Budget and Taxation (B&T) Senate
Chair: Edward J. Kasemeyer
Vice Chair: Nathaniel J. McFadden David R. Brinkley
Nancy J. King                      Richard F. Colburn                    Richard S. Madaleno, Jr.
Ulysses Currie                     Roger P. Manno
James E. DeGrange, Sr.                             Douglas J. J. Peters
George C. Edwards                    James N. Robey
Verna L. Jones-Rodwell
Ways and Means (W&M) Delegates
Chair: Sheila E. Hixson
Vice Chair: Samuel I. Rosenberg Kathryn L. Afzali
Anne R. Kaiser                        Kumar P. Barve                         Eric G. Luedtke
Joseph C. Boteler III                    Aruna Miller                        Talmadge Branch
LeRoy E. Myers, Jr.                    Jon S. Cardin                        Justin D. Ross
Mark N. Fisher                         Andrew A. Serafini                      C. William Frick
Melvin L. Stukes                    Ron George                             Michael Summers
Glen Glass                           Frank S. Turner                        Carolyn J. B. Howard
Jay Walker                       Jolene Ivey 

THIS IS THE PROBLEM AND SOLUTION......RECOVERING CORPORATE FRAUD AS WELL!

Back in 1950 corporations paid $3 for every $1 a worker paid.......today they pay 22cents for every dollar a worker pays.  This is the problem and solution along with recovering corporate fraud!
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Obama just offered up an override of the corporate repatriation tax of trillions of dollars in tax avoidance as a way to pay for infrastructure work. Obama cannot see the corporate fraud but he is an expert on giving trillions of dollars in corporate tax cuts. THAT'S A NEO-LIBERAL FOR YOU----WORKING FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT.


Caterpillar dodged $2.4 billion in US taxes by booking 85% of its profits in Switzerland, where the company employs a mere .5% of its workforce and has zero factories or warehouses.

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In Maryland, corporate tax breaks are so great that taxes are now income.  Taxes on the working and middle-class have skyrocketed to replace this lost revenue. People working for corporations sneer when the say 'progressive taxation'.....all this means is that EVERYONE PAYS THEIR FAIR SHARE!!

Because Congress has implemented austerity rather than recover tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud----less revenue coming from the Fed to states is pressing taxes higher at the state and local level and states are cutting corporate taxes at the same time doubling the burden.  This is why you see the government in Baltimore actually being predatory in hitting citizens with fees, fines, and taxes.

Corporate Tax Attacks in the States At the same time states are looking to beef up corporate tax collections, they are also cutting corporate taxes.
by Penelope Lemov | April 24, 2014



Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been complaining for years about corporate tax havens. The Congressional Research Services reports that offshore tax shelters cost the federal government between $30 billion and $90 billion a year. But such is the gridlock in Washington that even bipartisan efforts to do something about the problem have stalled. That's where Maine comes in. Tired of waiting on Washington, it passed legislation this month with an eye toward recouping the estimated $5 million in corporate income tax revenue lost a year.

The new legislation will treat income that companies list in 38 known tax haven countries as domestic income for Maine tax purposes, bringing the state millions in tax revenues. "If a big company like Apple sells things in Maine, they should pay a portion of their corporate tax in Maine, even if they have income in Bermuda," is the rationale from Democratic Rep. Adam Goode of Bangor, the sponsor of the bill.

Maine is not actually the first state to try this tactic. Montana tried it a decade ago, and last summer Oregon passed such a law. The strategy is seen as the best way to close the so-called "waters edge" loophole: Limit profit shifting by going after multinational corporations that avoid state taxes by stashing some of their earnings in offshore tax havens. In an analysis of 60 big U.S. companies, The Wall Street Journal found that on average more than 40 percent of these companies' annual profits were stashed overseas last year.



There is real tax revenue at stake. In addition to the amount the federal government loses each year, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group figures states lose $20.7 billion annually. But in the two states that have taken corrective action, Montana collected $7.2 million in extra revenue in 2010 and Oregon's Department of Revenue estimates the statute will bring in $18 million in fiscal 2014-2015.

The Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) recently issued a joint report on the federal and state corporate tax situation, and found that although the federal marginal tax rate on corporate profits is 35 percent, few corporations pay it. As for the states, the report found that the situation is similar: The average weighted state corporate income tax rate is 6.25 percent, but of the 269 profitable Fortune 500 companies the report studied, the companies only paid an average rate of 3.06 percent. As is the case with the federal corporate tax, some of these national and multinational corporations don't fork over any tax revenue at all.The report also found that 25 companies paid no state income tax in 2012. Another 127 of the companies paid less than half the average legal state tax rate that year.



There's more data from the report that suggests corporate income taxes are no longer carrying their weight: As recently as 1986, state corporate income taxes equaled 0.5 percent of nationwide gross state product (GPS). But in fiscal year 2011, state and local corporate income taxes were 0.33 percent of nationwide GSP. Even as corporate profits have rebounded and boomed in recent years, state and local corporate taxes have not kept pace. Corporate taxes as a share of nationwide corporate profits remain near the lowest point in the past quarter century.

CTJ researchers report that the long-term decline in the state corporate income tax has three broad causes: the trickle-down impact of federal corporate tax cuts (in states that have not decoupled from the feds); unintended tax shelters created by companies' accountants and lawyers; and tax incentives enacted by state lawmakers. Governors from both parties have increased the use of incentives since the 18-month recession ended in June 2009, says Kenneth Thomas, a political science professor at University of Missouri-St. Louis.

In fact, despite the actions of Maine, Oregon and Montana, the current trend in state legislatures is to cut corporate income tax rates and award tax credits. Lawmakers in Louisiana, Nebraska and North Carolina, for example, have seriously considered outright repeal of the state corporate income tax; several other states, such as Idaho, Indiana, New York and North Dakota, have moved to cut their corporate tax rates. Indiana lowered its corporate tax rate from 8.5 percent to 6.5 percent three years ago, with the ratcheted down rate of 6.5 percent scheduled to go into effect next year. But even before that can happen, the legislature this spring lowered the rate again, this time to 4.9 percent. The same legislation also grants localities the option to eliminate their property taxes on new business equipment.

With so many states lowering their corporate tax rates and offering corporations tax incentives for doing business in the state, it raises a basic question: If everyone's giving corporations breaks, where's the incentive?

The Pew Charitable Trusts is addressing a piece of that issue by looking at ways to increase data collection and reporting overall. There is a general lack of data to evaluate the effectiveness of state incentives. The results of the initiative will, says Jeff Chapman, manager of the project, "pave the way for the development of a set of best practices that can be put to use by states around the country."

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This is an understatement.  Yet, we see how to pay down the national debt.

$2 Trillion in Profit From the IRS

Alan Pyke Think Progress / News Report Published: Friday 14 March 2014

The largest American multinational companies parked an additional $206 billion of profits in offshore accounts last year, according to Bloomberg, bringing the total amount of profits stashed where U.S. tax officials can’t touch them up to about two trillion dollars.  The largest American multinational companies parked an additional $206 billion of profits in offshore accounts last year, according to Bloomberg, bringing the total amount of profits stashed where U.S. tax officials can’t touch them up to about two trillion dollars.

The 307 companies that Bloomberg examined now hold a combined $1.95 trillion offshore, allowing them to avoid paying U.S. taxes on those earnings. The majority of the total is concentrated in just a few corporate hands. The largest 22 of those companies hold more offshore than the other 285 combined.


General Electric leads the pack, with $110 billion held offshore. Tech companies like Microsoft ($76.4 billion), Apple ($54.4 billion), IBM ($52.3 billion), and Google ($38.9 billion) also dominate, along with drug companies like Pfizer ($69 billion) and Merck ($57.1). The tech giants have drastically accelerated their offshore holdings in recent years, with Microsoft and Google more than doubling and Apple more than quadrupling offshore profit holdings from 2010 to 2013. This propensity for profit-stashing among tech companies brought scrutiny from Congress last year, with committee reports and a Senate hearing where Apple CEO Tim Cook was called on to justify his firm’s tax behavior. That scrutiny exposed the complexities of how Apple pulls off its tax avoidance scheme through a set of Ireland-based subsidiary companies, but it also underscored that everything these companies are doing is legal. The current international corporate tax system encourages countries like Ireland, Luxembourg, and others to race each other to the bottom of the business tax rate barrel.

While lawmakers around the world talk a good game about reforms that would change the incentives faced not only by companies but tax haven governments, most of that talk is still premised on the same sort of patchwork system that’s in place now. Ireland, for example, made a splash last fall by announcing some changes to its tax laws, but they do little to end the country’s status as a tax haven. Tweaking specific rules within that flawed system seemsunlikely to produce meaningful changes in corporate behavior.

These companies face no meaningful negative consequences to stashing trillions from the taxman. When they need to access their offshore cash for investing in production or personnel, they can simply use the untaxed profits as collateral for borrowing from the financial sector. There is no business reason to stop ducking U.S. taxes, so it is up to lawmakers to address the problem.

Many in Congress want to tackle offshore profit stashing in ways that would be very generous to these companies. Slashing the corporate tax rate or offering a “tax holiday” for them to bring their money back home would reward their behavior. President Obama’s version of corporate tax reform would raise a significant amount of money over the coming decade, but still far less than what companies would be paying if they weren’t gaming the rules. While precise estimates of lost revenue are difficult to make, previous inquiries into profit offshoring found that it cost the U.S. between $30 billion and $90 billion each yearduring the early and middle 2000s, when the pile of untaxed corporate profits was much smaller.

States and localities also lose out on tens of billions of dollars in tax revenue each year to similar offshoring strategies. A recent study found that by closing just one small loophole in state business tax laws, states could bring in a billion dollars in new revenue almost overnight.

Despite corporate protests, there is no historical evidence that higher corporate tax rates hurt the economy, and companies that pay higher tax rates tend to create more jobs than those that game the rules to minimize their tax liability.


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As corporate NPR/APM report on Duke University as a corporate campus that charges $90,000 tuition shows.....all of America's tax revenue is going to subsidize all of corporations operations.  This is called a public private partnership as are all of the deals listed below.  Taxpayers get to not only pay all operation and infrastructure costs.....they are fleeced with fraud and corruption while the work is being done.  In the case of Duke University as with all corporate universities....students not only pay high tuition.....but they are free labor in a corporate R & D department.

SEE WHY WE HAVE NO MONEY TO FUND PUBLIC SERVICES AND PROGRAMS LIKE k-12

New Report Exposes America's Highest Paid Government Workers
Thursday, 20 February 2014 09:38 By Staff, PR Watch | Press Release
Journalism with real independence and integrity is a rare thing. Truthout relies on reader donations - click here to make a tax-deductible contribution and support our work.

(Photo: steve lyon / Flickr)Madison, Wisconsin - The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a new report, "EXPOSED: America's Highest Paid Government Workers."

The report shows that, contrary to misinformation spread by some politicians and pundits, America’s highest paid "government" workers are not your local teachers, nurses, or sanitation workers. Rather, they are corporate executives who sign lucrative contracts to take over public services and then pay themselves and other executives eye-popping salaries.

This report by CMD highlights just six of these "government" workers who, between them, raked in more than $100 million from taxpayers in personal compensation during the past few years alone.

"Given these astronomical salaries, and evidence of higher prices, poor service, and at times outright malfeasance, taxpayers have every right to be concerned about how their outsourced dollars are spent," said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of CMD.

These top executives include:

• George Zoley, America’s highest paid "corrections officer" and CEO of private prison giant GEO Group. Zoley made $22 million in compensation between 2008 and 2012. CMD estimates that GEO Group makes 86 percent of its revenue from the taxpayers. GEO Group writes language into private prison contracts that forces taxpayers to keep prisons full or else pay for empty beds. GEO Group has faced hundreds of lawsuits over prisoner deaths, assaults, excessive force, and more, which have led to secret court settlements.
• David Steiner, president and CEO of Waste Management, is America’s highest paid "sanitation worker." Steiner made a whopping $45 million in compensation from 2006 to 2012. Waste Management's makes about 50 percent of its revenue from U.S. taxpayers, says Goldman Sachs.
• Ron Packard of K12 Inc. is America’s highest paid "teacher." Packard made more than $19 million in compensation between 2009 and 2013, despite the alarming fact that only 28 percent of K12 Inc. cyber schools met state standards in 2010-2011, compared to 52 percent of public schools. CMD estimates that K12 Inc. makes 86 percent of its revenue from the taxpayers.
• Jeffry Sterba, president and CEO of American Water Works Company, is America’s highest paid "water worker." Sterba has made $8.3 million in the three years he has been top executive. American Water is the largest for-profit provider of water and wastewater services in the United States. CMD estimates that American Water makes approximately 89 percent of its revenue from taxpayers.
• Richard Montoni, CEO of Maximus, is America’s highest paid "caseworker." Maximus is a for-profit firm that handles government services for poor and vulnerable residents. Montoni made more than $16 million between 2008 and 2012. In 2013, Maximus landed in hot water for improper billing in Wisconsin. In 2007, Maximus paid $30 million to settle a U.S. Department of Justice criminal investigation into fraudulent billing.
• Nicholas Moore is America’s highest paid "road worker." As managing director and CEO of the Australian infrastructure firm Macquarie, Moore made $8.8 million in compensation in fiscal year 2013. As a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Macquarie has pushed for privatization of public services across the board. It has long-term contracts to run Chicago's Skyway, Indiana's Toll Road, and the Dulles Greenway in Virginia.

These and other “government workers” who head big firms that take over public assets or contract for services make billions off of taxpayers, but are not accountable to taxpayers for their enormous salaries being subsidized at public expense. The report also contains information on shareholder lawsuits, criminal investigations, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sanctions, court settlements, and more.



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I want to emphasize that all this talk of closing tax loopholes will come to nothing if TPP is implemented as all US corporations will have to do.....and are doing now......is partner with a foreign corporation that comes to the US and under TPP will be free of US laws cutting into profits.  So, if these people shouting out for corporate accountability are not shouting to bring tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud back to government coffers and the TPP is illegal and a COUP against the US Constitution.....which it is......

THAT POLITICIAN IS NOT WORKING FOR YOU AND ME.......DO YOU HEAR YOUR CURRENT POL SHOUTING THIS?  NOT IN MARYLAND,......ALL POLS IN MARYLAND ARE NEO-LIBERALS WORKING FOR WEALTH AND PROFIT!


Close the "Water's Edge" Loophole
Tuesday, 11 February 2014 15:19 By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

Corporations can't have their cake and eat it too.

Right now, corporations are making billions of dollars off of you and me, and are hiding those billions in offshore bank accounts to avoid paying taxes to our government.

But what if we closed the tax loopholes that allow corporations to skip out on paying taxes, and brought those trillions of dollars back home?

Some states are already doing that, and they're seeing some pretty amazing results.

Back in 2003, the Montana state legislature closed that state's tax loophole, a so-called "water's edge" loophole, that allowed companies to avoid state taxes by hiding their profits in offshore bank accounts.

In the decade since, Montana has brought in over $40 million, which is a lot considering that state only spends about $1.8 billion each year.

Last summer, Oregon jumped on the bandwagon, and closed a similar tax loophole. The state now expects to bring in an additional $17 million in tax revenue from corporations this year alone.

