|
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they
fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi
On Sunday, America Moves to Last Place
On Sunday, April 1, America will earn a new #1 distinction. Sorry
folks, this is no April Fool’s joke. This is serious business with serious consequences.
The Wall
Street Journal warns about this
impending honor - ironically, only weeks before 'tax day':
"April 1 is a date that every
politician and business executive in America should circle on the calendar.
That's when Japan cuts its corporate tax rate to 36.8% from 39.5%. The United
States will then hold the title of highest corporate tax rate, with average
combined federal and state profit levies of 39.2%.
The Washington
Examiner adds, “Come Sunday, America finally
has something to crow about in its economic war with China and Japan: It will
have the highest jobs-killing corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.”
The grim news is that American businesses – especially small
businesses – don’t have many options as The Business Roundtable makes clear in
their "Taking Action for
America: A CEO Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth:"
"A study of financial statement
effective tax rates for the 2,000 largest companies in the world found that
U.S.-headquartered companies faced a higher worldwide effective tax rate than
their counterparts headquartered in 53 of 58 countries over the 2006-2009
period."
The Heritage
Foundation warns, “Our high
rate also makes our businesses prime targets for takeovers by businesses
headquartered in foreign countries, because their worldwide profits are no
longer subject to the highest-in-the-world U.S. corporate tax rate. Until
Congress cuts the rate, more and more iconic U.S. businesses such as
Anheuser-Busch (which was bought by its Belgian competitor InBev in 2008) will
be bought by their foreign competitors.
Not content to just depress our economy at home, our tax code also
essentially prohibits American corporation’s foreign earnings from being
reinvested in the USA by subjecting them to an incredibly high 35% tax rate!
Politico reports: "Apple is planning to
spend an estimated $45 billion of its cash reserves in the next three years, as
part of a program the company announced Monday that includes the first dividend
for shareholders since 1995.
But not one penny of that is slated to come
from the roughly $64 billion the company has stashed overseas. That’s because
Apple, like other corporations, is loath to pay the heavy tax hit for
repatriating that money."
This is another case where our tax laws are seriously harming our
nation, our economy and our economic competitiveness - and we tolerate it!
So where are our politicians? Republican Presidential candidates
uniformly propose lowering the corporate tax rate and President Obama would like to do the same. But
that is simply like putting a Band-Aid on a cut needing stiches. And as the
saying goes, Congress continues playing partisan gridlock while Rome burns.
Once again, the FairTax is a
non-partisan answer to Washington-as-usual
politics.
But what does a high corporate tax rate
mean to you, an average American citizen?
Have you found a "Made
In America" label
on the products you recently purchased? Where did those jobs go? And for
everyone employed in our current economy, there are neighbors who aren't
working because costs were too high for their employers to keep them on the
payroll. Imagine what trillions of dollars invested back into our economy from
corporate America's foreign earnings would look like!
There is a solution waiting for
Congressional action right now. Passage of the FairTax (HR 25/S 13) would
eliminate the corporate tax code in its entirety and transform our economy. That’s
one reason why 80 economists endorsed HR 25!
Demand
that your Congressman represents you!
Thank you!
|
