A SLAP IN THE FACE & Jay Carney On GE's Zero Income Tax Payments: One Might Say 'What The Heck' 30 & 31 MAR 11

POOR ge, they just can't afford to pay their fair share of taxes and obscene executive pay too!!! Click the link to sign the petition against jeffery immelt as chairman of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. From MoveOn.org and HuffPost......

According to The New York Times, last year General Electric (GE) made over $14.2 billion in profit, but paid NO federal tax.¹ None.

In fact, thanks to the millions GE spent lobbying Congress, we American taxpayers actually owed GE $3.2 billion in tax credits.²

Now GE is slashing health benefits and retirement benefits for new employees among non-union workers and is expected to push unions to accept similar cutbacks³, while its CEO, Jeff Immelt, gets a 100% pay raise.⁴

What's worse? Immelt now sits as chair of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness (Jobs Council), representing corporate America to the President on matters like job creation and corporate taxation. That's a slap in the face to every hardworking, tax-paying American—especially GE employees.

That's why we're teaming up with Russ Feingold and his new group Progressives United today to call for Immelt to go. Will you join the call?

Sign the petition calling for GE CEO Jeff Immelt to step down as chair of the President's Jobs Council. 

One of the chief ways GE avoids paying taxes is by shifting a large portion of its profits overseas, and jobs follow.⁵ Now GE's CEO is the person charged with helping the President create jobs here in America. That's just perverse.

And if the American people got back just the $3.2 billion GE took in tax credits, it would pay for the programs that House Republicans want to gut, like community health centers providing care to over three million low-income people⁶ and food and health care assistance to pregnant women, new moms, and children.⁷ We'd even have enough left to save the jobs of over 21,000 teachers across the country.⁸

The American deficit is being weighed down by hundreds of billions spent on bailing out major corporations. The tea party's plan is to make working families pay through devastating cuts, instead of making corporations with billions in profits pay their fair share.

But if we can hold Immelt accountable for GE's corporate irresponsibility, the nation will turn its attention to the injustice of corporate tax evasion in the face of the Republicans' budget-slashing attack on working families.

Make it all happen by signing the petition calling for Immelt to go. Just click below—and share this email with your friends, family, and social networks today.

http://pol.moveon.org/immelt_must_go/?id=26713-17549061-Ux45kSx&t=2

Thanks for all that you do.

–Lenore, Tim, Marika, Kat, and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. "G.E.'s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes All Together," The New York Times, March 24, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=207259&id=26713-17549061-Ux45kSx&t=3

2. Ibid.

3. "After Paying Zero Income Taxes, GE Plans To Ask Its Union Workers To Make Wage and Benefits Concessions", ThinkProgress, March 28, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=207260&id=26713-17549061-Ux45kSx&t=5

4. "UPDATE: GE Doubles CEO Immelt's Compensation, Shrinks Board", Smart Money, March 14, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=207261&id=26713-17549061-Ux45kSx&t=6

5. "G.E.'s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes All Together," The New York Times, March 24, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=207259&id=26713-17549061-Ux45kSx&t=7

6. "NACHC Statement in Response to the Budget from the House Appropriations Committee," National Association of Community Health Centers website, February 9, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=206514&id=26713-17549061-Ux45kSx&t=8

7. "Bye Bye, Big Bird. Hello, E. Coli.," The New Republic, February 12, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=206104&id=26713-17549061-Ux45kSx&t=9

8. Based on an annual teacher's salary of $42,500, as noted in the Payscale website (updated March 19, 2011), accessed March 30, 2011
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=207263&id=26713-17549061-Ux45kSx&t=10

Jay Carney On GE's Zero Income Tax Payments: One Might Say 'What The Heck' 31MAR11

 WASHINGTON -- White House Press Secretary Jay Carney acknowledged once more on Thursday that average Americans would be confused, if not appalled, by the fact that General Electric Co. did not pay any federal income taxes in 2010 despite more than $5 billion in profits.