And, a new report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) found that if 21 other states and the District of Columbia had closed their offshore corporate tax-evading loopholes, they would have brought in over $1 billion in additional tax revenue in 2012.

Now just imagine what would happen if the federal government took similar actions, and closed corporate tax loopholes that allow giant transnational corporations like Apple to hide billions in profits overseas.

According to Apple, the giant tech company paid around $6 billion in taxes in 2012, and will probably pay around $7 billion in taxes for 2013.

But as multiple tax experts and lawmakers have said, Apple should be paying a lot more in taxes to our government.

After all, it's one of America's most profitable companies. In 2013 alone, it took home $37 billion in profits on $171 billion in revenue.

So, how is Apple making so much, but paying so little in taxes to support our nation?

It's hiding a lot of its money offshore.

Apple has a bunch of subsidiaries in Ireland for example, where that company has a maximum tax rate of just 2%, compared to the 35% maximum tax rate for corporations in the U.S.

It funnels money through those subsidiaries, so that it never touches U.S. shores, and can't be taxed.

According to reports, between 2009 and 2012, Apple hid at least $74 billion in profits from U.S. taxes by using those Irish subsidiaries.

And as CNN Money points out, Apple keeps its profits offshore for as long as possible, because companies owe U.S. tax on profits when they bring them back from overseas.

The moment that money comes back to the United States, Apple would have to pay the U.S. corporate tax on it minus any foreign taxes already paid.

Right now, Apple has around $102 billion held in offshore bank accounts, and the company has said that it doesn't plan to bring that money back to the U.S. anytime soon.

As Senator Carl Levin put it, "Apple sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be a tax resident nowhere."

Of course Apple isn't the only giant corporation hiding billions of dollars overseas.

Hundreds of corporations are exploiting those same corporate tax loopholes to avoid paying taxes to our government.

A report from Citizens for Tax Justice found that 30 corporations on the Fortune 500 list each paid zero in income taxes between 2008-2010, even though they made over $180 billion collectively.

But what if we closed those loopholes, shut down offshore banking operations, and forced corporations to pay taxes on all of their profits?

According to the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, proposed last September by Senators Carl Levin, Mark Begich, Shelden Whitehouse, and Jeanne Shaheen, closing offshore corporate tax loopholes would provide nearly $220 billion in additional tax revenues over the next decade.

Back in the 1950's and 1960's, when American businesses were doing just fine, corporate tax revenue was about 6% of GDP. Today, it's just over 1% of GDP.

It's time to return to corporate tax policies that work for both business and America.

If multi-billion dollar corporations like Apple want to make money off We The People, then they should be paying taxes to the U.S.

They can't have it both ways. They can't get rich off of us, and then screw us.

Working-class Americans shouldn't have to face the burden of corporate tax loopholes that are letting corporations off the hook.

Let's bring those offshore trillions back home, and start rebuilding the American economy.



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THIS IS A BLOG!!!



LOOK HOW FOR-PROFIT CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PAYING TAXES!!!!!!!!!

When you have individual entities like Johns Hopkins creating their own banking system for selected members while they are working Wall Street with all of the fraud and corruption bringing the economy to a crash.....you are creating a separate system of winners and losers. 

Federal and State Credit Unions were established to be the banking for low-income people so why do we have the system we have now?  THINK OF THE FHA AND THE STUDENT LOAN PROGRAM THAT WAS ALWAYS MEANT TO HELP LOW-INCOME AND BECAME CORRUPTED BY PUBLIC PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS AS WE SEE NOW IN THE CREDIT UNION BANKING INDUSTRY.

Congress passed in 2009 the right of credit unions to use predatory lending interest rates as a course of business.


As you see below this Act extends the ability of these corporate Credit Unions to act as banks and invest large amounts of leveraged funds just as Wall Street does.  It also protects these credit unions from the actions of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.....more importantly is that is creates tiered equity in categorizing what is supposed to be a low-income banking system.  THE ENTIRE CREDIT UNION STRUCTURE HAS BEEN CORRUPTED JUST AS WITH FREDDIE AND FANNIE AND SALLY MAE.  AND NO TAXES PAID BECAUSE OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF CREDIT UNIONS......FEDERALLY INSURED THOUGH!

We see the distortion in how these entities do not pay taxes while they contribute to private non-profits that are doing the work of the public sector starved of corporate tax revenue.  Meanwhile, the money invested by these credit unions are going to fund all of this corporate development that everyone hates and actually hurts the economy of the city/state!

Why Don't Credit Unions Pay Taxes?
By Justin PritchardDecember 28, 2010

Credit unions seem just like banks, but there are a few differences.

A major difference (and a criticism that banks regularly raise) is that credit unions don't pay taxes -- they're not-for-profit organizations.  Why do they qualify for this treatment?

The Financial Brand discusses credit unions' tax-exempt status in a recent posting.  If you're curious, you can find out why credit unions get a tax break.  You'll even learn about a few misconceptions, such as the claim that credit unions get a tax break because they're "member owned."

The takeaway seems to be that credit unions have an advantage because they contribute to society in ways that Congress wants to encourage. OH REALLY???????
The tax code is not just about taking your money, it's also designed to promote and discourage certain types of behavior.


Federal Credit Union Act  Federal Credit Union Act

The Federal Credit Union Act (FCUA) is the source of authority for all federally chartered credit unions and governs the coverage and terms of insured accounts at all federally insured credit unions. It also determines the structure and duties of NCUA. The Congress of the United States found the following, and embodied the same in the Federal Credit Union Act of 1934 (Amended):

The American credit union movement began as a cooperative effort to serve the productive and provident credit needs of individuals of modest means.

Credit unions continue to fulfill this public purpose, and current members and membership groups should not face divestiture from the financial services institution of their choice as a result of recent court action.

To promote thrift and credit extension, a meaningful affinity and bond among members, manifested by a commonality of routine interaction, shared and related work experiences, interests, or activities, or the maintenance of an otherwise well understood sense of cohesion or identity is essential to the fulfillment of the public mission of credit unions.

Credit unions, unlike many other participants in the financial services market, are exempt from Federal and most State taxes because they are member-owned, democratically operated, not-for-profit organizations generally managed by volunteer boards of directors and because they have the specified mission of meeting the credit and savings needs of consumers, especially persons of modest means.

Improved credit union safety and soundness provisions will enhance the public benefit that citizens receive from these cooperative financial services institutions.

The entire text of the Act is here: The Federal Credit Union Act (Revised April 2013)

Summary: H.R.2572 — 113th Congress (2013-2014) There is one summary for this bill.

Bill summaries are authored by CRS.

Shown Here:
Introduced in House (06/28/2013) Regulatory Relief for Credit Unions Act of 2013 - Amends the Federal Credit Union Act to authorize the National Credit Union Administration Board (NCUAB), if it determines that a regulation issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) would create an undue hardship when applied to credit unions, to: (1) delay the regulation's application to credit unions until the NCUAB determines that it would not create an undue hardship; and (2) modify the regulation as it applies to credit unions, so long as the modification meets CFPB's objective in issuing the regulation.

Authorizes a federal credit union to apply for NCUAB permission to comply with a state law applicable to a state credit union in lieu of applicable federal regulation (if any), for purposes of the credit union's branches located in that state. Limits such permission only to the state for which permission is given. Prohibits a federal credit union from complying with the regulation in any other state in lieu of the applicable federal regulation.

Prohibits a federal credit union, however, from applying for permission to comply with state law if it would conflict with federal limitations on member business loans.

Requires the NCUAB to: (1) implement a two-tier system of net worth ratios for credit unions, consisting of a risk-based net worth ratio and a net worth capital ratio; and (2) establish standards for leverage ratios to the same extent as are provided for net worth ratios.

Redefines net worth to include components of equity under generally accepted accounting principles not included in retained earnings.

Increases the net worth ratios for well-capitalized, adequately capitalized, undercapitalized, and significantly undercapitalized credit unions.

Directs the NCUAB to design the risk-based net worth requirement to account for material risks applicable to insured credit unions that are taken account of by comparable standards applicable to institutions insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Prohibits the NCUAB from reclassifying an insured credit union into a lower net worth category due solely to interest rate risk, or treat an insured credit union as if it were in a lower net worth category, for reasons not pertaining to its safety and soundness.

Exempts from the requirement of a net worth restoration plan any credit union undercapitalized as a result of a major natural or man-made disaster.

Eliminates the requirement that an insured credit union that is not well-capitalized set aside an earnings-retention amount annually. Authorizes the NCUAB to require an insured credit union that is not well-capitalized, instead, to submit a net worth restoration plan.

Directs the NCUAB to study problems associated with the current prompt corrective action regime.

Amends the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 to require each regulation issued by the NCUAB and the CFPB to include a cost-benefit analysis detailing the estimated cost of compliance compared to its measurable benefit.

Directs the Comptroller General (GAO) to study whether improvements or modernization is needed for the Central Liquidity Facility.

Permits a federal credit union to: (1) purchase and hold for its own account investment grade securities, not exceeding 10% of its total assets; and (2) purchase mortgage servicing rights as an investment, including mortgage servicing rights from other credit unions.

Modifies NCUAB authority to define the extent of share insurance coverage for member accounts where a member holds funds for the use of a nonmember. Requires coverage for an account established by a member to be consistent with FDIC coverage, regardless of the membership status of the owner of funds deposited in an account established by a member.

Amends the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 to authorize a federal banking agency, when it determines that a CFPB regulation would create an undue hardship upon a depository institution the agency regulates, to: (1) delay the regulation's application until the application would not create an undue hardship, and (2) modify the regulation so long as the modification meets the CFPB objective in issuing the regulation.

Requires that: (1) each CFPB regulation applicable to a depository institution include a cost-benefit analysis comparing the estimated cost of compliance with the regulation's measurable benefit, and (2) any information provided by a depository institution for purposes of that analysis be voluntary.


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As you see below Johns Hopkins is a bank.....it operates just like a bank and it uses the deposits to this bank to invest in development here in  Maryland and Baltimore often to its own corporate expansion here and overseas.  HOPKINS IS A CORPORATION AND THIS FEDERAL CREDIT UNION IS NOT NON-PROFIT NOR FEDERAL.

As you see below, Hopkins 'Credit Union' is advertizing for other SELECTED BUSINESSES to join in this 'credit union' that is in fact a bank.  You do not see which businesses are the selected ones.....but you can assume that this is an entire infrastructure of banking in the city that circumvents regulatory law for banking and it is all done tax free.


Offer the Credit Union Benefit to Your Employees Fringe benefits help you attract and retain good employees in today’s competitive employment market and one benefit that provides great value at little or no cost to you is credit union membership for your employees!

Credit unions are not-for-profit financial institutions that tend to offer the same services to consumers as banks, but usually with lower fees and better rates. Individuals who open accounts are members, not"customers," and become part owners of the credit union. A member volunteer Board of Directors, sets policies and helps determine the strategic direction of the Credit Union.

The Johns Hopkins Federal Credit Union (JHFCU) is a full-service financial institution founded in 1971 to serve the Johns Hopkins University employees. Since then, the organization has expanded and today provides members with economical financial services like free checking, free online bill payment with direct deposit*, high-rate savings accounts, low-rate loans, and a convenient, flexible ATM program that includes access to more than 26,000 surcharge-free ATMs!

*JHFCU’s Online Bill Payment service is free with direct deposit provided you pay at least one bill per month. Accounts that become inactive or do not have direct deposit will be charged the monthly fee of $4.95. You must have a JHFCU Checking account to use the bill payment service.

Become a Select Employee Group (SEG) As a business partner, your company can begin to reap the same great benefits that many other Johns Hopkins affiliates have come to value with the Johns Hopkins Federal Credit Union.

How to Get Started 1. Send the following information to our Business Development Specialist by mail or e-mail:

• Company name
• Approximate number of employees
• Brief description of what your organization does
• Website URL (if available)
• Company mailing address
• Your name, title, phone number, best time to call, and e-mail address

2. A JHFCU Business Development Representative will follow up with you within approximately 48 business hours after submission

3. Due to NCUA regulations, the approval time of your application may vary.

Direct Deposit to JHFCU JHFCU members with direct deposit receive many discounts and extra benefits, so we encourage all members to elect direct deposit of their net pay to the Credit Union. If your company offers direct deposit, we ask you to offer direct deposit to JHFCU. JHFCU provides the option of being able to allocate employees’ pay into various accounts (e.g., savings, checking, holiday club) automatically, at no charge, to provide convenient money management.

To sign up for direct deposit, your employees will need our routing number (252076235), their 9-digit JHFCU account number, and will need to indicate whether the net pay should be deposited to checking or savings. If they wish to “split” funds between accounts within JHFCU, they can use our ACH Payroll Deduction Form (PDF).

Current Resources for SEGs Already Being Served by JHFCU At JHFCU we realize that you will need support from us time to time. The information below is intended to be your online resource center. What Is Your Role? The first step in a successful partnership is to make Credit Union services available to your employees. Then we ask that you take an active role in the relationship. We will provide materials and make site visits at your request and convenience. We also ask that you let us know what you need, and help us communicate the Credit Union benefit to your employees.

What Are Your Resources? JHFCU is happy to supply materials and provide support. Just contact your Business Development Representative at the number below, or you can print the following for immediate use.

SEG Representative Tools

• Membership Application
• Custodial Application
• Payroll Deduction Form
• Current Deposit Rate Sheet
• Current Loan Rate Sheet
• Fee Schedule

Contact Information If you have any questions, comments, or concerns abou thet Johns Hopkins Federal Credit Union's benefits to your company, please contact our Business Development Specialist (below). We will be more than happy to help you in any way!

Debbie Johnson
Business Development Specialist
djohnson@jhfcu.org
2027 E. Monument St
Baltimore, MD 21287

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If you look below at the MECU of Baltimore it is tied with Baltimore Development Corporation and we all know that citizens of Baltimore lose more public money with this corporate public private partnership.  All money invested in these development projects are tied to Wall Street leverage, captured public revenue, and development that is killing the communities many of these municipal employees live. 

ERGO.....MECU DOES NOT WORK IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST AND TIES LOW-INCOME PEOPLE'S ACCOUNTS TO LEVERAGE THAT WILL TANK IN AN ECONOMIC COLLAPSE.

I have not yet investigated MECU but everyone with whom I speak use the words corruption when speaking of the organization and Bert Hash.  This is a distorted structure for low-income banking....the money is going to fund all of the corporate/affluent downtown development while MECU uses Catholic Charities as its social contribution.  We like the Daily Bread, but investing in low-income communities before people become homeless would be real social contributions.  Also, Catholic Charities is of course doing the business often of the public sector that would hire and employ these people impoverished from lack of work.  So, using public employee money to fund an organization that is increasingly taking all of the public sector work......

REMEMBER, IT WAS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH THAT IN THE MEDIEVAL DAYS THAT SERVED AS LORD OF THE MASSES WITH THE MEDICI'S HAVING THE WEALTH.  I am not against any religion but I know the value of the public sector and the ability of communities to decide how to allocate money rather than a private non-profit that makes those decisions for you.  THAT IS WHAT SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE IS ABOUT.

I went to look at the financial statement for MECU and the file was unavailable.  It states that its members earned a few million in profits on what I think is a lot of investment.

BOARD MEMBER OF BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION.

