The Best Government Money Can Buy? LinkTV

The cost of election campaigns has spiraled out of control-- on average, U.S. representatives spend more than 25% of their time fund-raising. This documentary asks who provides the money? What effect does it have? And is it in the public interest?

GE's Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether

Thursday 24 March 2011 by: David Kocieniewski, The New York Times News Service Report


General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.
Read the whole article at Truthout


And if you think they're alone;

How Offshore Tax Havens Save Companies Billions - NPR March 2011
- On today's Fresh Air, Bloomberg News reporter Jesse Drucker, who has written extensively about corporate tax-dodging, explains how companies like Google, Pfizer, Lilly, Oracle, Facebook and Microsoft have managed to reduce their tax rates by hundreds of millions — and in some cases, billions — of dollars by taking advantage of offshore tax havens.

Bailed-Out Firms Have Tax Havens, GAO Finds - Washington Post January 2009
- American International Group, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are among the companies that are getting bailed out by U.S. taxpayers while having subsidiaries in locations where they can avoid paying U.S. taxes, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Most U.S. Companies Avoid Federal Income Taxes - USATODAY (AP) August 2008
- Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, according to a new report from Congress. The study by the Government Accountability Office released Tuesday said about 68% of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.
Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO's estimate.

Top Iraq Contractor Skirts US Taxes Offshore - Boston Globe March 2008
- Shell companies in Cayman Islands allow KBR to avoid Medicare, Social Security deductions. More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

Are you voting republican because you think they're fiscally responsible?