Excerpt: Just how many billions of tax dollars corporations escape paying is a mystery. The reason: Everyone responsible for picking your pocket — the politicians who grant the subsidies, the companies that get them and the brokers who charge fees to arrange them — prefer to hide in the dark. Every dollar of tax not collected from these companies is a dollar you must make up through higher taxes, fewer government services or more government debt. Nationwide, property taxes provide three-fourths of local government tax revenues. From 2000 to 2011, as wages stagnated and job growth slowed, the burden of local property taxes soared to $443 billion. Adjusted for inflation over those years, property taxes soared 30 percent, to $1,423 per American, Census Bureau data show. People know little about the myriad local and state subsidies to corporations because governments report welfare costs using two systems, separate and unequal: a fully transparent one for individuals and an opaque one for companies. Governments at every level publish finely detailed reports on how much taxpayer money is spent to help children, the chronically sick, the disabled, the elderly and the poor. But virtually no statistics exist on welfare for the rich and the corporations they own, as those of us whose who report on these matters know from years of painstaking work to extract limited facts from the public record. The best estimate is that corporate welfare costs state and local governments more than $70 billion per year. That works out to $900 annually for a family of four, which is more than a week’s take-home pay for the typical family. All these corporate welfare programs operate on the assumption that the lucky companies will create jobs. Good Jobs First, a research organization based in Washington, D.C., and various tax watchdog groups have shown that often far fewer jobs were created than promised. Sometimes jobs are destroyed despite massive corporate welfare. The jobs that are created are too expensive; subsidies of more than $1 million per job are becoming common. america.aljazeera/opinions/2014/11/gasb-corporate-welfare.html
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 01:58:24 +0000
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