Mr. Bert J. Hash, Jr.
President & CEO
Municipal Employees Credit Union of Baltimore, Inc. (MECU)


Founded in 1936, Municipal Employee Credit Union (MECU) of Baltimore, Inc. served the Baltimore Community. Anyone who lives, works, worships, attends school in Baltimore City or is an employee of one of our credit union partners, is eligible to become a member of MECU.

MECU is known as the home of great rates with consistently lower rates on loans and higher rates on deposits than other financial institution in our market. MECU has also returned value to its members as an annual cash bonus every year since 1981. In 2010, MECU returned $4.25 million to its members.

MECU is commited to serving its community and making it a better place to live. All employees participate in community outreach projects that serve organizations ranging from Our Daily Bread to Sandtown Habitat for Humanity. MECU employees are also among the highest contributors to the Combined Charities Campaign.


The increased poverty in Baltimore is created by the elimination of the public sector and all of its oversight making for a predatory fraud and corruption third world governance.  So, we do not want charities becoming our public sector......good paying jobs paid for with what should be corporate tax revenues!


Combined Charity Campaign


If you are a Baltimore City employee or retiree you can support the work of Catholic Charities through the Combined Charity Campaign. By designating your gift to Catholic Charities, or one of our programs, you will be supporting the life-changing work of Maryland's largest private provider of human services, while also helping to achieve your employer's campaign goals.

With a staggering increase in the demand for services and the complex nature of those demands, your support is critical. Our extensive breadth of services are a lifeline for people facing hardship. Catholic Charities helps meet the urgent needs of our most vulnerable neighbors while providing a continuum of care, which takes people from crisis to self-sufficiency, and improves the lives of more than 160,000 Marylanders in need each year. 

Through the Maryland Charity Campaign you can support the work of Catholic Charities and these Catholic Charities programs serving Maryland's most vulnerable:

Catholic Charities of Baltimore, Designate #8111

Our Daily Bread Employment Center Fund, Designate #7982

My Sister's Place Women's Center Fund, Designate #7977

Sarah's House Fund, Designate #7983



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If you look below you see one state......West Virginia and all of the businesses allowed the categorization.......Federal Credit Union.  The reason I look into this is that in Baltimore, our global corporation Johns Hopkins has a Federal Credit Union.....banking done tax free for all its employees world-wide.  It is their own corporate bank and they pay no taxes and use all the money deposited for investments in the stock market.  This is what the US Post Office will become if it is left to become a bank in order to support its business of simply delivering mail.

As a union supporter I want union members to have benefits but do they qualify as Federal Credit Unions?  NO PRIVATE UNIONS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE FEDERAL CREDIT UNIONS!  PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE FEDERAL CREDIT UNIONS ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE NOW CORPORATIONS.  We are now having to question whether state universities now made into corporations earning profit from research can be Federal or State Credit Unions!

Public School systems being privatized with private charter chains called 'public'.......ARE NOT PUBLIC AND SHOULD NOT HAVE FEDERAL OR STATE CREDIT UNIONS!  Public hospitals that are now working for profit......NOT ELIGIBLE.

FEDERAL AND STATE EMPLOYEES SHOULD HAVE A FEDERAL AND STATE CREDIT UNION THAT ALLOWS THEM TO BANK TAX-FREE.  That is what public banking is all about.  So, do we need the Post Office doing public banking when we simply need to use RULE OF LAW TO GET THOSE AGENCIES NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF PUBLIC BANKING OUT OF IT?  Wait.......the Post Office has a Federal Credit Union!!!!!




Division of Financial Institutions > Banking > Institutions > Federal Credit Unions Federal Credit Unions "CWV

Tel CWV Tel"Clarksburg, Phone: (304) 623-6879 83 Plumbers & Steamfitters Federal Credit UnionWheeling, Phone: 304-232-0181167TH TFR Federal Credit UnionMartinsburg, Phone: 304-267-2944Alderson FCIAlderson, Phone: 304-445-2901Alloy Federal Credit UnionAlloy, Phone: 304-779-2773Applachian Power Employees Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-696-1399Atlantic Greyhound Federal Credit UnionCharleston, Phone: 304-344-3605Bayer Heritage Federal Credit UnionProctor, Phone: 304-455-4029Berkeley County Public School Federal Credit UnionMartinsburg, Phone: 304-263-0902Bluefield Municipal Employees Federal Credit UnionBluefield, Phone: 304-327-2401Cabway Telco Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-522-7752CAMC Federal Credit UnionCharleston, Phone: 304-388-5700Capital Federal Credit Union(merged with 167th FCU in 2010)Martinsburg, Phone: 304-267-1544CCMH Federal Credit UnionParkersburg, Phone: 304-424-2255Charleston Federal Credit UnionCharleston, Phone: 304-347-3393Charleston Newspapers Federal Credit Union (merged w/Members Choice WV FCU 6/18/11)Charleston, Phone: 304-348-4891Charleston PostalCharleston, Phone: 304-746-5111CHA-TEL Federal Credit UnionCharleston, Phone: 304-344-3330CHHE Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-526-2097City of Clarksburg Federal Credit UnionClarksburg, Phone: 304-624-1678City of Fairmont Federal Credit UnionFairmont, Phone: 304-366-4200Clarksburg Area Postal Employees Federal Credit UnionClarksburg, Phone: 304-623-4794Eagle Can Employees Federal Credit UnionWellsburg, Phone: 304-737-9865Eastern Panhandle Federal Credit UnionMartinsburg, Phone: 304-263-2887Element Federal Credit Union (formerly WV United FCU, changed 10/16/2012)Charleston, Phone: 304-721-4145Fairmont Federal Credit UnionFairmont, Phone: 304-363-5320Fayette Federal Credit UnionMount Hope, Phone: 304-877-5405FCU_NameFCU_City, Phone: FCU_PhoneFirst Choice America Community FCUWeirton, Phone: 304-748-8622First Priority FCUHuntington, Phone: 304-522-9450Hancock School Federal Credit UnionWeirton, Phone: 304-723-5605Harrison County Federal Credit UnionNutter Fort, Phone: 304-622-3780Hope Federal Credit UnionClarksburg, Phone: 304-623-8077Huntington C & O Railway Employees FCUHuntington, Phone: 304-522-7998Huntington West VA Fire Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-523-8321Huntingtonized Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-528-2400IBEW 141 Federal Credit UnionWheeling, Phone: 304-277-2201IBEW 317 Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-522-4871IBEW 466 Federal Credit UnionCharleston, Phone: 304-344-0390IBEW 968 Federal Credit UnionParkersburg, Phone: 304-424-6666Kemba Charleston Federal Credit UnionDunbar, Phone: 304-768-5700Logan County School Employees Credit UnionLogan, Phone: 304-752-1513Long Reach Federal Credit UnionFriendly, Phone: 304-652-8363Mail Pouch FCU ceased operation 6/30/2013 merged w/First Choice America Community FCU 7/1/2013Wheeling, Phone: 304-233-9227Marion County School Employees Credit UnionFairmont, Phone: 304-366-2390Marshall County Federal Credit UnionMoundsville, Phone: 304-843-1179Martinsburg VA Center Federal Credit UnionKearneysville, Phone: 304-263-3454McDowell County Federal Credit UnionWelch, Phone: 304-862-3144Members Choice Federal Credit UnionCharleston, Phone: 304-346-5242Mercer County WV Teachers Credit UnionBluefield, Phone: 304-325-9753Metro Community Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-697-4652Mildred Mitchell-Bateman Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-525-7801Mingo County Education Federal Credit UnionWilliamson, Phone: 304-235-7152Monroe County School Employees Credit UnionUnion, Phone: 304-772-5127Morgantown AES Federal Credit UnionMorgantown, Phone: 304-599-9600Mountain Heritage Federal Credit UnionParkersburg, Phone: 304-424-7256Mountain Valley Federal Credit UnionNitro, Phone: 304-755-7393National Employees Federal Credit UnionBluefield, Phone: 304-325-9753Natrium Employees Federal Credit UnionProctor, Phone: 304-455-6719Novamont EmployeesKenova, Phone: 304-453-5935O. F. Toalston Federal Credit UnionLogan, Phone: 304-792-2356Ohio County Public School Federal Credit UnionWheeling, Phone: (304) 243-0499One Community Federal Credit UnionParkersburg, Phone: 304-485-4066PACE Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-399-5772People's Federal Credit UnionNitro, Phone: 304-722-2274Pioneer West Virginia FCUCharleston, Phone: 304-348-6648Preston Federal Credit UnionKingwood, Phone: 304-329-2522Putnam School Employees Federal Credit UnionEleanor, Phone: 304-586-3900Raleigh County Educators Federal Credit UnionBeckley, Phone: 304-256-4600Raleigh County Federal Credit UnionBeckley, Phone: 304-253-6279Randolph County School Employees Federal Credit UnionElkins, Phone: 304-636-9150Ravenswood Federal Credit UnionRavenswood, Phone: 304-273-6100RMH Federal Credit Union(merged into Bayer Heritage FCU effective 6/30/12)Glen Dale, Phone: 304-845-3211Romney Federal Credit UnionRomney, Phone: 304-822-3116South Berkeley FCU(merged into Bayer Heritage FCU 10/1/12)Martinsburg, Phone: 304-263-8899South Charleston Employees Federal Credit UnionSouth Charleston, Phone: 304-720-5600Star USA Federal Credit UnionCharleston, Phone: 304-357-2319Steel Crete Employees FCU(merged with Tin Mill EmployeesFCU 3/1/13)Weirton, Phone: 304-394-5930Strip Steel Community Federal Credit UnionWeirton, Phone: 304-748-6622Teamsters Local 697 Federal Credit UnionWheeling, Phone: 304-232-9840Telbec Federal Credit UnionBeckley, Phone: 304-255-9815The Mac Federal Credit Union(merged with Pioneer FCU 5/2011)South Charleston, Phone: 304-766-3415The United Federal Credit UnionMorgantown, Phone: 800-458-3712Tin Mill Employees Federal Credit UnionWeirton, Phone: 304-748-5811Tri AG WV Federal Credit UnionMorgantown, Phone: 304-292-3798Tri-State Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-526-1047Trivantage Community Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304 697-2300Twin Oaks Federal Credit UnionApple Grove, Phone: 304-576-4056U S Employees Federal Credit UnionFairmont, Phone: 304-366-0910Union Trades Federal Credit UnionParkersburg, Phone: 304-485-1421United Hospital Center Federal Credit UnionBridgeport, Phone: 304-624-2517Universal Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-697-2919Valley Bell Federal Credit UnionCharleston, Phone: 304-344-2511Valley Board Federal Credit UnionHalltown, Phone: 304-725-2076W VA Arng Technicians(changed name 7/2010 to WV Nat'l Guard FCU)Charleston, Phone: 304 561-6301WAYCOSE Federal Credit UnionHuntington, Phone: 304-429-1213WEE Federal Credit UnionParkersburg, Phone: 304-420-9663West Virginia Federal Credit UnionSouth Charleston, Phone: 304-744-7604Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel Federal Credit UnionWheeling, Phone: 304-234-2264Whetelco Federal Credit UnionWheeling, Phone: 304-232-8123Willow Island Federal Credit UnionSt. Marys, Phone: 304-684-0018Wood County Community Federal Credit UnionParkersburg, Phone: 304-865-2361WV National Guard Federal Credit UnionCharleston, Phone: 304-342-2422WVU Employees Federal Credit UnionMorgantown, Phone: 304-293-5737



THIS IS A BLOG!!


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Obama, O'Malley, and Rawlings-Blake have given corporations so many tax breaks and allowed so much tax evasion that government coffers are empty and corporate profits soaring!  Corporations not only do not pay taxes.....they are writing our public policy with 'donations' to private non-profits that are then run by the donating corporation....all for another tax write-off.  You cannot have two decades of these Enterprise Zone policies that starve coffers for decades in the future and not be forced to soak the public for money.  So, to live in Baltimore and MD the middle/working class have to pay all kinds of taxes and fees to subsidize corporate and wealth welfare.

These are neo-liberal policies and not democratic ones and as we saw with Ehrlich...government coffers are so starved of corporate and wealth revenue that even republicans have to soak citizens to run the government.  So, republicans and neo-liberals have the same policies in that regard.  It's called a patronage/peasant taxation model from the middle ages.

Billions of dollars are lost to these private contracting consultants and outsourcing to fraud and corruption further emptying coffers.  The answer is to rebuild white collar criminal agencies in the state and city and elect a labor and justice candidate not affiliated with the crony democratic machine controlled by neo-liberals. The lost revenue is not sustainable.

Do you notice all the concern is how the businesses will be affected and not the customers actually paying the tax.  One of the most common comments by Baltimore politicians on anything involving


Mayor seeks new taxi tax compromise as revenues lag Some companies have refused to pay tax under current structure

Taxi drivers made their case in front of the Baltimore City Council for a delay in the controversial taxi tax. (Kim Hairston and Barbara Haddock Taylor/Baltimore Sun video)

By Kevin Rector, The Baltimore Sun 6:00 a.m. EST, February 6, 2014

Changes proposed by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake for Baltimore's controversial and so-far unsuccessful taxi tax drew mixed reviews from city taxi and livery firms.

The proposed amendments to the tax, to be introduced before the City Council today, would switch the levy from 25 cents per passenger to 35 cents per trip for taxis starting July 1.

The city implemented the tax Oct. 1, but many taxi operators simply ignored it, with some complaining and refusing to pay it. Others only began complying after they were allowed to pass the cost on to customers.

Expected to generate more than $100,000 a month on average, the tax has produced just $21,000 in revenue for the city through Wednesday.

Rawlings-Blake said she sees the proposed changes as a "compromise" with private industry leaders based on a shared conclusion that they can handle a tax if it is easier to comply with.

She played down the idea that compromising on an established tax would set a bad precedent, giving companies the impression they can fight unpopular taxes by refusing to pay them.

"While that's a concern, my bigger concern is that I show a willingness to be flexible and to work with the industry," she said.

Dwight Kines, a spokesman for Veolia Transportation, which operates about 550 Yellow, Checker and Sun cabs in the city — or about half the city's fleet — said he welcomes most of the changes.

"Believe me, there are all kinds of advantages of a per-trip fee over a per-passenger fee," he said.

The change will make it easier for companies to check if drivers are collecting the tax honestly, and easier for drivers to pass the charge onto customers without confrontations, Kines said.

The proposed changes would also extend the 35-cent per trip levy to new companies such as Uber and Lyft. Some taxi drivers complained that the months-old tax made them less competitive in Baltimore's changing livery landscape, where passengers are increasingly turning to phone apps and other new technologies to arrange rides.

The changes would also set the fee for limousine and for-hire sedan companies at $1.50 per trip.

Mark Thistel, president of Mount Washington-based sedan service FreedomCar and a leading opponent of the existing tax, called the new rate unmanageable.

"I will be at a competitive disadvantage that's three times bigger than what I thought it would be," Thistel said. The proposed "cost" of shifting to a per-trip model "vastly outweights the fruits of the victory."

"This is a counter proposal that's so onerous, so appalling, that it's designed to make people like me say, 'OK, the original idea wasn't so bad after all,'" said Thistel, who said he participated in talks with the administration but sees the proposal as a snub.

