Chuck Schumer Flip-Flop=Billions of Dollars In Corporate Welfare

[marmar]

from the Working Life blog:




Chuck Schumer Flip-Flop=Billions of Dollars In Corporate Welfare

by Jonathan Tasini
Friday 24 of June, 2011


This is just silly--but, unfortunately, not entirely surprising. Chuck Schumer has grabbed on to the idiotic idea of rewarding corporate America for tax dodging and stashing billions of dollars overseas. And the senior Senator is doing a huge flip-flop--one that is bad for the country.

We're talking about one of the worst ideas ever thought up--one that was already tried and failed miserably: giving corporations a tax holiday in return for those corporations doing a big favor and bringing back tens of billions of dollars sitting in off-shore accounts. Citizens for Tax Justice has the upshot:

In 2004, Senator Charles (Chuck) Schumer of New York voted in favor of the so-called American Jobs Creation Act, a bill full of so many tax breaks for special interests that one observer called it a “bacchanalia of Caligulan proportions.” The bill, which many Democrats and Republicans supported, prompted one business lobbyist to confess to a reporter that the policy process had “risen to a new level of sleaze.” One of the most outrageous breaks in the bill was an amnesty for corporate tax dodgers, a measure called a “repatriation holiday” by its supporters.

A second “repatriation holiday” was proposed as “economic stimulus” in 2009, but Senator Schumer, like most Senators, voted against it because of data summarized by the Congressional Research Service showing that the 2004 measure did not create jobs. In fact, the research showed that the benefits went to enrich shareholders rather than to job creation.

Now Senator Schumer has switched positions again and is supporting a second repatriation holiday.

Indeed, when I wrote about this foolish idea recently, I happened to run into Rep. George Miller recently and he underscored what CRS had found: he asked CEOs in Silicon Valley what they did with the repatriated profits and they admitted to him that almost none of it went to job creation. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.workinglife.org/blogs/view_post.php?content_id=15217

[LiberalAndProud]

1. repatriated profits

Now that's a phrase.

[dkf]

2. Benefitting shareholders is bad? How else do we expect pensions to pay out benefits?

[TheKentuckian]

3. The Senator from Wall Street likes to talk nice and sensible and then shovels money at his patrons

once he has us suckers sold on whatever bait and switch he has up his sleeves.

Chuck is triangulation with a smile and a lil hand wringing as reality sets in.