Fake infrastructure
Econ4’s Jerry Epstein writes on Trump’s infrastructure “plan”:
Infrastructure investment: it’s that economic policy sweet spot that everyone loves to love.
Fixing bridges, building roads, modernizing airports, improving mass transportation, keeping lead out of our water: nearly everyone can relate to the need for it and can imagine how much better their lives would be with more of it.
Read his post here.
Offshore shell games
A new report details how companies duck paying their taxes – and free-ride on those of us who do:
Fortune 500 companies are holding nearly $2.5 trillion in accumulated profits offshore for tax purposes.
Read the report here.
Labor Day – or Assets Day?
Econ4’s Doug Smith writes for Naked Capitalism on the hypocrisy of celebrating Labor Day while screwing workers:
You, my friends, are truly champion asset creators! Your long-suffering self-denial of working for crap wages contributes to massive corporate profits that executives tap to buy-back company stock in order to keep those asset values high. Your low-to-no wages give you as consumers the God-given freedom to borrow and, thereby, fund securitized assets. And, when those asset values get threatened, your taxes come to the rescue through bailouts and mumbo jumbo (“quantitative easing”).
Read his piece here.
True cost of fossil fuels
A new IMF working paper estimates world spending on fossil fuel subsidies:
Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.
Read more here.
Redefining the problem: the corporate predator state
Katrina van den Heuvel writes in The Washington Post:
True conservatives are — or should be — offended by corporate welfare as well. Conservative economists Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales argue that it is time to “save capitalism from the capitalists,” urging conservatives to support strong measures to break up monopolies, cartels and the predatory use of political power to distort competition.
Here is where left and right meet, not in a bipartisan big-money fix, but in an odd bedfellows campaign to clean out Washington.
Read her piece here.
Benefits without responsibilities: the American way?
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Ind- VT) on corporate takers:
In 2010, Bank of America set up more than 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands (which has a corporate tax rate of 0.0 percent) to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It worked. Not only did Bank of America pay nothing in federal income taxes, but it received a rebate from the IRS worth $1.9 billion that year. They are not alone. In 2010, JP Morgan Chase operated 83 subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens to avoid paying some $4.9 billion in U.S. taxes. That same year Goldman Sachs operated 39 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to avoid an estimated $3.3 billion in U.S. taxes. Citigroup has paid no federal income taxes for the last four years after receiving a total of $2.5 trillion in financial assistance from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.
On and on it goes. Wall Street banks and large companies love America when they need corporate welfare. But when it comes to paying American taxes or American wages, they want nothing to do with this country.
Read more here.
Good jobs first
Tracking state subsidies to corporations. Check out their latest report:
Read it here.
Race to the bottom
Econ4’s Jerry Epstein breaks downs the fallacy of ‘tax incentives’ as a lure to investment:
Source: The Real News Network.
Read the New York Times story on corporate tax giveaways here.