The new per-trip rates would apply starting in July, to give taxi and limousine companies time to work out the changes with the Public Service Commission, which regulates the industry. Uber and Lyft would immediately be required to begin paying the existing tax, officials said.

Neither Uber nor Lyft responded to a request for comment.

Andrew Smullian, the mayor's deputy chief of legislative and government affairs, said the proposals are the product of "a lot of time and a lot of back-and-forth" talks with council members and industry leaders.

The administration's amendments would subsume another bill, filed by Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke, that sought to retroactively delay the original taxi tax in order to give taxi companies more time to comply.

Smullian said estimates show the new proposed tax structure will raise a similar amount of revenue as the existing tax, which was forecast to bring in $1.3 million a year. That money, part of Rawlings-Blake's 10-year financial plan for the city, was intended to offset cuts to city property taxes and pay for school improvements and removal of blight.

Rawlings-Blake said the city will continue to pursue companies that haven't paid owed taxes to date.

The mayor said she believes some companies were "hedging their bets" by not paying the tax, hoping Clarke's bill to retroactively delay it would pass. The new tax structure, if passed, will likely result in more payments being made, she said.

The changes will be considered during a Finance Committee hearing on Clarke's bill today, officials said.

Clarke said she may try to change when the new per-trip structure goes into effect, but she is generally happy with the mayor's changes.

She also said the problems with the existing tax should never have made it into law.

"The administration and the City Council both need to spend longer, before legislation is introduced, negotiating reasonable approaches to any fees or taxes," she said. "I put myself in that category."

Councilman Carl Stokes, chair of the Finance Committee, said he is also in favor of the changes because they make the tax "fairer and easier."
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Your state taxes going right to the business you work for?????  YOU BETCHA!!!!!!



Taxed by the boss

By David Cay Johnston April 12, 2012

Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers – and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.

The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid.

General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors and AMC Theatres enjoy deals to keep state taxes deducted from their workers’ paychecks, the report shows. Foreign companies also enjoy such arrangements, including Electrolux, Nissan, Toyota and a host of Canadian, Japanese and European banks, Good Jobs First says.

Why do state governments do this? Public records show that large companies often pay little or no state income tax in states where they have large operations, as this column has documented. Some companies get discounts on property, sales and other taxes. So how to provide even more subsidies without writing a check? Simple. Let corporations keep the state income taxes deducted from their workers’ paychecks for up to 25 years.

It was not always this way. Letting companies keep their workers’ state taxes apparently began in Kentucky two decades ago as a way to retain jobs.

Last July when I wrote about six big companies that pocket Illinois state taxes I knew there was more to this. But I had no idea how pervasive these diversions were until I read an advance copy of the 39-page report by Good Jobs First.



CORPORATE SOCIALISM

Deals cut with the states over the past two decades diverted $5.5 billion from public purposes to private gain, the report says. Close to $700 million more was diverted last year, Good Jobs First estimates.

New Jersey approved $73.2 million in new deals in 2011 on top of $178 million diverted that year alone under previous deals. I calculate that at nearly $80 per household in corporate welfare based on New Jersey’s 3.1 million households.

These deals typify corporate socialism, in which business gains are privatized and costs socialized. They also mean government picks winners and losers, interfering with competitive markets. Leaders in both parties embrace these giveaways because they draw campaign donations from corporate interests and votes from people who do not understand that they are subsidizing huge companies.

Michael Press, a Connecticut consultant on tax incentives, says such deals, however troubling, are an inevitable result of the U.S. Constitution setting up competition between the states.

“In an ideal world we would not provide any corporate subsidies,” Press told me. “It looks like corruption. But if you do it right, if you only target those companies whose behavior you change to create jobs or keep jobs in your state then these targeted temporary arrangements are cheaper – much cheaper – and can be more effective than an overall reduction in tax rates.”

The mission of Good Jobs First is making economic development subsidies accountable and effective. In years of working with their data I have always found it sound. While Greg LeRoy, Good Jobs First’s founder, has rooted out all sorts of hidden subsidies over the years, he emphasizes that he is not inherently hostile to them, only to secrecy, waste and what he calls job piracy and job blackmail.

“Job piracy” occurs when one state diverts taxes to lure an employer across state lines. AMC Entertainmentannounced a deal last year to move its corporate headquarters from Kansas City, Mo., to a nearby Kansas suburb. In return, Good Jobs First said, Kansas will let the multiplex chain keep $47 million of state income taxes withheld from its workers’ paychecks, a drain on public finances that did not create any jobs, but does enrich the Wall Street firms that own AMC including arms of J. P. Morgan, Apollo Management, Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group. AMC declined to answer my questions.

“Job blackmail” occurs when a company threatens to close a plant unless it gets tax money.

In Illinois, the law requires companies to threaten to leave before they can keep taxes withheld from paychecks. Motorola Mobility, now being acquired by Google; the truck maker Navistar; the German manufacturer Continental Tire, and three auto makers – Chrysler, Ford and Mitsubishi – get to keep $346.8 in taxes over 10 years because they threatened to leave Illinois. Navistar can pocket $62.1 million even if it fires a quarter of its Illinois workforce, its contract shows. A recent deal gives Sears $150 million, Good Jobs First reported.



PROMISES OF JOBS

Promising to retain jobs can be lucrative. General Electric invested $126 million updating part of its Ohio operations. In return, GE gets a tax credit equal to $115.3 million of its worker taxes, recovering 92 percent of its investment. A sweet deal for GE, but not its competitors.

Gary Sheffer, GE’s top spokesman, said the company told its workers about the deal. In all, he said, GE is investing around $300 million in Ohio and “the resulting taxes the state will receive will far exceed the tax credits provided to GE.”

That response, I think, misses the point – GE should pay its own bills without taking welfare.

Many figures in the Good Jobs First report are from disclosure reports some states make. Others come from news accounts and company announcements.

Total revenue losses are higher than the report states. First, some states hide the costs. Phil Mattera, the research director at Good Jobs First, said he lists the cost as zero for states that hide the numbers.

Good Jobs First wants to end these diversions, but failing that recommends mandatory disclosure to the workers as the first reform. I concur. It’s the first step in ending corporate welfare as we know it.




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If you live in a neo-liberal state like Maryland you know corporate tax is now in the income column of the accounting ledger with tax breaks galore and no tax collection oversight. Now, our Maryland Assembly leader shouts to lower them more just as Obama and neo-liberals in Congress are pushing.....

PROGRESSIVE TAX REFORM WILL HAVE TO DOUBLE TAXES IN ORDER TO RECOVER MASSIVE FRAUD!


Monday, 13 January 2014 08:41

Abolish the Corporate Income Tax? Four Reasons Why It Should Be Doubled

PAUL BUCHHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

A recent New York Times article by economist Laurence J. Kotlikoff suggested that we "Abolish the Corporate Income Tax." His case for doing so, he explains, "requires constructing a large-scale computer simulation model of the United States economy as it interacts over time with other nations' economies." The computer determined that the tax cut would be "self-financing to a significant extent."

Big business hints at serious consequences if we don't comply with this lower tax demand. But abolishing the corporate income tax is not likely to reverse the long history of harmful corporate behavior. There are several good reasons why.


1. Corporations Have a Proven Record of Spending Tax Breaks on Themselves

The evidence comes from 2004, when a "repatriation holiday" allowed corporations to bring their profits home at a much-reduced tax rate. But they used over 90% of the money to "enrich shareholders and executives" by paying dividends and buying back their own stock. At the same time, they cut jobs and research spending. A Senate subcommittee called the whole affair a "failed tax policy" that shouldn't be repeated.

The increasing level of stock buybacks epitomizes the transition from corporate responsibility to corporate self-indulgence. Stock buybacks are a means by which major corporations seek to manipulate the market prices of their own shares, thereby enriching executives with plentiful stock options. The buyback surge is dramatic. In 1981, 292 major corporations spent less than 3 percent of their combined net income on buybacks, but by 2007 the very same 292 corporations were spending over 82 percent of their net income repurchasing their own stock.


2. They Only Pay Half of Their Tax Obligation

Mr. Kotlikoff claims that "the United States may well have the highest effective marginal corporate income tax rate of any developed country." But the effective rate in the U.S. is not high at all, and it keeps dropping. For over 20 years, from 1987 to 2008, corporations paid an average of 22.5% in federal taxes on their profits. Since the recession, this has dropped to an outlandishly low 10% -- even though their profits have doubled in less than ten years. Even taking into account IRS figures that reduce taxable income to about two-thirds of profits, their 10% tax rate increases to only 15%. They should be paying over twice as much.

U.S. Office of Management (OMB) figures confirm the steady decline in Corporate Income Tax as a Share of GDP, from 4 to 6 percent in the 1950s to 1 percent in 2009, and then back to 1.6 percent in 2012. Today's rate is less than one-half of what it was in our country's most productive era.


3. They've Stopped Investing in America

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides job data by size of business. A review of job gains and losses reveals that since the recession:

--Almost 4 million jobs have been lost, almost all at companies with less than 50 employees or more than 1,000 employees.

--Only 2% of the jobs were lost at medium-sized companies (100 to 999 employees).

While small companies have been hit hardest by the recession, large corporations have continued to accumulate massive profits, and yet they're not using their immense gains for new initiatives. A stunning graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve shows that business is investing much less in America. Instead, as a National Bureau of Economic Research study confirmed, startups and young firms are of primary importance to U.S. job creation.


4. Their Vision of Tax-Free Prosperity Is a Delusion

Mr. Kotlikoff cites the "Irish Miracle" of the 1980s, which led to "a massive inflow of capital, with over 1,000 multinationals setting up shop." The authors of a New York Times article explain, "Simply put, the Irish miracle was a mirage driven by clever use of tax-haven rules and a huge credit boom that permitted real estate prices and construction to grow quickly before declining ever more rapidly." In other words, a bubble.

Without tax revenue, Ireland turned to austerity measures, some of the toughest in Europe, while the wealth of the boom years flowed upward to a small minority. The process should be familiar to us. Paul Krugman notes that Ireland collapsed "By being just like us, only more so. Like its near-namesake Iceland, Ireland jumped with both feet into the brave new world of unsupervised global markets."


U.S. corporations need to pay for the many years of employee productivity and public research that built their trillion-dollar industries. Perhaps a minimum tax on U.S. income, or a return to the public on their use of infrastructure and government research, or a minimum investment for job creation. But reducing their taxes would just legitimize their refusal to meet their obligations.





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THAT'S WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT.  IF CORPORATIONS DO NOT PAY TAXES, THE PEOPLE WILL BE SOAKED WITH FEES AND TAXES.  IT IS NOT ONLY TEXAS AND REPUBLICANS.....MARYLAND IS DOING THE SAME THING AND THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS!  Do you know that Maryland ships in much of its workforce from these Right to Work states? It is the deregulation of corporations that make for the fraud and corruption that drains economies.  It is global markets that take away jobs!


'Firstly, Patrick Werner is the State Director of Missouri for Americans for Prosperity. Everything in the article is a blatant lie. Patrick talks about how Texas and Kansas have great business climates., but guess what, if you are an individual, taxes and fees kill you.

He also talks about "Worker Freedom". Don't let him fool you. What he is talking about is Right-to-Work (For Less). He says that "workers can bring home more of their paycheck," but what he fails to mention is it will still be less that what you were making before this so called "progress." Since members would not be paying dues, there would be no-one financially able to collectively bargain and advocate for workers, then wages will go down. We will all be working for next to nothing.

When you hear worker freedom, or workplace freedom, be sure you are letting people know it is nothing more than Right-to-Work (For Less). This name-game that ALEC and Americans for Prosperity is insulting. They think they can pull one over on us. We must have a united front against these economic bullies'.

HERE IS A CONSERVATIVE RIGHT TO WORK THINK TANK TELLING YOU JUST THE POLICY FILLING MARYLAND RIGHT NOW!


Guest column: Time to restore economic success

Tuesday, December 31, 2013
By Patrick Werner

What do I wish for in 2014? No MO excuses! 2014 needs to be a time of bold actions, policy solutions and leadership. While our elected leaders jump through hoops every time a company utters the word "jobs," the reality is that Missouri's stagnant economy is trapped by Gov. Nixon and the state legislature's lack of vision.

Across the nation, forward-thinking governors and legislative bodies are passing reforms to reverse their states' decline, spur job growth, reduce wasteful spending and increase revenues. Americans for Prosperity -- Missouri is providing a "Path to Prosperity" to educate lawmakers about the demonstrated reforms that can move our state forward. The following examples show how the Show-Me state could achieve real progress through a comprehensive approach of free-market policy solutions from states like Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina and Kansas.

Just this year, Indiana passed massive tax reforms which displaced Texas on the top 10 most competitive state business tax climates, as ranked by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. That same index saw Kansas move from 26th to 20th and predicts that North Carolina could move from 44th to 17th in coming years, as tax reforms are put into effect. These competitive advantages provide an incentive for entrepreneurs to start and grow their businesses and allow workers to keep more of their paychecks.

Lower taxes alone are not the only secret to a strong economy. Promoting worker freedom, for example, encourages companies to build strong firms with happy, hardworking employees. Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reveals that right-to-work states enjoy nearly double the job growth of non-right-to-work states. That's why Indiana passed right-to-work in 2012, making it the 23rd state to do so and joining Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa in placing workers above union bosses.

Reducing regulatory burdens on businesses and its citizens is another example of free market solutions to growing a state economy. That's why Florida Gov. Rick Scott established an executive order that has resulted in 2,600 state rules and regulations being streamlined, reduced or eliminated. Small business owners tell us all the time if you just get government out of the way they will create jobs.

Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida and Indiana have demonstrated that cutting spending, reducing regulations, lowering taxes and reforming health care, education and labor are essential to our long-term success as individuals and as a nation. As more states embrace policies that promote economic freedom, the federal government and Missouri must do the same.

Gov. Brownback also said when he became the governor of Kansas "that he didn't want to manage a state in slow decline." Gov. Nixon's agenda last year of increasing spending while rejecting the first tax cut in nearly 100 years is a formula for managing a state in slow decline.

Let there be no doubt, Missouri is currently a state in slow decline. In 2012, Missouri's gross domestic product grew slower than half of the states including Indiana and Texas. Over the last decade, Missouri's population grew slower than the majority of states. It seems our friends and neighbors have decided that it's time to leave for more prosperous states.

Missouri is not without options for restoring economic success. Our Path to Prosperity highlights various policy reforms that other states have used to move their economies forward. It's time for Gov. Nixon and our legislators to embrace a long term vision for a free and prosperous Missouri.

Patrick Werner is the Missouri State Director of Americans for Prosperity.

© Copyright 2013 Southeast Missourian. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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This is what I will do if elected President!  Please do not be afraid to use heavy taxation on corporations in your state.  Besides revenue, what heavy taxation does is say-----IF YOU DO NOT LIKE IT----LEAVE AND WE WILL GROW SMALL AND REGIONAL BUSINESSES TO REPLACE YOU!  That is what I hope Hollande was thinking!


