Hightower Lowdown
"The less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag." -- Kin Hubbard
In This Issue
The FTAA is NAFTA on steroids
December's Lowdown
The many REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL after Election Day 2008
After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Corporate tax-dodgers
Suppose you owned a local hardware store and had a very good year, making, say, $182 million in profits. And suppose that instead of having to pay taxes on that juicy profit, Uncle Sam sent you a check for millions of dollars.
Fantasyland? Well, if your company was Texaco, this very fantasy would have come true. Not only did Texaco pull in $182 million in profits in 1998, but it also received a tax rebate from the U.S. Treasury in the amount of $67.7 million.
The independent Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has issued a stunning new report documenting that 41 of America's largest corporations had $25.8 billion in profits from 1996 to 1999. Yet not only did they avoid paying their share of taxes— they got $3.2 billion in rebate checks from us taxpayers!
Among these tax-dodgers are Chevron, PepsiCo, Pfizer, J.P. Morgan, Saks, Goodyear, Ryder Trucks, Enron, Colgate Palmolive, MCI, Weyerhauser, GM, and Northrop Grumman.
By law, corporations are supposed to pay 35% of their profits in taxes. Yet their lawyers and lobbyists have riddled the tax code with all sorts of special breaks— including one that allows corporations to buy tax breaks from other corporations that have more tax breaks than they can use!
The bottom line is that we taxpayers end up paying these corporate tax-dodgers' share of financing America's highways, schools, parks, military, and other essentials.