The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks

This business-driven initiative is using the so-called fiscal cliff as a cover for tax-code changes that would damage our economy.

The Fix the Debt campaign has raised $60 million and recruited more than 80 CEOs of America’s most powerful corporations to lobby for a debt deal that would reduce corporate taxes and shift costs onto the poor and elderly.

This report focuses on the Fix the Debt campaign’s corporate tax agenda and in particular the windfalls the campaign’s member corporations would reap from a territorial tax system. We also analyze the savings the Fix the Debt campaign’s CEOs have derived from the Bush tax cuts and how many of them received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal income taxes.

Key findings:

• The 63 Fix the Debt companies that are publicly held stand to gain as much as $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves one of their main proposals — a “territorial tax system.”Under this system, companies would not have to pay U.S. federal income taxes on foreign earnings when they bring the profits back to the United States.
• The CEOs backing Fix the Debt personally received a combined total of $41 million in savings last year thanks to the Bush-era tax cuts. The top CEO beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, saved $9.9 million on the Bush tax cuts. The private equity fund leader reaped $215 million in taxable income last year just from vested stock.
• Of the 63 Fix the Debt CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes. All but six of these firms reported U.S. profits last year.

Corporations have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts

Um, no they haven't. But it is comical that someone believes that giving a company federal dollars to make tanks and air craft carriers (the Pentagon doesn't own factories) is the exact same as welfare.

Note: Since 1967, federal spending on the "war on poverty" has topped $15 trillion dollars. The US poverty rate is now higher than in 1967.

Facts, aren't they fun?

Yet these corporate bastards make the case that the only way to cut the deficit is to severely scale back social safety-net programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security

The federal government spends more than $1 trillion per year on these programs. All of these programs are on their way to insolvency and need to be reformed.

AG subsidies need to end. Perhaps this will get traction and be a good first step:

Congressman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia on Wednesday introduced legislation that would essentially eliminate the RFS in order, he said, "to help protect consumers, producers, and the American economy."

Goodlatte and fellow Republican Steve Womack of Arkansas was joined by Democrats Jim Costa of California and Peter Welch of Vermont and other lawmakers.

The legislation would eliminate corn-based ethanol targets, which make up the vast majority of the biofuel mandate. It would also cap the amount of ethanol that can be blended into gasoline at 10 percent, while requiring the government to set targets for cellulosic ethanol use at levels of actual production.

https://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/10/usa-ethanol-congress-idUSL2N0CX0XC20130410

The poor and the elderly are useless.  And the corporations and the government are greedy.  None of these four should be subsidized.

The best decision I ever made was to stop paying income taxes after 1979.

and daroad you might want to educate yourself a little bit.  Social security had enough funds to last another 100 something years, if the politicians didnt give that money away to the big corporations in the form of corporate welfare.

What i really cant figure out is why guys like you keep defending these huge corporations that have basically destroyed our country and taken money out of all our pockets.  Are you one of the rich corporations, then i could understand your defense.  Or do just like the taste of corporate jizz?

Your a total class act  I guess when your parents become old, you told them they were useless

I think you should re-read post #11 and ge back to us on why you reflexively (and falsely) assert I support subsidies to big companies.

Further, Social Security is going to run out of money in 10 years.

Finally, you, a supporter of the GM bailout which cost the federal government billions, have little standing to rail against subsidies for large corporations.

Oh, one other point.

The assertion that "politicans" took Social Security money to give out corporate subsidies is silly and ridiculous. That money is moved to the general fund and spent on all these big government programs, federal housing, AFDC, medicaid, etc.

The politicians stole the money to be used on their pet projects, which is giving it to their corporate buddies, so really wake up and smell the real world.

Funny how you leave out the fact, that if the politician crooks never touched that money, which was only supposed to be used for social security, that fund without doing 1 thing to it, would have lasted over 100 more years.  So did the people using the system that you seem to hate so much break it or did the corrupt stealing politicians {and their buddies} break it?