France passes 75% 'millionaire's tax' Thomson Reuters Posted: Dec 29, 2013 11:41 AM ET Last Updated: Dec 29, 2013 12:00 PM ET

Activists of "Sauvons les Riches", (Save The Richs) carrying posters reading 'Tax Revolution.' The new tax on the rich will be a 50 per cent levy on the portion of wages exceeding 1 million euros paid in 2013 and 2014. Including social contributions, its rate will effectively remain roughly 75 per cent. (Francois Mori/The Associated Press)



France's Constitutional Council gave the green light on Sunday to a 'millionaire's tax', to be levied on companies that pay salaries of more than one million euros, or about $1.4 million, a year.

The measure, introduced in line with a pledge by President Francois Hollande to make the rich do more to pull France out of crisis, has infuriated business leaders and soccer clubs, which at one point threatened to go on strike.

It was originally designed as a 75 per cent tax to be paid by high earners on the part of their incomes exceeding one million euros, but the council rejected this, saying 66 per cent was the legal maximum for individuals.

French President Francois Hollande had to re-work his original tax plan. (Christophe Ena/The Associated Press)

The Socialist government has since reworked the tax to levy it on companies instead, raising the ire of entrepreneurs.

Under its new design, which the Council found constitutional, the tax will be an exceptional 50 per cent levy on the portion of wages exceeding 1 million euros paid in 2013 and 2014.

Including social contributions, its rate will effectively remain roughly 75 per cent. The tax will, however, be capped at 5 percent of the company's turnover.

The Council, a court made up of judges and former French presidents, has the power to annul laws if they are deemed to violate the constitution.


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At a time when government coffers are being gutted with corporate fraud and tax evasion, neo-liberals like Cuomo and O'Malley are looking to cut more taxes on wealth even as they gave them a trillion in 2010. Cutting property tax after middle/lower class lose homes to subprime mortgage fraud and damages from the economic collapse----who owns the millions of foreclosed houses now-----the rich.


Cuomo Backs Plan to Ease Array of Tax Burdens and Faces a Fight
Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, center, appeared Tuesday at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury to discuss recommendations from his tax-cutting commission, led by former State Comptroller H. Carl McCall, left, and former Gov. George E. Pataki.

By THOMAS KAPLAN Published: December 10, 2013New York Times

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday embraced a package of proposals to reduce the effects of property, estate and business taxes, setting the stage for a battle over revenue collection that is expected to dominate the New York State legislative session that begins next month.


Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, has said that cutting taxes will be his top priority next year — when he and all state lawmakers will be up for re-election — and his comments on Tuesday were an early preview of how he might seek to accomplish that.

But the contours of a debate also immediately emerged, with questions about the proposals from some of the governor’s allies. A leading business official who has championed Mr. Cuomo’s agenda questioned whether the new plan was fair to New York City taxpayers; labor unions said provisions unfairly favored the rich; and the powerful speaker of the State Assembly said the government’s priority should be providing money for public education.

Mr. Cuomo has tried to grapple with the state’s high-tax burden several times since he took office in 2011; that year, he persuaded the Legislature to limit annual increases in property taxes, and then called lawmakers back to Albany to cut taxes for middle-class earners while creating a new tax bracket for high-income earners. Earlier this year, he won approval of a $350 family tax rebate; the first checks will be sent to homeowners shortly before the fall 2014 election.

Mr. Cuomo on Tuesday traveled to Old Westbury, in highly taxed Nassau County, to unveil and praise a set of tax-cutting recommendations from a panel led by former Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican, and former State Comptroller H. Carl McCall, a Democrat.

“People are still struggling,” Mr. Cuomo told reporters, “and to the extent we can cut taxes and help them and their households, that’s exactly what government should be doing.”

The most striking of the recommendations are two meant to mitigate the effect of high property taxes.

The commission suggested a so-called property tax circuit-breaker — a tax credit for households in which property taxes exceed a certain portion of family income. The proposal drew praise from liberals, who said it would provide help to households that needed it most, but drew criticism from business groups, which said it amounted to shifting the tax burden, not reducing it.

More unusual was a proposal for the state to create a program that would effectively wipe out any increases in local property taxes for two years for homeowners outside of New York City. The state would provide a tax rebate equal to the amount by which the individual homeowner’s tax bill increased.

Only homeowners in localities that stay under the state’s annual cap on property tax increases would be eligible for the rebate. It would not apply to New York City homeowners, because the tax cap does not apply to the city.

The commission proposed raising the exemption from the state’s estate tax to $5.25 million, from $1 million, and lowering the estate tax rate. Several other proposals would cut taxes paid by businesses; one would trim the corporate income tax, and another would change the way banks are taxed.

While legislative leaders and business groups offered praise for some of the commission’s proposals, many recommendations are controversial, and legislators, whose approval is needed for tax law changes, are divided. The panel said its proposals would cost $2 billion annually, including $1 billion that would go to property tax relief for homeowners.

Mr. Cuomo’s aides said by limiting spending in next year’s budget, the state would have a surplus that could be used for tax cuts.

State Senator Dean G. Skelos of Long Island, the leader of the Senate Republicans, who have advocated tax cuts, said, “The plan must go further.” Republicans control the Senate in coalition with a small group of breakaway Democrats.

But the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, suggested a reluctance to set tax-cutting as a priority, saying it was “important that we have the resources necessary to fund vital programs,” like public schools. And, hinting at concern about whether the tax package would be unfair to New York City, he said that any package “should be premised on a principle of fairness to all New Yorkers — city residents, suburbanites and rural residents alike.”

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Taxing The 1%: Why The Top Tax Rate Could Be Over 80%

Posted on 4 December 2013 by admin by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva
Originally published in Voxeu.org 08 December 2011.


The top 1% of US earners now command a far higher share of the country’s income than they did 40 years ago. This article looks at 18 OECD countries and disputes the claim that low taxes on the rich raise productivity and economic growth. It says the optimal top tax rate could be over 80% and no one but the mega rich would lose out.

In the United States, the share of total pre-tax income accruing to the top 1% has more than doubled from less than 10% in the 1970s to over 20% today (CBO 2011 and Piketty and Saez 2003). A similar pattern is true of other English-speaking countries. Contrary to the widely held view, however, globalisation and new technologies are not to blame. Other OECD countries such as those in continental Europe or Japan have seen far less concentration of income among the mega rich (World Top Incomes Database 2011).

At the same time, top income tax rates on upper income earners have declined significantly since the 1970s in many OECD countries, again particularly in English-speaking ones. For example, top marginal income tax rates in the United States or the United Kingdom were above 70% in the 1970s before the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions drastically cut them by 40 percentage points within a decade.

At a time when most OECD countries face large deficits and debt burdens, a crucial public policy question is whether governments should tax high earners more. The potential tax revenue at stake is now very large. For example, doubling the average US individual income tax rate on the top 1% income earners from the current 22.5% level to 45% would increase tax revenue by 2.7% of GDP per year,1 as much as letting all of the Bush tax cuts expire. But, of course, this simple calculation is static and such a large increase in taxes may well affect the economic behaviour of the rich and the income they report pre-tax, the broader economy, and ultimately the tax revenue generated. In recent research (Piketty et al 2011), we analyse this issue both conceptually and empirically using international evidence on top incomes and top tax rates since the 1970s.

Figure 1 shows that there is indeed a strong correlation between the reductions in top tax rates and the increases in top 1% pre-tax income shares from 1975–79 to 2004–08 across 18 OECD countries for which top income share information is available. For example, the United States experienced a 35 percentage point reduction in its top income tax rate and a very large ten percentage point increase in its top 1% pre-tax income share. By contrast, France or Germany saw very little change in their top tax rates and their top 1% income shares during the same period. Hence, the evolution of top tax rates is a good predictor of changes in pre-tax income concentration. There are three scenarios to explain the strong response of top pre-tax incomes to top tax rates. They have very different policy implications and can be tested in the data.

First, higher top tax rates may discourage work effort and business creation among the most talented – the so-called supply-side effect. In this scenario, lower top tax rates would lead to more economic activity by the rich and hence more economic growth. If all the correlation of top income shares and top tax rates documented on Figure 1 were due to such supply-side effects, the revenue-maximising top tax rate would be 57%. This would still imply that the United States still has some leeway to increase taxes on the rich, but that the upper limit has already been reached in many European countries.

Second, higher top tax rates can increase tax avoidance. In that scenario, increasing top rates in a tax system riddled with loopholes and tax avoidance opportunities is not productive either. However, a better policy would be to first close loopholes so as to eliminate most tax avoidance opportunities and only then increase top tax rates. With sufficient political will and international cooperation to enforce taxes, it is possible to eliminate most tax avoidance opportunities, which are well known and documented. With a broad tax base offering no significant avoidance opportunities, only real supply-side responses would limit how high top tax rate can be set before becoming counter-productive.

Third, while standard economic models assume that pay reflects productivity, there are strong reasons to be sceptical, especially at the top of the income distribution where the actual economic contribution of managers working in complex organisations is particularly difficult to measure. In this scenario, top earners might be able to partly set their own pay by bargaining harder or influencing compensation committees. Naturally, the incentives for such ‘rent-seeking’ are much stronger when top tax rates are low. In this scenario, cuts in top tax rates can still increase top income shares – consistent with the observed trend in Figure 1 – but the increases in top 1% incomes now come at the expense of the remaining 99%. In other words, top rate cuts stimulate rent-seeking at the top but not overall economic growth – the key difference with the first, supply-side, scenario.

To tell these various scenarios apart, we need to analyse to what extent top tax rate cuts lead to higher economic growth. Figure 2 shows that there is no correlation between cuts in top tax rates and average annual real GDP-per-capita growth since the 1970s. For example, countries that made large cuts in top tax rates such as the United Kingdom or the United States have not grown significantly faster than countries that did not, such as Germany or Denmark. Hence, a substantial fraction of the response of pre-tax top incomes to top tax rates documented in Figure 1 may be due to increased rent-seeking at the top rather than increased productive effort.

Naturally, cross-country comparisons are bound to be fragile, and the exact results vary with the specification, years, and countries. But by and large, the bottom line is that rich countries have all grown at roughly the same rate over the past 30 years – in spite of huge variations in tax policies. Using our model and mid-range parameter values where the response of top earners to top tax rate cuts is due in part to increased rent-seeking behaviour and in part to increased productive work, we find that the top tax rate could potentially be set as high as 83% – as opposed to 57% in the pure supply-side model.

Up until the 1970s, policymakers and public opinion probably considered – rightly or wrongly – that at the very top of the income ladder, pay increases reflected mostly greed or other socially wasteful activities rather than productive work effort. This is why they were able to set marginal tax rates as high as 80% in the US and the UK. The Reagan/Thatcher revolution has succeeded in making such top tax rate levels unthinkable since then. But after decades of increasing income concentration that has brought about mediocre growth since the 1970s and a Great Recession triggered by financial sector excesses, a rethinking of the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions is perhaps underway. The United Kingdom has increased its top income tax rate from 40% to 50% in 2010 in part to curb top pay excesses. In the United States, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its famous “We are the 99%” slogan also reflects the view that the top 1% may have gained at the expense of the 99%.

In the end, the future of top tax rates depends on the public’s beliefs of whether top pay fairly reflects productivity or whether top pay, rather unfairly, arises from rent-seeking. With higher income concentration, top earners have more economic resources to influence social beliefs (through think tanks and media) and policies (through lobbying), thereby creating some reverse causality between income inequality, perceptions, and policies. We hope economists can shed light on these beliefs with compelling theoretical and empirical analysis.

Figure 1. Changes in top 1% pre-tax income shares and top marginal tax rates since the 1970sNote: The Figure depicts the change in top 1% pre-tax income shares against the change in top marginal income tax rates from 1975-9 to 2004-8 for 18 OECD countries (top tax rates include both central and local individual income tax rates, exact years vary slightly by countries depending on data availability in the World Top Income Database). Source: Piketty et al (2011), Figure 4A.

Figure 2. GDP-per-capita growth rates and top marginal tax rates since the 1970sNote: The Figure depicts the average real GDP-per-capita annual growth rate from 1975-9 to 2004-8 against the change in top marginal tax rates from 1975-9 to 2004-(exact years are the same as Figure 1 and vary slightly by countries). The correlation is virtually zero and insignificant suggesting that cuts in top tax rates do not lead to higher economic growth. Source: Piketty et al (2011), Figure 4B.
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References

• Congressional Budget Office (2011), “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007”, US government Printing Press: Washington DC. Available online at http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/124xx/doc12485/10-25-HouseholdIncome.pdf

• Piketty, Thomas and Emmanuel Saez (2003), “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1):1-39, series updated to 2008 in July 2010, online at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/

• Piketty, Thomas, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva (2011), “Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities“, CEPR Discussion Paper 8675, December.

• The World Top Incomes Database (F Alvaredo, T Atkinson, T Piketty, and E Saez), online at http://g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/topincomes/

This calculation assumes that the top 1% income share is 20%. The top 1% income share peaked at 23.5% in 2007, and then fell to 21% in 2008 and 18% in 2009, at the trough of the recession. In 2010 and 2011, the top 1% income share is very likely to increase again to 20%. Total market income reported for tax purposes is about 60% of GDP (on average from 1999 to 2008). Hence, increasing the top 1% average tax rate by 22.5 points raises .6*.225*.2=2.7% of GDP, or $405 billion given the current 2011 GDP of $15 trillion.

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Raise your hand if you understand that the purpose of this pipeline is moving natural gas from fracking in WVA, OH, and PA to what MD neo-liberals think will be an export PORT in MD..EVERYONE!  This pipeline is just like the midwest XL pipeline in that it promotes export of raw energy from the US and it will be very dangerous for communities built around and/or on top of this pipeline.

As the article states, there will be no oversight just as the state fails to inspect train tracks/ crossings they will not inspect lines that will leak and explode.  We know that natural gas for local consumption can happen by LNG trucking for example.

Liquefied Natural Gas

• Pipelines are not economical for shipping natural gas across oceans, and there are customers in areas not served by pipelines. In these instances, the gas is delivered in a more portable liquid form, known is liquefied natural gas (LNG). LNG takes up 0.002 percent the volume of the gas at home consumption compression level. This is done by either an LNG carrier ship, or by a specialized tanker truck.   Why would your neo-liberal not go with trucking to supply MD with natural gas?  BECAUSE THE GOAL IS TO EXPORT HUGE QUANTITIES THAT CANNOT BE TRUCKED----ERGO, PIPELINES TO THE EXPORT HUB.
  
  

All of this pipeline all across the country will be paid for by Federal taxpayers.  Now, do we need some pipeline-----probably.  Do we need the amount necessary to make natural gas an export-------NO
Gas pipeline project wins federal approval Columbia Gas expects to begin construction next year; line drew opposition in Baltimore and Harford counties

• By Jamie Smith Hopkins, The Baltimore Sun 8:53 p.m. EST, November 25, 2013
  
  
  

Columbia Gas Transmission said Monday that it expects to begin work on a 21-mile pipeline through Baltimore and Harford counties next year after winning federal approval for the $180 million project, which drew heated opposition from neighbors.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authorized the company to extend an existing line from Owings Mills to Fallston, built largely alongside another line. Columbia Gas said the project would improve safety and reliability because it would provide a backup method for transporting natural gas when the other line needed repairs.

"We find that the project should not significantly affect landowners and the surrounding community," FERC commissioners wrote in their Thursday order.

Some community members strongly disagreed.

