AAR

[dick]

in the Finance section of the Yahoo home page: "Tax Loopholes Are Corporate Socialism." Sets out the idea that governments, from local to national, put additional taxes on each family through loopholes for corps, and suggests that the solution is for us, the taxpayers to revolt. If accurate, should raise everyone's ire a bit.

[Eliza]

Is this it?
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/corporate-tax-loopholes-corporate-socialism-pulitzer-prize-winner-121242544.html

My question would be why don't more people already know this. Or do they and that's why there's so much unrest. This is the meat of it to me:

Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chairman of the subcommittee told reporters, "These loopholes and abuses exact a tremendous cost…What these gimmicks do is shift the burden of taxes onto citizens and business who don't use armies of lawyers and accountants."

"The scandal is the law," says David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of "The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use 'Plain English' to Rob You Blind." He told The Daily Ticker: A 1909 law requires that companies not hold more cash than needed to reasonably run their business. If they don't re-invest the extra cash into the business or pay dividends, they face a 15% penalty. President Reagan added a loophole to the law allowing companies to avoid the 15 percent penalty if they hold the extra funds offshore.

How can anything off-shore benefit our on-shore country is what I want to know.

-------------------
ETA: A 2003 NYT article trying to warn us back then: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/magazine/21ENCOUNTER.html?pagewanted=all

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 12-21-03: The Loophole Artist
David Cay Johnston, who won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting, is a financial reporter for The New York Times. This article is adapted from his book ''Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich — And Cheat Everybody Else,'' which will be published next month by Portfolio. (This book won the "Investigative Reporters and Editors 2003 Book of the Year" award.)

Here is background on him--his "creds" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cay_Johnston

[dick]

If we had a Blattmachr running for president, we'd all know whom to vote for. Thanks for the reference.

[Eliza]

You're welcome. David Cay Johnston had a new book just released Sept. 18--The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind

This is the book description from Amazon--
“No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge cus­tomers, shortchange workers, and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news . . . addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward.”

You are being systematically exploited by powerful corporations every day. These companies squeeze their trusting customers for every last cent, risk their retirement funds, and endanger their lives. And they do it all legally. How? It’s all in the fine print.

David Cay Johnston, the bestselling author of Per­fectly Legal and Free Lunch, is famous for exposing the perfidies of our biggest institutions. Now he turns his attention to the ways huge corporations hide sneaky stipulations in just about every contract, often with government permission.

Johnston has been known to whip out a utility bill and explain line by line what all that mumbo jumbo actually means (and it doesn’t mean anything good, unless you happen to be the utility company). Within all that jargon, disclosed in accordance with all legal requirements, lie the tools these companies use to rob you blind. Even worse is what’s missing—all the contractually binding clauses that companies hide elsewhere yet still enforce and abuse. Consider, for example, how:

--An insurance company repeatedly delayed paying for a paralyzed man’s vital care despite court orders to pay up.
--Laws in nineteen states let companies like Goldman Sachs, General Electric, and Procter & Gamble pocket the state income taxes withheld from their workers’ paychecks for up to twenty-five years.
--A little-known government rule gives safety waiv­ers to deadly industrial facilities secretly located underneath schools and playgrounds.
--The “FCC Charge” on your phone bill, which appears to be a government fee, actually goes straight to the phone company.

Johnston shares solutions you can use to fight back against the hundreds of obscure fees and taxes that line the pockets of big corporations, and to help end these devious practices once and for all.

Obviously this can't be fun or light-reading at all, can it?

[dick]

The library here doesn't have a copy yet. Now I'm trying to decide if I want to order it on Amazon for about 60% off and make myself angry reading it.

[LizE]

[dick]

I'm reading it. The writing is sometimes a bit inflammatory, deliberately, I think. And it is making me angry.