Events 2013

[eridani]

10. Wells Fargo paid no taxes last year! Demostrate for economic justice 1/30 in Seattle

Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action
Uniting Generations for a Secure Future

When: Wednesday, Jan. 30, 12 noon. If you are late, go straight to the Wells Fargo at 3rd & Madison.

What: Wells Fargo is one of the "Dirty 30" big corporations that pay $0 in taxes while lobbying for permanent tax breaks and cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The only way to stop them is to expose their tax-dodging practices and to call on our Senators to take action to ensure that corporations pay their fair share.

Where: Meet at the Working Washington office: 215 Columbia Street, in downtown Seattle. The entrance to the Working Washington office is on 3rd and Columbia. We will walk 2 blocks to the bank and then one block from there to the Federal Building.

Why Wells Fargo?

Wells Fargo is one of the Dirty 30: behemoths that collectively earned tens of billions in profits between 2008 and 2010 but paid no taxes during that three-year period. These companies "so deftly exploited carve outs and loopholes in the tax code that all but one of them enjoyed a negative tax rate"-that is, they received money back from the U.S. Treasury.

The Dirty 30 have spent millions to get the tax code the way it is, and will likely spend millions more to keep it that way. In the three years studied by Citizens for Tax Justice, the 30 spent nearly half a billion dollars on lobbying Congress.

Together the 30, which include Wells Fargo, Mattel, Verizon, GE, and other well-known corporate brands, collected $10.6 billion in tax rebates during the three years Citizens for Tax Justice studied. Many of the companies on the list claim tax rebates while avoiding taxes altogether by parking profits in overseas shelters.

In total, the top 30 companies dodged $67.9 billion in taxes over three years, costs that are passed on to American taxpayers and small businesses that lack the teams of tax analysts necessary to exploit loopholes in the code. Spread out over every individual tax filer in America, the taxes avoided by the Dirty Thirty break down to an average of $481 per taxpayer over the three years.

We will call on Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to make sure big corporations like Wells Fargo - and their wealthy executives - pay their fair share in taxes.

Conservatives in Congress want the middle class to pay for deficit reduction by cutting Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid while refusing to close tax loopholes or end tax breaks for millionaires and corporations.

We need Congress to:

- End tax breaks and cap deductions that benefit the richest 2 percent.
- Place a tiny tax on Wall Street transactions to raise revenue while curbing dangerous financial gambling
- Oppose corporate "territorial" tax proposals that would exempt big corporations from paying taxes on profits earned overseas, and end tax breaks that allow multinational corporations to ship jobs and profits overseas to foreign tax havens like the Cayman Islands.