More than 100 people showed up to a FERC hearing at Oregon Ridge Lodge last year, and those who spoke opposed the project or parts of the route. Five members of Maryland's congressional delegation told the agency they heard environmental and health concerns from many residents.

And state Sen. Bobby Zirkin, arguing that interstate gas lines are unsafe because federal oversight is insufficient, introduced a raft of bills this year in an effort to give Maryland regulators more power over such infrastructure.

Zirkin, a Democrat, condemned the FERC ruling and vowed to keep pushing for change.

"It's a sad thing, but not — unfortunately — a surprising outcome," he said. "The oil and gas industry has greased the wheels in Washington, D.C., and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on lobbying and campaign contributions."

The line would bisect Zirkin's Baltimore County district and run near but not on his property. Columbia Gas insisted earlier this year that Zirkin simply wanted to get the line away from his home, which he denied.

Zirkin said he remains hopeful that the state will "put up roadblocks" to keep the project from moving forward. The pipeline requires a permit from the Maryland Department of the Environment as well as one from the Army Corps of Engineers, Columbia Gas said.

Residents who sent comments to FERC raised concerns ranging from lost property and felled trees to explosions. A Columbia Gas line explosion in Massachusetts last year flattened a strip club, damaged several dozen buildings and injured nearly 20 people. Another in West Virginia — also last year — destroyed several homes and damaged part of Interstate 77.

Brendan C. Neal, manager of community relations and stakeholder outreach for Columbia Pipeline Group, which includes the transmission firm, said "we've never had an incident" on the Maryland pipeline.

"Our pipeline facility in Maryland has been in service for over four decades now," he said.

Federal records dating to 1970 showed no injuries involving the pipeline itself but 11 gas leaks during the 1970s and 1980s, The Baltimore Sun reported last year.

Mike Tomko, a Fallston resident who was among many in his neighborhood with objections to the project, said his concern wasn't about Columbia Gas specifically but a nearby pipeline in general.

"With gas lines, there's never a problem until there's a problem," said Tomko, whose four sons sleep on the side of the house that's closest to the originally proposed route.

Columbia Gas' current plans would not send the pipeline through his neighborhood, he said. But he feels for the people who would be close to it and for those raising other objections.

"There are some very legitimate concerns that were brought up, in Baltimore County especially, on some of the environmental impact that the federal government doesn't seem too concerned about," Tomko said.

The line's route includes Oregon Ridge Park in Cockeysville. But Neal said the company agreed to reroute the pipeline around Gunpowder Falls State Park after the state Department of Natural Resources requested it, delaying the project by a year.

"We feel we've done a very good job with regards to protecting the environment and minimizing any impacts to it," he said.

Neal said Columbia Gas has two pipelines running from the state line in Montgomery County to Owings Mills but just one through the rest of Baltimore County and into Harford. The company wants to extend the other line not to expand the amount of gas it can move but to have a backup when needed, he said.

FERC saw value in that for natural-gas customers. New Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration rules "will require more frequent inspection and maintenance of pipelines, thereby increasing the likelihood of service outages on any given single-line pipeline segment," FERC said.

Columbia Gas expects that the new segment would go into service in 2015, probably in the late fall.

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Please think about Farm Subsidy as this:  We know the mid-west is going to feel the brunt of global warming changes with ever increasing drought and their aquifers are drying.  This farm bill has taxpayers giving these global farming corporations money for these losses they knew were coming even as these global corporations are buying all the fertile land overseas to ship back to the US as imported food.  WAKE UP!!!!!!!



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Do you know Obama and Timothy Geithner crossed Europe a few years ago lobbying AGAINST THESE FINANCIAL INDUSTRY ACCOUNTABILITY POLICIES? Neo-liberals are losing big time in Europe because they are the ones protecting wealth and corporations just like the conservatives. WHY DO WE NOT SEE LABOR AND JUSTICE IN ALL PRIMARIES AGAINST NEO-LIBERALS?


European Progress Toward a Financial Transactions Tax

Monday, 18 November 2013 09:16 By Salvatore Babones, Truthout | News Analysis

The Europeans for financial reform, a coalition of progressive forces, support a Financial Transaction Tax. Picture taken during the first seminar of the Europeans for Financial Reform initiative, Brussels, 15 March 2010. (Photo: Thomas Delsoi / PES PSE )Germany's major political parties have agreed on the need to impose a financial transactions tax (FTT) as part of a broad package of economic reforms to be undertaken by a coalition government.

The German federal elections in September 2013 gave the conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel 311 seats in the German Parliament, just short of a majority. As a result, Merkel is negotiating with other parties to form a governing coalition.

The FTT is very popular in Germany. Eighty-two percent of Germans support an FTT, according to the latest Eurobarometer poll, compared with 64 percent of Europeans as a whole. If Europeans could vote on financial regulation, they would vote for an FTT.

For details on the implications of financial transactions taxes and how they work, see the answers to these Frequently Asked Questions on FTTs.

For good or for bad, Germany is the economic and political heart of the European Union. Europe's largest country and largest economy has an even larger influence on European politics. In many ways, as goes Germany so goes Europe.

In recent years, this has sometimes been a problem, as when Germany demanded harsh austerity measures in response to the Eurozone banking crises of 2008-12.

At other times, German leadership has been a blessing. Germany has consistently used its influence to promote peace and good governance. And since the NSA was caught tapping Merkel's phone, Germany has come out strongly in favor of Internet privacy.

Now, Germany is leading the way toward a European FTT. Until the German coalition negotiations, the FTT had faded from the European agenda in the face of determined opposition from big banks and other business interests.

The popularity of the FTT in Germany made it one of the first planks to be agreed upon in the ongoing coalition negotiations. It may take several weeks or months for Germany's political parties to reach a final agreement. When the new German government takes office, a European FTT likely will be one of its top priorities.

The European Union began moving toward an FTT at the June 2013 Eurozone summit. At that event, European leaders agreed in principle to impose a tax on financial transactions. Their stated goal was to raise money to support European financial institutions.

The main opposition to a European FTT comes from the United Kingdom. The UK government is closely aligned with London's banks and financial firms. These businesses would bear the brunt of any FTT, because it would make them pay tax every time they traded financial instruments like stocks, bonds and derivatives.

Despite its fierce resistance to a European FTT, the UK has had a tax on stock market transactions since 1808. All industrialized countries have or used to have some form of tax on financial transactions. The difference is that a European FTT would be explicitly designed to slow trading in some of the most profitable - but riskiest - areas of finance.

The UK is a member of the European Union but is not a member of the Euro currency group, the so-called Eurozone. Germany is the most important member of the Eurozone, and the European Central Bank is based in Germany's financial capital, Frankfurt. If the new German government pushes for an FTT, the Eurozone is likely to follow.

A European FTT would have an important demonstration effect for the rest of the world, including the United States. To date, global financial regulation has been very weak. Pundits who are opposed to financial regulation claim that globalization makes it impossible to tax and regulate banks across borders.

If Europe successfully implements an FTT, it will demonstrate that it is possible to make banks pay for the privilege of trading financial instruments like stocks, bonds and derivatives. This could be an important first step toward creating a more stable global financial system that better serves the interests of the peoples of the world.


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First of all in a state and city ranked at the bottom nationally for fraud, corruption, and lack of transparency and tons of fraud in tax evasions..the fact that the same people involved in creating this problem are the ones talking about solutions is a sign of Banana Republic governing.  WE ALL KNOW THERE IS SYSTEMIC FRAUD THROUGHOUT STATE AND CITY TAX SYSTEM THAT GOES FAR BEYOND PROPERTY TAX ASSESSMENT!

The city loses billions in tax revenue from skirted tax collection and fraudulent use of taxpayer grants and Wall Street financial instruments and credit bond deals. BILLIONS OF DOLLARS FOLKS!  We have lawsuits from the city schools for a billion in underfunded city school; transportation trust funds flowing to fungible projects..we have subprime loan fraud settlements yet to come back to the people defrauded..all involving misappropriation of taxes.  We have corporate tax breaks that have these deals never meeting terms of contract..greening projects that are not greening..health care fraud of taxpayer entitlements by the billions. Shareholders of c-corporations almost never pay and b-corporations are not the social good corporations they say they are.  Corporations being given tax breaks are using private non-profits to launder money to their own projects. THE ENTIRE SYSTEM IS CAPTURED AND CRIMINAL AND WE DO NOT WANT THE SAME PEOPLE INVOLVED 'FIXING' IT.  For goodness sake!


City, state officials spar over tax errors at hearing 'Probably most candid' council debate in years, Stokes says

By Scott Calvert, The Baltimore Sun 9:38 p.m. EST, November 6, 2013

A City Council hearing on tax break errors turned into a public spat Wednesday, as officials from the city's Finance Department and the state assessments agency traded blame for costly mistakes that are confusing taxpayers.

A discussion about the nuances of commercial assessments gave way to a spirited back-and-forth over who bears responsibility for chronic errors in miscalculating tax credits. City finance officials even scrapped their presentation after saying that a state official caught them off guard with his criticism.

While the city had faulted the state before Wednesday — and both city and state officials have acknowledged mistakes — the sparring in the council chambers provided a stark view of interagency discord.

It started when Robert Young, director of the state Department of Assessments and Taxation, said the city had used incorrect property values when it determined that 315 historic credit recipients had paid too little tax in past years and owed more — sometimes thousands of dollars more — on their July tax bills.

"They simply weren't the right assessments," Young said of the 315 bills, which the city began revising last month, with the result that some bills have dropped back to last year's levels.

Moments later, Harry E. Black, the city's finance director, told the council members that Young's allegation, detailed in a printed statement, was untrue. "We would have to take serious exception to that statement," Black said. "It is our view that is not actual fact."

City officials then made what Black called a "last-minute change," swapping out previously distributed handouts and putting on a slide show that criticized the state agency. One slide listed nine types of errors that the city said emerged from the state assessments office, five relating to the historic credit.

Councilman Carl Stokes, who called the hearing to push for an independent audit, described the bureaucratic dust-up as "probably the most candid conversation we've had in these chambers" since he rejoined the council in 2010.

"We have a tendency to not want to air dirty laundry," he said. "But citizens are weary of not getting answers."

The tax errors have spurred calls for an immediate audit of the Finance Department — an idea that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake opposes while her administration implements changes that she says are showing strong results.

Deputy Finance Director Henry J. Raymond urged council members to wait until next summer to conduct an audit, noting that a new automated system is scheduled to go online in coming months.

Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young has asked Comptroller Joan M. Pratt to audit certain Finance Department functions, including the tax credit programs. Stokes said his hearing was meant in part to pressure finance officials to cooperate by providing records to the auditors.

Much of the debate Wednesday concerned two tax break programs: the historic credit, which exempts the value of approved renovations for 10 years, and a 10-year discount available to businesses in the city's designated "enterprise zone."

In 2012, The Baltimore Sun found that the city had failed to collect more than $1.5 million in potential taxes because of errors on historic credits. In addition, The Sun found in September that commercial buildings were underbilled by more than $700,000 because of wrongly calculated enterprise zone credits.

More recently, city officials have grappled with fresh confusion over the historic credit program, which they began fully operating this year. A city analysis begun last year concluded that 315 credits had been too large in prior years because of state miscalculations. (It also found that 241 were smaller than they should have been.)

State officials countered that some of the mistakes identified by the city simply reflected a new calculation method adopted by City Hall.

In 2012, The Sun found that state officials had for years miscalculated historic credits on large commercial buildings and that city officials never caught the errors. Owen C. Charles, deputy director of the state agency, conceded then that his agency made mistakes administering aspects of the program.

But Charles also said at the time that the city shared responsibility for some errors because of design flaws in a database jointly developed in 2009, and city officials agreed with that view.

At Wednesday's council hearing, the two sides yielded little ground despite assertions from officials that they maintain a good working relationship.

At one point Black said, "I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree."


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An exodus of banks from a nation with a Bank Transaction Tax?  SO THAT IS WHAT WE NEED TO DO TO BE RID OF WALL STREET?  RECOVERY OF TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN FRAUD AND THIS BANK TRANSACTION TAX----


Germany wants the Robin Hood tax – and Europe's voters do too No argument against a financial transaction tax has stood up to scrutiny, so politicians must resist lobbying and see sense

• • Stephany Griffith-Jones
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 30 October 2013 10.10 EDT
  
  

Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats look set to prioritise a Robin Hood tax in Germany. Photograph: Isopix/Rex Features The path to implementing a tax on financial transactions (known as the FTT) was never going to be smooth. This week's announcement that the expected coalition between Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in Germany will prioritise the tax's implementation, is a sign that the proposal remains on track. But any measure that taxes or regulates financial markets and banks will always meet concerted opposition.

In recent weeks, this has been growing from some quarters. The latest criticism, from France's central bank governor Christian Noyer, was splashed on the front page of Monday's Financial Times: "France central bank chief says Robin Hood tax is 'enormous risk'" ran the headline. As this extremely small tax is to be implemented by 11 European countries, it is appropriate to ask: an enormous risk for whom?

Certainly it will impact on trades with short time horizons – high-frequency traders, whose computer algorithms fire off thousands of trades in microseconds, will undoubtedly have their business dramatically curtailed. Yet this will significantly reduce rather than create risk. Many regulators are concerned about the risk of this high-frequency trading, which now accounts for over half of trades on the London Stock Exchange. As demonstrated by the infamous flash crash of May 2010, when liquidity drained from the market and the Dow Jones index dropped 9% in a matter of minutes, it poses a threat to wider economic stability.

By contrast, the impact on a typical long-term investor is likely to be negligible. There are already many transaction costs such as trading commissions, spreads, clearing, settlement, exchange fees and administration costs. Prof Avinash Persaud, a former JP Morgan executive, has estimated that the FTT of 0.1% on stocks and bonds, and 0.01% for derivatives will comprise of only 5% of annual transaction costs for long-term equity holders, taking levels back to those experienced 10 years ago. Compared to management fees – typically about 1% charged by many financial institutions which are now lining up to oppose the FTT – it is hard to conclude the tax will have more than a marginal impact on costs for long-term investors, like corporates and pension funds.

The net result is that an FTT would slow short-term trades, which are mainly unproductive, helping to reduce the risk of crises that are so detrimental to growth. Furthermore, the potential €30bn in revenue the European FTT could raise, could be invested productively, for example in infrastructure and innovation, encouraging much needed future growth and employment and making European countries more competitive.

Noyer and others worry unnecessarily that the tax will lead to an exodus of bankers from participating countries. But the issuer principle embedded in the EU proposal means that attempts by banks and their subsidiaries to duck the tax by migrating to other jurisdictions will not work, since the FTT would be paid by all those transacting the eleven countries' bonds and shares, wherever they are based. Thus the tax, from a transaction in say a French bond taking place between parties in New York and Singapore, will still be collected by French authorities.

But this need not be a debate about hypotheticals. Major financial sectors such as the United States, Hong Kong and South Korea already have FTTs which together raise tens of billions in revenue annually without causing economic damage. In the UK we have the very successful stamp duty, an FTT on share transactions that raises more than £3bn a year, of which 40% is paid by foreign-based investors and banks. It too rightly taxes all those trading UK shares, wherever they are based. This is the same principle on which the European FTT will be based.