One "might say, 'what the heck, I don't get this,' " Carney said during his daily briefing, adding that, "the president shares that opinion. ... He believes our corporate tax structure needs to be reformed."
But in having to reiterate the administration’s continued commitment to tax reform and equity (and with it, the closing of corporate loopholes), Carney underscored the extent to which GE’s non-existent 2010 payments have become a political liability. The company’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, serves as the chair of the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. And despite the apparent advantages that he was able to secure for his company, the White House has indicated no willingness to drop him from that post.
“The tax system is complex,” Carney said in a briefing back on March 25, “it is filled with loopholes and other pieces of it that make it possible for corporations to reduce their tax burden. And it's not good for the companies in terms of their competitiveness and potential for growth and this is obviously not good overall for job creation in the United States.”
Immelt, to his credit, has not ducked the issue. On Thursday, the GE CEO spoke at the Economic Club of Washington D.C. and was pressed on a wide-range of company practices -- from the company’s outsourcing of jobs to its seemingly lax tax requirements. "Like any American, we do like to keep our tax rate low,” he acknowledged.
Both there and in a follow up interview with ABC News’ Jake Tapper, however, he was forced to defend charges that his company had somehow beat or cheated the system.
In an excerpt of the interview that Tapper provided to The Huffington Post in advance of broadcast on ABC World News Thursday, Immelt was asked to respond to the critique that GE “was not there for taxpayers.”

“On taxes we had billions of dollars of losses on GE Capital,” he responded. “Our taxes are going to go up this year, over the last five years we’ve paid more than 14 billion dollars in taxes. I’m going to work my best on behalf of the president on the jobs council, I’ll do it with passion and focus and that’s what I’ll do.”
This story was edited after publication.

Corporate Tax Policies 'The Worst Of All Worlds' As Big Companies Often Pay Little 2FEB11 &Jeff Sessions: Lower Corporate Tax Rates Even If We Raise Taxes Elsewhere (VIDEO) 4FEB11

SO Sen jeff sessions r AL wants to lower the corporate tax rate in the U.S. Surprised? Not me. He is bought and paid for by corporate America and the military-industrial complex and they expect him to deliver. Note he doesn't address closing the corporate tax loopholes that allow a lot of companies to avoid paying most of their taxes, yet does mention someone else (that means the poor, working class and middle class) will have to pay more in taxes. This from HuffPost...
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has an excellent piece out diving into the paradox of the American corporate tax code -- "the worst of all worlds" -- and the supreme difficulty of achieving the kind of reform Obama called for in his State of the Union address last week.
"I'm asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes," Obama said in his address. "A parade of lobbyists has rigged the tax code to benefit particular companies and industries."
The top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world -- but, Leonhardt notes, the code is filled with so many loopholes and credits that few companies pay the top rate. And for this those companies that are paying only 4 or 5 percent, there is little incentive to overhaul the system.
As Leonhardt puts it, "any system that creates as many winners as this one won't be changed easily":
Or, as Jonathan Chait approximates it at The New Republic, "reforming the corporate income tax means transferring money away from companies with lots of political clout toward those with less political clout."
One of the major winners of the current loophole-ridden tax code system is General Electric -- and GE's CEO Jeffrey Immelt was recently appointed to head President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is expected to suggest changes to the corporate tax code.
How does GE play the game so well? There are a number of routes that companies who pay low corporate tax rates can go, such as spending large sums of money on new equipment, or a company losing money can subtract their losses from initial profits thus avoiding tax payments until they are consistently earning money again. GE, as Leonhardt put it, is simply "expert at avoiding taxes":

When the three accounting professors analyzed more than 2,000 companies, they found big variations in tax rates within almost every subset of companies. Companies in the same industry often paid very different rates, even when they were similar in size.

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G.E. is so good at avoiding taxes that some people consider its tax department to be the best in the world, even better than any law firm's. One common strategy is maximizing the amount of profit that is officially earned in countries with low tax rates.

