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Can we afford corporate tax breaks?
By Lauren | January 27, 2012
President Obama’s State of the Union has stirred up a hornet’s nest in Washington. It’ll be awhile before the dust settles enough to know who’s coming down where on his various proposals. However, I want to focus on one aspect of his speech that seems to me to be very relevant to business ethics: the growing economic inequality that’s making it increasingly difficult for average Americans to get by.
There’s a lot of talk about taxing wealthy individuals. Mitt Romney is scrambling to defend the 15% income taxes he pays each year, and Warren Buffet drew a lot of positive press when he observed that his tax rate is lower than that of his secretary. But corporate tax rates are getting less attention, and it’s time to rectify that.
Public Campaign, a self-described ” non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to sweeping campaign reform that aims to dramatically reduce the role of big special interest money in American politics” (phew!) issued a report last December that demonstrates how big corporations are using their lobbying muscle to reduce their taxes to a pittance. Relying on statistics from its non-profit peers Citizens for Tax Justice and the Center for Responsive Politics, Public Campaign reports that some of the largest corporations in the United States have spent millions on lobbyists in the past three years and, in the process, managed to eliminate their tax liability or even receive tax rebates. That’s right; some corporations are actually getting tax money from the government even as they lay off workers and drive profits into the hands of their shareholders.
The Supreme Court recently opined that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as people when it comes to political advertising. Regardless of whether one agrees with the Court (and I don’t), if corporations do have rights they should accept the responsibilities that go with them. Corporations use the infrastructure and services that the government provides, and they should pay their fair share of the taxes that support them. It’s time voters woke up to the tax breaks corporations receive, and time for politicians to prevent corporate lobbyists from picking the pockets of the 99% of Americans who aren’t among the wealthy few.
To read the Public Campaign report, click here.
Topics: Business Ethics, Corporate Governance, Social Ethics, corporate responsibility, ethics |