CEO Campaign to "FIX the Debt" : A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks
As the White House begins a series of meetings today on the looming "fiscal cliff,"
a coalition of the largest corporate firms and advocacy groups is lobbying for wide-ranging cuts
in government spending, including to programs like Medicare and Social Security.
The group, which includes 80 of the country’s most powerful CEOs, is called
The Campaign to Fix the Debt. It was co-founded by former Clinton White House chief of staff,
Erskine Bowles, and former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, previously the co-chairs of
President Obama’s bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
Critics have accused the group of
using the budget crisis to push for corporate tax cuts. We are joined by Sarah Anderson,
director of the Global Economy project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of the new report,
"The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks."
[Transcript to come. Check back soon.]
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/13/as_talks_begin_on_fiscal_cliff
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The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks
By Sarah Anderson and Scott Klinger. Contributors include Brent Soloway.
“The ‘Fix the Debt’ CEOs are trying to pass themselves off as noble leaders who are willing to compromise in order the save America from financial ruin,” says report co-author Scott Klinger. “In reality, the campaign is a Trojan horse concealing massive corporate tax breaks that would make our debt situation much worse.”
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.
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http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/ceo-campaign-to-fix-the-debt
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