At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson displays some nice graphs (h/t Tax Notes) which track the drastic drop in GE's effective tax rate from approximately 30 percent in the 1990s to extremely low levels today. Thompson notes: "What's good for GE isn't necessarily good for the U.S. Treasury."
However, Thompson also adds that Immelt "should be an expert" at suggesting changes to the tax code. Given Immelt's history of blasting the high corporate tax rate, and his company's adept navigation of tax arcana, it may be doubtful that he will be a reform-from-within leader. But Thompson's point still raises the question: is Immelt President Obama's Joseph Kennedy?
Kennedy was appointed by Roosevelt to be the first chairman of the SEC -- despite years of risky behavior on Wall Street. A BusinessWeek article on "Joseph Kennedy's Enduring Example" lays out the relevant historical details:

After becoming the youngest bank president in the country at age 25, Kennedy gained notoriety as a Wall Street speculator throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. In the 1930s, for example, he participated in the Libby-Owens-Ford stock pool, a scheme in which Kennedy and his partners created an artificial scarcity of Libby-Owens-Ford stock to drive up the value of their own portfolios. The pool, and others like it, was investigated by Senate Banking and Currency Committee counsel Ferdinand Pecora, who just a few years later would report to Kennedy as one of the SEC's commissioners. Clearly, Kennedy wasn't an obvious choice for the role of reformer. Indeed, Roosevelt is said to have responded to criticism of his appointment of Kennedy by saying, "It takes a thief to catch one." Yet Kennedy succeeded beyond anyone's imagination in his efforts to create a watchdog for the securities business -- to the surprise of both his Wall Street associates and those who distrusted him. In retrospect, it seems as though Kennedy understood that the SEC represented such a radical idea that it was doomed to fail unless he persuaded a defiant business community to offer a measure of cooperation.

Jeff Sessions: Lower Corporate Tax Rates Even If We Raise Taxes Elsewhere (VIDEO)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/sessions-lower-corporate-tax-rates_n_818827.html 

WASHINGTON -- Among the longtime cornerstones of Republican economic policy is the argument that the U.S. corporate tax rate is too high, stagnating growth. This argument is becoming increasingly bipartisan, championed by President Barack Obama's deficit commission and endorsed by Obama himself during this year's State of the Union address.
But deficit hawks still want tax cuts to be "paid for" -- that is, offset by spending cuts elsewhere in the budget -- despite the conservative claim that the increased economic activity encouraged by lower rates will result in a wider pool of taxpayers.
On Friday, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) took to the floor of the upper chamber to call for cuts in corporate tax rates, and announced that he'd be comfortable offsetting the cuts by raising the rates in other places.
"I believe the American people are open to these kinds of ideas," Sessions said. "I think the idea that this is not a popular plan because, 'Whoa, you're talking about cutting taxes on corporations, nobody wants to do, they don't believe [in], that, the American people won't support that.' I think the American people understand we can't tax our corporations more than they are doing in Canada, 34 percent to 16 percent, and expect to win competition for jobs and business. We have got to make some of those changes, even if we have to raise taxes somewhere else, we've got to look at the taxes that are killing jobs and try to make our tax policy further growth and prosperity, not austerity." [emphasis added]


For the record, the top marginal corporate tax rate, for businesses with net taxable income over $18,333,333, stands at 35 percent. The effective corporate tax rate, however, is generally much lower, as The Huffington Post has reported and New York Times columnist David Leonhardt pointed out this week.
Sessions didn't detail what sort of tradeoffs he would find acceptable, and his office didn't return an email seeking clarification.
But the Alabama Republican's suggestion that taxes be raised elsewhere in order to make corporations more comfortable was too inviting for some Democrats to ignore. The office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) quickly pounced, posting video of Sessions' speech on its YouTube channel.

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"Today," Reid spokesman John Summers wrote in a statement, "Sen. Sessions said he wants to cut taxes for corporations, even if it means raising taxes somewhere else. So, whose taxes would Sen. Sessions raise? Does he think it's time to fund corporate giveaways on the backs of middle-class families?"
UPDATE: Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sessions on the budget committee, sends over the following response. It's not a direct disavowal of the Senator's floor statement. But it does accuse Reid's office for twisting his words.

So let me get this straight: Senator Sessions goes to the floor for thirty minutes to explain a variety ways we can create millions of new private sector jobs--without government spending--and Democrat Leadership's apparent priority is to find a way to twist his words to fit into a scripted attack? I'm sure out-of-work Americans consider that a really constructive use of Congressional resources.

WASHINGTON -- Among the longtime cornerstones of Republican economic policy is the argument that the U.S. corporate tax rate is too high, stagnating growth. This argument is becoming increasingly bipa...

WASHINGTON -- Among the longtime cornerstones of Republican economic policy is the argument that the U.S. corporate tax rate is too high, stagnating growth. This argument is becoming increasingly bipa...