small Business Survey Results on Tax Reform -- American Sustainable Business Council, Main Street Alliance and Small Business Majority.
Read Loopholes For Sale -- U.S. PIRG and CTJ Report.
The FACT Coalition includes a broad range of organizations with an interest in seeing tax loopholes closed due to their impact on jobs, critical programs, small businesses, human rights, corruption and national security. The FACT coalition seeks to achieve greater financial accountability and transparency within financial institutions, corporations and government.
Friends of the Earth fights for a more healthy and just world. Together we speak truth to power and expose those who endanger the health of people and the planet for corporate profit. We organize to build long-term political power and campaign to change the rules of our economic and political systems that create injustice and destroy nature.
(202) 783-7400LATEST NEWS
Trump Eyes Social Security Cuts By Slashing Payroll Tax
"He is dusting off the old Republican playbook and bringing back the strategy known informally as 'Starve the Beast,'" said one advocate. "In this case, Social Security is the beast."
Apr 18, 2024
Amid new reporting that former U.S. President Donald Trump's economic advisers are urging him to cut the federal payroll tax, a key revenue source for Social Security and Medicare, advocates on Thursday urged voters to remember that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has long threatened to do just that.
"Don't be fooled," said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, which lobbies to strengthen the social safety net for retired Americans. "At the end of his term in office, Trump delayed Social Security's dedicated revenue paid from workers and their employers. He was quite explicit that, if reelected, he would convert that delay into a permanent cut."
Altman was referring to an executive order Trump signed in August 2020, allowing companies to delay payroll tax payments—an option most companies declined to take as the Treasury Department made clear they would have to pay all of the deferred taxes the following year and that employees would see smaller paychecks as a result of the program.
Trump promised to make the payroll tax cut permanent, and as Reutersreported late Wednesday, the former president is discussing the proposal with economic advisers including Fox News host and former National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and right-wing commentator Stephen Moore.
The former president is weighing cuts to Social Security's revenue stream even as Republicans complain that the popular program is unaffordable and push to raise the retirement age to delay Americans' use of the funds.
The GOP has long claimed Social Security is headed toward insolvency and pushed to privatize the program or cut benefits, but last year's Social Security trustees report found that the program's trust fund currently has a $2.85 trillion surplus and could pay 80% of benefits for the next 75 years even if Congress takes no action to expand it—as long as it continues to be funded through taxes.
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Along with cutting payroll taxes, which are paid by workers and employees and amount to 7.65% of each employee's gross pay in order to fund senior citizens' post-retirement income, Trump has proposed extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the vast majority of which benefited the wealthiest Americans, according to the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Popular Democracy.
Altman noted the contrast between Trump's tax proposals and those of President Joe Biden, who has proposed strengthening Social Security and extending its solvency by requiring people with wealth over $100 million to pay at least 25% in income taxes, raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, and quadrupling the stock buyback tax to disincentive companies lavishing their shareholders with their profits instead of investing in their workforce.
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"The current U.S. Supreme Court has gone rogue."
For example, in Moore v. United States—in which the Supreme Court could preemptively ban or limit wealth taxes—half of all amicus briefs were filed by groups affiliated with right-wing powerbrokers.
In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, groups funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch want to scupper the Chevron deference, a 40-year precedent under which judges defer to the legal interpretations of federal agencies if Congress has not passed any laws on an issue. Powerbroker-affiliated organizations have filed more than one-third of the amicus briefs seeking to overturn the Chevron doctrine.
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According to SupremeTransparency.org:
The current U.S. Supreme Court has gone rogue. The right-wing justices that make up the court's supermajority frequently toy with precedent and the rule of law to issue opinions that not only defy the will of a majority of Americans, but also rewrite constitutional principles, overturn widely respected legal precedents, and gut longstanding rules that protect the public interest.
In just the 2021 and 2022 Supreme Court terms alone, the court overturned Roe v. Wadeafter 49 years; gutted both the decades-old Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act; overturned a 100+ year old gun safety law; eroded the National Labor Relations Act (adopted as part of New Deal reforms to protect workers); broke with their own procedures regarding standing to sue in order to block student debt relief; and reversed decades of precedent to end the decadeslong practice of race-conscious college admissions policies that promoted diversity and redressed discrimination. But this radically reactionary court and its radically reactionary justices aren't acting alone.
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"It's just one of the ways our Supreme Court is deeply, fundamentally broken," Lipton-Lubet added. "And it's a reminder of how urgent and necessary it is that we reform this corrupt court."
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Apr 18, 2024
The climate crisis will shrink the average global income 19% in the next 26 years compared to what it would have been without global heating caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, a study published in Nature Wednesday has found.
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Put in dollar terms, the climate crisis will take a yearly $38 trillion chunk out of the global economy in damages by 2050, the study authors found.
"That seems like… a lot," writer and climate advocate Bill McKibben wrote in response to the findings. "The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year."
This means that the costs of inaction have already exceeded the costs of limiting global heating to 2°C by six times, the study authors said. However, limiting warming to 2°C can still significantly reduce economic losses through 2100.
"This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering noneconomic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity," Wenz said.
The damages predicted by the study were more than twice those of similar analyses because the researchers looked beyond national temperature data to also incorporate the impacts of extreme weather and rainfall on more than 1,600 subnational regions over a 40-year period, The Guardian explained.
"Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected," PIK scientist and first author Maximilian Kotz said in a statement. "These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labor productivity, or infrastructure."
However, Wenz told the paper that the paper's projected reduction was likely a "lower bound" because the study still doesn't include climate impacts such as heatwaves, tropical storms, sea-level rise, and harms to human health.
Unlike previous studies, the research predicted economic losses for most wealthier countries in the Global North, with the U.S. and German economies shrinking by 11% by mid-century, France's by 13%, and the U.K.'s by 7%. However, the countries set to suffer the most are countries closer to the equator that have lower incomes already and have historically done much less to contribute to the climate crisis. Iraq, for example, could see incomes drop by 30%, Botswana 25%, and Brazil 21%.
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Wenz told The Guardian that the results were "devastating."
"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking," Wenz said.
Levermann said the paper presented society with a clear choice:
It is on us to decide: Structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on, will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas, and coal.
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