Tax avoidance schemes that enrich the rich, Krugman's prescience
While Republicans maneuver to slash social programs, they ignore the tax avoidance schemes that keep the rich rich.
- “America’s largest global corporations are holding $1.5 trillion dollars in profits overseas in order to avoid US taxes.” (source)
- After Taking A $10 Billion Bailout, Goldman Sachs Announces It Will Outsource 1,000 Jobs To Singapore.
- America’s largest global corporations are holding $1.5 trillion dollars in profits overseas in order to avoid US taxes. (source)
- Goldman Sachs, which received a $10 billion taxpayer bailout, managed to get their effective tax rate down to one percent. (source)
- GE paid no US taxes on worldwide income of $14.2 billion. (source)
- The IRS estimates that individuals and corporations currently hold $5 trillion in tax haven countries. (source)
- “Apple has $12 billion waiting offshore, Google has $17 billion and Microsoft, $29 billion,†according to the New York Times.
- One year loss in unpaid payroll taxes from businesses: $58,000,000,000 (source)
- Annual cost in oil & gas subsidies: $2,754,000,000 source)
- Companies Push for Tax Break on Foreign Cash,Apple, Google, Microsoft Sitting on 58 Billion in Overseas Profits, Blackmailing Us to Avoid Taxes, and U.S. Business Has High Tax Rates but Pays Less.
To get an idea of the mentality of the current Republican party, listen to Terri Gross’s 2003 interview with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. Norquist compares the estate tax to the Holocaust (targeting the few), calls government ‘tyrannical’ and says Social Security is a ‘ponzi scheme.’ Norquist lauds anti-government campaigners, saying their work “harkens back to armed resistance to the central government” from the Revolutionary War.
Gross had recently interviewed Paul Krugman, who presciently predicted the Bush tax cuts would “send us into a spiral of fiscal collapse. Krugman said that behind the Bush economic policies was a plan to deprive the government of revenue so that it’s forced to dismantle most of the federal system that’s been built up since the 1930s.”
The conservative plan to drown the government in a sea of red ink, corruption, privatization, and mismanagement is coming to fruition, both nationally and in the states.