Four Ways to End Wall Street’s Free Ride

[WildNovember]

1. Make Profitable Corporations Pay Their Fair Share in Taxes

Some profitable corporations enjoy so many tax loopholes that they pay no federal corporate
income taxes. Over the last three years, General Electric made $10.5 billion in profits, but had an
effective corporate income tax rate of negative 45.3 percent. That means that instead of paying
taxes, GE received $4.7 billion from the IRS.1 It’s outrageous for Congress to discuss cutting
public investments and services for working people while ignoring these corporate tax loopholes.


2. Repeal the Tax Break for Corporations Sending Jobs and Profits Overseas

Our tax system encourages U.S. corporations to shift jobs and profits overseas. U.S. corporations
are allowed to “defer” paying U.S. taxes on their foreign profits until those profits are brought to
the U.S. (until those profits are “repatriated”). As a result, U.S. corporations have an incentive to
move operations and jobs offshore or just disguise their U.S. profits as “foreign” profits by
shifting them to offshore tax havens. Congress should address this by repealing “deferral.”5

Unfortunately, lawmakers of both parties are considering expanding this tax break into a full tax
exemption for offshore corporate profits (often called a “territorial” tax system) or a temporary
tax amnesty for repatriated offshore corporate profits. Either of these would simply encourage
U.S. corporations to shift even more jobs and profits overseas.


3. Implement the Buffett Rule

The “Buffett Rule” is the principle that wealthy taxpayers should not pay a lower percentage of
their incomes in federal taxes than middle-class workers pay.6


4. Enact a Bank Tax

The “too-big-to-fail” financial firms now enjoy an implicit guarantee that the federal government
will bail them out when needed, a guarantee that is underwritten by all U.S. taxpayers. For these
firms, this benefit is far greater than the cash they actually received during the recent bailouts.
Congress should make the big financial firms themselves pay for this benefit by enacting the sort
of “bank tax” initially proposed by the Obama administration.9

http://www.ctj.org/pdf/fixwallst.pdf

[FreakinDJ]

1. I wish more people understood Corp Tax Loopholes like these guys

Not sure if I totally agree on their means to end offshore tax breaks and how they encourage Corps to ship jobs offshore but at least they are speaking out against them

[Owlet]

2. All great ideas

With ZERO chance of being implemented. This government is not in place to create change, but to preserve the status quo for as long as it can, by any and all means available. 'Change and Hope' meet 'Resistance and Despair'. It's enough to turn a President's hair gray.

[sam11111]

3. who needs to keep Wall Street? OP is good but only a start

WS is a casino...which helps crash our economy about every

ten years.

Destructive.

Replace it with a co op economy. Run by employees, and planned (to a degree).

Finland is well along on that path and is world's leader in Quality of Life Index. Similar denmark is tops in world happiness poll.

Sounds good to me.