Fortunately, the European commission is clearly supportive of the proposal, as is the European parliament. Eleven European countries, representing 66% of European GDP, remain committed to implementing the tax.

It is encouraging that in coalition talks between the German SPD and CDU, they achieved clear consensus on the FTT. This is not surprising, as in Germany 82% of citizens, according to Euro-barometer, support a European FTT. In France this figure reaches 72%, and the EU average is 64%. Let's hope politicians elsewhere will listen to their voters and fully implement the tax soon.


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Do you know why a republican, Erhlich and now a democrat running on NO NEW TAXES O'Malley both loaded Maryland citizens with taxes and fees?  Because there is no corporate tax in Maryland.  If you think any substantial corporate tax is collected I've got swampland in Florida for you!  The middle/lower class is taxed to the max because the category of tax has moved to the income column for corporations.  Do you know that most corporations are s-corp or now b-corp.  Government watchdogs say that very few shareholders pay tax on s-corp and these same watchdogs say b-corp is full of social good cheats.  What about all those corporate tax breaks for just breathing?

Maryland is run by corporate pols...republicans and neo-liberals who make all law about maximizing corporate profit which is why Miller is still thinking lower corporate taxes.  What we have is a state where corporate fraud is king...billions of dollars lost to government coffers and individuals through fraud.  The taxes are where you work to recover fraud.  Remember the economic crash and the wealth inequity it caused?  This was all caused by massive corporate fraud which we have yet to recover.  All this requires high corporate tax, not lower.  In the 1950s corporate tax was 60%...today it is 17%.  This is why government coffers are broke...corporate fraud and lost corporate tax revenue. 


Did you know that the reason for high unemployment was that workers are paid too little to afford to consume...buy things.  This lack of demand for goods keep people unemployed.  Higher pay, more consumption.  When tax revenue collection falls more and more on people and not corporations that too makes for little consumption and demand.

So, when a pol tells you they want even less corporate tax at a time when wages are as low as they can go...that is really bad policy.  We want corporations paying more and the Comptroller making sure corporations pay the taxes they owe.  This makes a strong economy.  If someone tells you that corporate tax cuts create jobs tell them corporations already pay almost nothing so where are the jobs?!!

Building a better tax code for Maryland Our view: The state can take steps to improve its competitiveness without jeopardizing its ability to make investments in a better future
12:01 p.m. EDT, October 10, 2013  Baltimore Sun

It's fair to say that the Tax Foundation, a non-partisan but conservative-leaning think tank, has not historically been a big fan of Maryland, or many other liberal northeastern states, for that matter. The group looks at one side of the equation — taxes — and not at the quality of what you get in return, and that tends to make Maryland look bad compared to, say, Wyoming. The Free State comes out 41st in the Tax Foundation's latest rankings of which states have the best tax climate for business, and the Equality State comes out on top.

There are obviously other factors that go into a business' decision of where to locate — the presence of a skilled workforce, transportation infrastructure and the overall quality of life, for example — and the Tax Foundation acknowledges as much. But the competitiveness of a state's tax structure clearly matters in its ability to attract, retain and grow businesses and the jobs that come with them.

That's become an issue in the 2014 gubernatorial race, with all three Republican candidates vowing to cut the corporate tax rate (among other taxes) and Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, a Democrat, joining them with a pledge to reduce the corporate tax. Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller is trying to tie a corporate tax cut with an increase in the minimum wage. A business competitiveness work group convened by House Speaker Michael E. Busch has been meeting for months, and the Greater Baltimore Committee is working on its own review of Maryland's business conditions, including its tax structure.

We welcome the reviews, but we are wary of an ill-considered rush to cut taxes, particularly the idea of cutting the corporate tax rate in isolation. After years of struggling, Maryland is finally on a path toward a sustainable budget, thanks to spending restraint, tax increases and a gradually improving economy. We are wary of jeopardizing that progress, particularly at a time when repeated budget standoffs in Washington threaten Maryland's economy. Moreover, while the corporate income tax has its flaws — it tends to be volatile, and its costs are frequently passed on to consumers — it would hardly seem fair to cut it while leaving in place recent increases to individual income and sales taxes.

There is, however, a lesson to be drawn from the Tax Foundation report, and it is that while rates do matter, they are not the only thing that determines whether a state is conducive to business growth. Equity, transparency and simplicity are important, too, and Maryland can take steps to improve the business-friendliness of its tax system without either undermining its ability to continue investing in good schools and infrastructure or fundamentally altering the balance of who pays for state government.

Maryland's corporate tax is actually fairly competitive, by the Tax Foundation's measure. It comes in 15th best in the nation, a bit worse than Virginia (6th) but better than West Virginia (20th), Pennsylvania (46th) or Delaware (50th). The Tax Foundation says the state could do even better by eliminating tax credits for things like job creation, investment and research and development and lowering the overall rate. We would suggest consideration as well of a rate cut in exchange for adopting combined reporting, a system that seeks to better account for a multi-state corporation's activity in any one state. Maryland businesses have resisted this idea, complaining that such a system is too complicated, but it has been the law in many states for decades, and the Tax Foundation does not consider it a major factor in its analysis.

But the corporate tax is not the only thing that merits consideration. Many businesses pay individual income taxes instead, and Maryland ranks relatively poorly on them, in large part because it allows local piggyback taxes that can bump the top rate up to nearly 9 percent. The Tax Foundation does not like progressive taxation — a view we do not share — but we do agree with the group that tax brackets, personal exemptions and standardized deductions should be indexed to inflation, which Maryland's are not.

Maryland's sales tax comes out well in the rankings (8th) because of its relatively low rate and the lack of local add-ons. Nonetheless, sales tax reform may mark the most important opportunity the state has to improve its overall rankings in a fair and progressive way. Maryland's sales tax applies to goods but generally not to services — a vestige of an industrial-era economy. That means it will become increasingly obsolete as a revenue source as time goes on. Any comprehensive look at Maryland's tax structure should consider a broadening of the base to services and, in exchange, reducing the rate or cutting other taxes.

Any significant re-writing of the tax code would be politically difficult, but if done right, it could protect our investments in building a stronger future while making Maryland a better place to start and grow a business today. For that to happen, the candidates for governor will need to start engaging in a detailed debate about the tax structure in all its complexity and not just squabbling about who will cut the corporate tax rate the most.



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First, while we do want to maintain a public auditing system in Baltimore we want to acknowledge that the Comptroller's office is no less suspected of malfeasance than the Finance Office.  We all know that the City Hall is corrupt to the bone.

We want public justice agencies to come forward and oversee these audits as we work to shake the bugs from the rug and run and vote for labor and justice candidates next elections.  No neo-liberal and crony farm team for us!  The Comptroller's office is the one who oversees things like tax collection and tax expenditure and in a city known for billions of dollars in fraud and corruption often involving Federal, state, and local taxpayer money, she is the one most involved.  The Mayor and her Finance team are next and are deeply involved in negotiating deals with developers and private contractors all of which involve fraud and corruption.

While Stokes calls for privatizing the auditing....no doubt because a private audit will be closed to public access.....we do want public justice groups to engage in reforming City Hall.  If these organizations do not, they are being held captive by these very funds handed out for what may as well be 'hush money'.  If you cannot stand for justice....get out of the justice non-profit business!


Comptroller to audit Baltimore's tax billing Mistakes have cost the city millions; mayor asks for time to fix errors
Mayor Rawlings-Blake (right) and city finance department officials highlighted key reforms to reduce costly tax errors in Baltimore City ahead of City Council consideration of resolutions calling for the privatization of tax collections and an audit of the city's tax programs. (Jeffrey F. Bill, Baltimore Sun / October 7, 2013)

By Luke Broadwater, The Baltimore Sun 11:01 a.m. EDT, October 8, 2013

Chronic mistakes in Baltimore's tax bills commanded attention at City Hall Monday as the mayor said her administration is fixing the problems and the comptroller ordered an audit nonetheless.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said the city is implementing an automated system to reduce mistakes — which officials acknowledged have cost the city $11 million in the past decade — and she asked citizens to give finance officials "a chance to work."

But a City Council chairman called for an audit, and Comptroller Joan M. Pratt said her office has asked for the documents needed to perform one. "I want to make sure the citizens are being billed properly," Pratt said.

The actions came after investigations by The Baltimore Sun that uncovered millions of dollars in errors in property tax bills. The Sun reported last month that Baltimore has undercharged the owners of three commercial properties by more than $700,000 in recent years because of errors by city and state officials in calculating tax breaks. Among the properties is One Charles Center, a 23-story downtown office tower owned by Orioles majority owner Peter G. Angelos.

Errors in the Enterprise Zone tax break program followed other mistakes in city tax collections documented by the newspaper, including more than $2 million in improper credits for owners of rental and historic properties.

Most of the City Council joined the taxation committee chairman, Carl Stokes, in sponsoring a resolution calling for an audit of the city's tax collections.

"It is one level of incompetence to continue to have so many errors, but it is another level of indifference not to address them time and again and not to allow a true and full accounting to the citizens and taxpayers of Baltimore City," Stokes said.

The city finance department laid out a plan it said will "crack down" on the mistakes by automating more of the process and relying less on the state government — where many errors originated — to calculate bills. But some council members said they've lost so much faith in the city's ability to properly collect taxes that they called on the mayor to consider hiring a private firm to take over the work.

Pratt said auditors have requested documents from the finance department for five key functions, including property tax billing and revenue collections. She said her office — which requested the documents after meeting with City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young — was waiting for the finance department to turn over papers for review. Young identified the city's treasury, risk management and procurement agencies as other key areas that needed audits, officials said.

The mayor said on Monday that she, too, was frustrated by the errors. "These errors have frustrated tax credit recipients and caused many to lose confidence in the government's ability to do one of its most basic functions," Rawlings-Blake said. "I share that frustration."

Finance Director Harry E. Black said the city has taken over the job of calculating tax credits from the state. Finance officials also have instituted internal audits of "all tax credit accounts" to identify errors, and expect a new automated system to be fully functioning by March, he said.

"Too many hands were actually touching the process," said Black, who blamed "inadequate interagency coordination" for the problems.

Since taking over tax calculations, Black said, city officials have corrected many problems. "The bills that went out in July of this year, we believe, are error free," he told reporters at a news conference.

But other officials acknowledged last month that the city sent out some erroneous bills in July after they were alerted to the errors by The Sun. Kevin Harris, a spokesman for Rawlings-Blake, said late Monday that Black meant the bills "have since been corrected."

Rawlings-Blake said a "Billing Integrity Unit" she established in 2011 has "recovered millions of dollars" in erroneous bills. "They have already been doing audits," she said. "That's why we've been able to identify errors. It's a misrepresentation to say we're in fear of audits. Yes, we want audits but we want to make sure we're not being redundant."

Besides calling for an audit, Stokes introduced a second resolution asking the finance department to consider privatizing tax calculations and collections. Two council members co-sponsored that measure.

"I know the current administration has done more in the last couple of years than any other administration," said City Councilman William H. Cole IV, who backed the call for an audit. "The reality is, we have problems and they need to be addressed. ... It doesn't take rocket science to figure this out. It takes man-hours."

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You know what laws need more attention to detailed definition in the Maryland Assembly?  Corporate fraud laws.  Can you imagine the revenue brought into MD coffers ......billions each year if fraud was recovered.  Rather we see laws written with such definition to detail on behavior for the general public.

Do we want laws that make the public aware and want to pay attention to what are indeed public safety issues? YES.  Somehow we were able over a few decades to get people to buckle up across the country with warnings and small fees.  I have never been ticketed for seat belt laws in decades of being caught while forgetting upon occasion and I do work to see I do not forget.

So, what is all this excessive fines and fees about?  Why do you fail to pay a few parking tickets and then see your car impounded or late tickets go from $100 to thousand dollars in late fees?  WHEN YOU ARE NOT TAXING CORPORATIONS AND IN FACT GIVING THEM TAXES AS PROFIT...CORPORATE WELFARE....you need to tax and fee the heck out of the general public.  This is why republican Erhlich was doing it and why O'Malley has supersized this.  Both parties are corporate and wealth and the middle/lower class will pay for this.

The solution is to vote all incumbents out of office.  Republican and neo-liberal.  Run and vote for labor and justice in both parties to reverse this non-sense!


New law cracks down on cellphone chatting while driving Hundreds of new Maryland laws effective Tuesday

1/10 By Michael Dresser, The Baltimore Sun 5:00 a.m. EDT, September 30, 2013

It won't matter if you're obeying every other traffic law: Starting Tuesday, if you're talking on a hand-held mobile phone while driving in Maryland, the police will have the right to pull you over and ticket you.

The new law tightening the state's curb on cellphone use behind the wheel is one of hundreds that will take effect Tuesday as a result of General Assembly action this year. Among the others are high-profile measures banning the sale of some types of guns and repealing the death penalty.

Concerned about crashes caused by distracted drivers, lawmakers passed a hand-held cell phone ban in 2010 but made it a "secondary" offense, meaning an officer couldn't stop the vehicle without witnessing some other violation. This year proponents argued drivers had been given adequate notice. They persuaded the legislature to put more teeth in the law, making it a "primary" violation.

"It's really vital that the law is primary because drivers are very reluctant to put the phones down unless they think they're going to get a ticket," said Jonathan Adkins, spokesman for the Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state highway safety offices.

John Wynn, 56, of Lutherville, a candy broker who drives some 40,000 miles a year, said he agrees with the intent of the law. He and his wife have been rear-ended in crashes caused by people who admitted to being on their phones.

"I do know that people get distracted. They can't multi-task, shifting gears, steering, on the phone watching the kids in the car," he said.

But Wynn wonders how enforceable the law — which also raises the fine for a violation from $40 to $75 — will be.

"They weren't able to enforce the secondary violations," Wynn said. "I'm just wondering if they are going to do something either at toll booths or on the side of the road and start nailing people with phones up to their ears."

Other new laws range from matters as narrow as the salaries of Orphans Court judges in Howard County to those as sweeping as life and death, as in the law abolishing capital punishment in Maryland.

Easily the most controversial legislation taking effect Tuesday — as measured by the outpouring of demonstrators in Annapolis – is the sweeping gun control bill passed in the wake of the mass killing last year at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

The law bans the sale of 45 types of long guns classified as assault rifles, along with handguns whose magazines accept more than 10 rounds. The law also requires licensing and fingerprinting of handgun buyers, and training for new handgun owners. It also bars gun ownership for more people with mental illnesses.

The measure set off a flurry of gun buying to beat the Oct. 1 deadline, resulting in a backlog in completing the background checks. State police announced they would waive the handgun license requirement for buyers who apply before Tuesday. The law faces a court challenge filed last week by gun rights advocates.

Another new law that stoked passions this year was the elimination of the death penalty. After many years of trying, opponents of capital punishment prevailed, with the help of Gov. Martin O'Malley and the NAACP, making Maryland the 18th state to end executions.

In addition to the stiffer cell phone law, drivers will now face a requirement that all passengers — even adults in back seats — wear seat belts.

John T. Kuo, head of the Motor Vehicle Administration, said while Maryland has a relatively high 91.1 percent seat belt compliance rate, it's important to reach that remaining 8.9 percent.

"In a crash, that back seat passenger, if you're unrestrained, becomes a projectile to the front seat passenger," he said.

