Collect on tax dodgers, fix our infrastructure
When my father built the small laundry business I now run, he didn’t take out a loan. He literally built it, by hand, on my grandmother’s property, doing as much construction as he could by himself. A small business is different from a big corporation, of course, but still I wish our nation’s leading multinational firms practiced some of that simple, straightforward approach to business.
Instead, we see mostly the opposite. Take their unethical approach to paying their fair share of taxes. Like most people, I pay what I owe each year. But huge multinational corporations avoid tax bills for decades, sometimes forever. One of their most effective tax-dodging strategies is stashing profits offshore.
President Obama and some congressional leaders want to collect taxes on all that offshore corporate loot — $2.1 trillion at last count — and use it to fix our roads and bridges. Sounds good, but here’s the kicker: They don’t propose to collect all the money due, just a small portion of it.
I know our roads need fixing. When I was a long-haul truck driver, there were certain places you didn’t like to go — like Chicago in the winter. It wasn’t just the cold; the weather tore up the highways. You could hit a pothole hard enough to knock you out of gear.
But raising the money we need to maintain our highways doesn’t mean we have to reward corporate tax dodgers. Let’s charge full freight — 35 percent — instead of the 14 percent proposed by the president. Republicans want to go even lower. Making them pay what they owe would raise $600 billion, nearly $400 billion more than the sweetheart-deal rates.
With the full tax payment, we could meet our nation’s transportation needs and a lot more, too.
Road work isn’t just about safety. My business is in historic Eatonville, the earliest incorporated municipality founded by African-Americans. The town has been beautifying our main thoroughfares: putting in brickwork, landscaping and more. Those additions will improve the city’s quality of life and the business environment. More city streets all across our country need that kind of attention. That’s why we need more tax revenue from corporations, not less.
My wife is a branch director for the local Boys and Girls Club. It provides a fun and educational haven for kids who might otherwise get in trouble. We need more after-school programs like it. Making sure multinational corporations pay what they owe on their offshore profits could help pay for them.
What’s stopping us? A massive lobbying campaign has convinced Washington politicians to ignore the hundreds of billions of dollars in uncollected offshore corporate taxes and instead worry about the corporate tax rate — which has become a largely irrelevant figure.
The offshore tax dodgers have on average paid only 6 percent in taxes — and all of that to foreign countries. Just a few years ago, a cross-section of American corporations paid a mere 13 percent, a government report revealed. Some big firms such as Boeing, General Electric and Verizon, plus a couple dozen more, paid absolutely nothing over a recent five-year period, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.
Besides the revenue lost and what we could do with it, there’s something else that rankles me about American corporations stashing their profits in other countries to avoid their fair share of U.S. taxes: I didn’t serve three years as an Army paratrooper, including a tour in the jungles of Vietnam at the height of the war, so that profitable corporations could duck out on their responsibilities to our nation.
As Floridians, we have a way to turn the focus back to the problem of corporate tax dodging. Our Sen. Bill Nelson serves on the tax-writing Finance Committee. He can bring our voice to the deliberations in D.C.
There’s an important highway project going on right now in the Orlando area: the widening of Interstate 4 and the addition of new exit and entrance ramps. Let’s not let this important work get gridlocked because the federal highway trust fund runs out of money. But let’s also not run out of courage in standing up to huge, tax-dodging corporations. They should pay everything they owe.
I didn’t serve three years as an Army paratrooper so that profitable corporations could duck out on their responsibilities to our nation.