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Truthout...
You Have More Money
in Your Wallet Than Bank of America Pays in Federal Taxes
by Zaid Jilani
Saturday 26 February 2011
Today, hundreds of thousands of people comprising a Main Street
Movement — a coalition of students, the retired, union workers, public
employees, and other middle class Americans — are in the streets,
demonstrating against brutal cuts to public services and crackdowns on
organized labor being pushed by conservative politicians. These
lawmakers that are attacking collective bargaining and cutting
necessary services like college tuition aid and health benefits for
public workers claim that they have no choice but than to take these
actions because both state and federal governments are in debt.
But it wasn’t teachers, fire fighters, policemen, and college students
that caused the economic recession that has devastated government
budgets — it was Wall Street. And as middle class workers are being
asked to sacrifice, the rich continue to rig the system, dodging taxes
and avoiding paying their fair share.
In an interview with In These Times, Carl Gibson, the founder of US
Uncut, which is organizing some of today’s UK-inspired massive
demonstrations against tax dodgers, explains that while ordinary
Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to
use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. As he
says, if you have “one dollar” in your wallet, you’re paying more than
the “combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the
Bank of America“:
[Gibson] explains, “I have one dollar in my wallet. That’s more than
the combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the
Bank of America. That means somebody is gaming the system.”
Indeed, as politicians are asking ordinary Americans to sacrifice their
education, their health, their labor rights, and their wellbeing to
tackle budget deficits, some of the world’s richest multinational
corporations are getting away with shirking their responsibility and
paying nothing. ThinkProgress has assembled a short but far from
comprehensive list of these tax dodgers — corporations which have
rigged the tax system to their advantage so they can reap huge profits
and avoid paying taxes:
- BANK OF AMERICA: In 2009, Bank of America didn’t pay a single penny
in federal income taxes, exploiting the tax code so as to avoid paying
its fair share. “Oh, yeah, this happens all the time,” said Robert
Willens, a tax accounting expert interviewed by McClatchy. “If you go
out and try to make money and you don’t do it, why should the
government pay you for your losses?” asked Bob McIntyre of Citizens for
Tax Justice. The same year, the mega-bank’s top executives received pay
“ranging from $6 million to nearly $30 million.”
Read the rest of the story, with links, at truthout
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