Main Street Businesses Take on Corporate Tax Havens

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:




Main Street Businesses Take on Corporate Tax Havens
When Wall Street dodges taxes, Main Street is left to pick up the slack. Now a coalition of small businesses, community banks, and domestic manufacturers are joining forces to hold corporations accountable.

by Chuck Collins
posted Aug 02, 2010


How is it possible that the Ula Café and City Feed & Supply pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than profitable Wall Street firms and Fortune 500 companies? Multinational corporations—but not mom-and-pop businesses—are able to make use of overseas tax havens to avoid paying their fair share.

Tired of picking up the slack, small businesses are coming together to demand a level playing field.

A new campaign, Business and Investors Against Tax Haven Abuse, is the result of an interesting convergence of domestic manufacturers, community banks, and small businesses that are fed up with how porous the global corporate tax code has become.

A Broken System

Over the last two decades, multinational companies have taken advantage of huge tax loopholes to move income and assets between foreign subsidiaries in order to dodge taxes. Responsible Main Street businesses and individual taxpayers are left to pay for U.S. infrastructure and the public investments that contribute to a healthy business climate, economy, and commons.

How does this work? A U.S. company creates a subsidiary in a secretive low-tax haven such as Bermuda, Luxembourg, or the Republic of Mauritius. In the Grand Cayman Islands, one building provides a mailbox haven to over 19,000 of these corporate subsidiaries.

These corporations shift assets and income between their subsidiaries. Profits appear to be generated overseas while losses are deducted from U.S. taxes. Because of the lack of transparency, it is difficult to assess just how much money is lost, but estimates range from $43 billion to $123 billion per year, including both individual and corporate tax avoidance. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/main-street-businesses-take-on-corporate-tax-havens

[Jackpine Radical]

1. About ^%$# time small businesses started to figure it out.

Most of the small businessmen I know (but by no means all) are Republicans despite the fact that their interests are served better in almost every way by Democratic policies.

Like, for example, how can they not get it that public health care helps to level the playing field? Under the current system, they pay much more per employee than the big guys, who can work volume-based deals with the insurers.

[kenny blankenship]

3. This is an issue on which Democrats can connect with those small business people

who after all are the real engine of job creation in our economy in spite of the lion share of revenues going to big business.

We'll see if the Democrats get interested in any of these things : economic justice, job creation, or smart political outreach to a constituency long considered the base of the other side.

[elleng]

2. OUR FIGHT!

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), a long-time champion of closing tax havens, told The New York Times that the “campaign represents the first time in recent years that business people who believe tax havens are bad for business are mobilizing publicly to end the abuse.”

edit

NYT article referred to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/business/20tax.html?_r=1