The back seat provision will be a secondary offense, but the law also will double the maximum fine for violating the seat belt law from $25 to $50 and allow judges to impose court costs.

Montgomery County Police Capt. Thomas Didone, whose 15-year-old son was killed in a 2008 crash while riding in the back seat without a belt, said the new law could cost drivers $83 for every person in the vehicle who is unrestrained.

Didone said the new law also requires there be a seat belt or child safety seat for every person in a car. He said that could discourage teenagers from driving around in what police call "clown cars" — with more people packed into a car than it is designed to carry.

Another measure taking effect attempts to address the problem of "cyber-bullying" of minors by peers or adults over the Internet using social media. The legislation is known as "Grace's Law" after 15-year-old Grace McComas, a Howard County teen who committed suicide after repeated online harassment. The law makes bullying someone under 18 using a computer or smart phone a misdemeanor.

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Do you know why America's infrastructure is crumbling?  BECAUSE CORPORATE TAX COLLECTION HAS DISAPPEARED, CORPORATE FRAUD HAS EMPTIED GOVERNMENT COFFERS, AND PUBLIC WORKS DEPARTMENTS HAVE BEEN OUTSOURCED TO PRIVATE CONTRACTORS WHO BOOST PROJECT COSTS....

So why are the American people paying for this infrastructure bill through tolls?


How to Toll Every Interstate Highway in America
Posted By Ryan Holeywell | September 12, 2013  Governing



AP/David Duprey Motorists pay tolls to pass through an Interstate 90 tributary in New York. Most of the few roadways that allow tolling on the interstate are on the East Coast.

When it comes to infrastructure in America, two things are clear to most observers: the need for improvements are vast, and Washington isn't too keen on figuring out how to pay for it.

That's caused various organizations and interests to continue exploring potential ways Congress could pay for roads. Some advocate for higher gases taxes. Some pitch per-mile driving fees. And still others are hoping Congress will allow more tolling.

To that end, the Reason Foundation this week published an ambitious study to explain how, exactly, tolling the interstate might work.

Historically, tolling the interstate has been prohibited, except for a few roadways -- mainly on the East Coast -- that were grandfathered in when the interstate system was created. Over time, that situation has changed slightly. In the 1990s, states started to get greater flexibility to toll the interstate when they built new lanes. And since 1998, a pilot program allows states pursuing major rehabilitation to interstates to toll them too (the three states in that pilot, Virginia, Missouri and North Carolina, haven't actually done interstate tolling yet).

But the Reason Foundation -- along with several other stakeholders -- is asking Congress to make a major departure and instead let states toll all the interstates, so long as they use the money to rebuild or expand the roads.

Such a move would be dramatically different from the status quo and no doubt controversial. But Congress hasn't raised the gas tax in 20 years, and it hasn't taken any steps to indicate its serious about addressing the funding shortfall facing the country's roadways. "There's no serious alternative on the table anywhere that has a chance," says Robert Poole, Reason's director of transportation policy.

Poole and others argue that the timing is right for wide-spread interstate tolling for a few reasons. While the interstate represents just 2.5 percent of all lane-miles of roadway in the country, it represents 25 percent of the miles driven by motorists. Meanwhile, most of the interstate was designed for a 50-year life span, which is quickly approaching.


The technology exists to make widespread tolling possible without the huge cost of actually manning toll booths. Traffic has grown since the early days of the interstate, when tolling was initially banned due to concerns about insufficient volume to make it economically feasible. And the growth of the population in the south and west means tolling could work in places where it previously wouldn't have made much sense.

But those are old arguments. So Poole took the case a step further, and tried to model how, exactly, a nationally tolled interstate system would work in hopes of giving him and other advocates more ammunition.

First, he tried to estimate on a state-by-state basis how much it would cost to reconstruct the country's interstates and widen the ones in need of more capacity. The work was based largely on traffic projections using a U.S. Department of Transportation model. Moreover, construction cost estimates were calculated for each state too, based not only on the amount of work needed but how expensive construction is in each state.

Then, he came up with some standardized toll rates. Under Poole's model, interstates could be tolled at 3.5 cents per mile for cars and 14 cents per mile for trucks, adjusted for inflation annually. Those tolls would be feasible in about 30 states, would need to be a bit higher in 15, and would seemingly be prohibitively expensive -- and thus in need of supplemental funding -- in about six mostly rural states.

In short, Poole concluded, the whole undertaking would cost about $1 trillion, and the tolls could pay for it, under a plan to rebuild the interstate over a decade and pay for it via tolling for 35 years after that. "It appears feasible to finance the reconstruction and selective widening of nearly the entire Interstate system via moderate toll rates collected via (all-electronic tolling)," he writes.

That's important, because advocates have long called for lifting the interstate tolling ban, but Poole's study shows how, exactly, it would work.

Still, the plan could be a tough sell, which Poole fully acknowledges. The trucking industry generally opposes tolling, and so to do some auto clubs. Moreover, a massive system of interstate tolling would likely be a huge opportunity for so-called "public-private partnerships," in which the private sector would take a larger role in operating the country's infrastructure. Those deals have been controversial in many states, and undoubtedly, they could be controversial on something like the interstate as well.

But Poole envisions a scenario in which users of the tolled interstates could be reimbursed the gas tax they pay on those routes, to eliminate criticism of "double taxation." Moreover, he argues that tolls are actually more politically palatable to drivers than across-the-board gas tax hikes, since they're seen as more equitable. The people who use the interstate the most would pay the most, and the tolls would reflect the actual cost of the roadway improvements.

The idea of easing interstate tolling restrictions gained some traction last year, when Congress debated the MAP-21 highway bill. Three moderate senators -- Democrats Tom Carper of Delaware and Mark Warner of Virginia, and Republican Mark Kirk of Illinois -- introduced an amendment that would have lifted the cap on interstate tolling pilots, but they ultimately withdrew it. Tolling advocates want to see that amendment again.

But that raises the question of why other states could be expected to toll, when the the three states already in the pilot aren't doing it? Poole says he doesn't expect every state would take advantage of the policy, at least initially, but if Congress lifted the tolling ban, one state would eventually figure out a politically palatable way to do it and could become a "pathfinder" other states would follow.

Patrick Jones, who leads the trade association representing toll owners and operators, says the issue is about giving states the flexibility to toll the interstate, not a mandate. "Right now," he says, "we can't even have that debate in the states."


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This is O'Malley's signature on Maryland....an economy built on a financial industry known for fraud and corruption that takes money from the middle-class and poor in lieu of lost corporate tax base throughout the state.  When the financial collapse in 2008 showed massive financial industry fraud O'Malley, who ran orginally against gambling as bad for Maryland because of the reasons above all of a sudden thought.....HUMMMM, SYSTEMIC FRAUD IN THE FINANCIAL INDUSTRY.....LET'S DOUBLE-DOWN ON A FINANCIAL ECONOMY!

What a guy that O'Malley, always working for the EVERYMAN!  What O'Malley did was create a funding for education, albeit slim earning percentages as less and less profit goes to the state, paid for by more taxes (gambling is a tax) from middle/lower class even as he hands more and more TIFs and property tax breaks to corporations.  Instead of paying propert taxes to support schools, corporations in MD now simply donate to selected schools and get a tax write-off for doing that!  WHAT A DEAL O'MALLEY HAS MADE FOR THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS IN MD!  Oh, I forgot....he's doing it for the families and children in MD!


Penn National clears a hurdle needed to bid for Prince George's casino Plans in works for new tables at other state casinos

By Yvonne Wenger, The Baltimore Sun 9:09 p.m. EDT, September 19, 2013

Penn National Gaming Inc. took another step Thursday toward being able to bid for a casino license in Prince George's County after Maryland gaming officials approved a corporate restructuring for the owner of Hollywood Casino Perryville.

The state Lottery and Gaming Control Commission approved Penn National's plan to spin off Gaming and Leisure Properties Inc., which would allow the Wyomissing, Pa.-based company to circumvent a state law restricting businesses to one video lottery facility.

Last November, Maryland voters approved an expansion of the state's gambling industry, including the addition of table games such as poker and blackjack and a sixth casino location in Prince George's County. The state's Video Lottery Facility Location Commission will evaluate three bids submitted earlier this year for that license.

Penn National is competing with MGM Resorts and Greenwood Racing for the Prince George's license. A casino there is projected to bring thousands of jobs.

The location commission will conduct site visits and public hearings on the three bids Oct. 21, 23 and 25. Each day, the commission will tour one of the proposed sites, followed by a company presentation to the commission at 3:30 and a public hearing at 6 p.m. at Friendly High School, 1000 Allentown Road, Fort Washington.

Penn National has proposed building a casino at its Rosecroft Raceway harness track. MGM's bid involves a prominent site adjacent to Interstate 95 at the National Harbor resort and conference center. Greenwood wants to build on a site a few miles south off Indian Head Highway.

The Lottery and Gaming Control Commission on Thursday also approved a corporate restructuring plan for Caesars Entertainment Corp., which is building the $400 million Horseshoe Casino near the two pro sports stadiums in southwest Baltimore. The gaming giant intends to create Caesars Growth Partners and Caesars Acquisition Co.

The restructuring was characterized as a temporary financing vehicle for the company that would provide Caesars with more liquid assets. The company's fixed costs make it difficult to raise cash without taking on high-cost debt or diluting its shareholders, according to commission documents.

In other business:

•The commission approved the addition of three poker tables at the Rocky Gap Casino Resort near Cumberland. The tables should be open for gaming on Oct. 7.

•The Casino at Ocean Downs shared plans to expand its facility near Ocean City by 50,000 square feet and about 10 additional tables, said general manager Joe Cavilla. The expansion will allow extra space for the facility's 800 slot games. The casino's plans also call for a racing sports-themed restaurant with a view of the racetrack.

•The commission entered into a consent agreement this month with Maryland Live! Casino after the facility was charged this summer with allegedly allowing underage individuals to enter the gaming floor on four occasions. The casino, which undertook corrective measures to stop it from happening again, agreed to pay $20,000.

•The commissioners received an update on a change to the Mega Millions game, set for Oct. 19. The multi-state lottery — with an estimated jackpot of $145 million in advance of Friday's drawing — will increase its starting jackpot from $12 million to $15 million, according to John Martin, assistant director for Maryland Lottery. From there, the jackpot will grow in $5 million increments.

That lottery's second-tier prize will jump from $250,000 to $1 million. Five numbers will be drawn from an expanded pool of 75, and one Mega ball will be drawn from a smaller pool of 15 to determine winners, which decreases the odds of winning.

ywenger@baltsun.com

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Let's review the manipulated 'crises' over the national debt.  Remember, we have this debt because of massive corporate fraud sucking tens of trillions from our government coffers so the answer to this debt is a massivre jobs program to rebuild white collar criminal agencies across the US costing taxpayers no money and no republicans needed.  Obama and Congressional neo-liberals have chosen to make the people pay for these massive corporate frauds.  THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

Obama/Congress first pretended that they had to extend the Bush tax cuts in 2010 giving the largest tax break to the rich and corporations in US history ..over $1 trillion in one year..because of the critical need of the Start Treaty with Russia.  Have you heard anything more about the Start Treaty?  NOTHING.

Then there are the debt ceiling debates where neo-liberals pretend to have to negotiate with republicans to cover the government's bills.  This is where neo-liberals just had to surrender to sequestration/austerity to pay the bills and now they are doing it again.  Obama famously said 'I do not see the 14th Amendment as making debt ceiling unconstitutional'.  This from a man who 'sees no corporate fraud'.

It is almost conclusive that the Constitution assures America's bills will be paid and the debt ceiling is about debt already incurred.  So this entire issue is mute and simply a ploy to make concessions.


Below is the argument for ignoring debt ceilings:

Then there was the debt ceiling debate in 2011 where Obama and neo-liberals pretended they had to negotiate with republicans rather than simply say the debt ceiling is unconstitutional per the 14th Amendment.

'Democrats increasingly urged Obama to invoke the Constitution to raise the debt limit himself. They pointed to Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which states: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." Essentially, they argued that since the "public debt" cannot be questioned, the debt ceiling itself is unconstitutional'.  

As I said at first, this issue would not even exist if Rule of Law was reinstated and tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud returned to govenment coffers at all levels of government.  It is simply a way for neo-liberals to work with republicans in dismantling public sector assets and social safety nets.  So far we have seen $1 trillion taken from Medicare/Medicaid to pay for corporate fraud and all of War on Poverty program cuts pay the rest.


House vote to set the stage on government shutdown

The House plans to vote today on a stopgap funding measure that would keep the government running through Dec. 15.

By Michael A. Memoli 6:00 a.m. EDT, September 20, 2013

WASHINGTON - The House of Representatives has voted 40 times to repeal or curtail the Affordable Care Act since Republicans took control of the chamber in 2011 - and each time the Democratic Senate has swatted away their bills.

In using the threat of a government shutdown as leverage, House Republicans will vote Friday on legislation they view as their single best opportunity to block the president’s signature legislative accomplishment just as it is about to take hold.

Much of the federal government will cease operation at month’s end unless Congress passes new legislation, referred to as a continuing resolution, to keep the lights on. The House will vote to do just that - extend the existing funding levels for another 75 days - but with a catch: The legislation includes an amendment to prohibit funding to implement the new healthcare law.

• Related
• Obama accuses GOP faction of trying to 'extort' him on healthcare
• House passes new bill aimed at undermining Obama healthcare package
• Obama administration delays key part of healthcare law
• Supporters of Obama's healthcare law kick off outreach campaign

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The "defund Obamacare" effort has been championed by conservative Republican lawmakers and independent groups such as the Heritage Foundation and Club for Growth.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) spent much of the August recess traveling the country urging party activists to pressure Republicans to support the showdown with President Obama over the Affordable Care Act.

Facing pressure from their conservative flank, House Republican leaders, initially lukewarm to such an approach, ultimately agreed this week to adopt it, setting the stage for Friday's vote.

"The law is a train wreck, and it's going to raise costs. It's destroying American jobs, and it must go," House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday. "We'll deliver a big victory in the House tomorrow, then this fight will move over to the Senate, where it belongs."

House leaders were confident they would have the votes needed to pass the measure, though some members have been critical of the approach.

If the House vote is successful Friday, the Senate will begin its debate on the measure Tuesday. Democrats in the Senate have mocked Republicans for what they call the party's obsession with repeal efforts, and they vowed to simply return a "clean" funding bill to the House next week.

"In case there's any shred of doubt in the minds of our House counterparts, I want to be absolutely crystal clear: Any bill that defunds Obamacare is dead, dead. It's a waste of time," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters.

Though Democrats control 54 seats, including those of two independents, Cruz has vowed to use "any procedural means necessary" to force Democrats to adopt the House measure in full. But Obama could still veto such a bill if it were to emerge from Congress.

While the House votes Friday, the president will be traveling to Kansas City for an event at a Ford plant to tout America’s economic recovery five years after the economic collapse. A White House official said the president would argue that "a minority of Republicans" was now threatening "to throw our economy back into crisis by refusing to pay our country's bills or shutting down the government."

Congress has until Oct. 1 to pass a funding bill or the government will shut down for the first time since the mid-1990s.


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'The reality that corporate decision-making is largely a function of corporate choice rather than corporate law is no less true for the new benefit corporation. The B Corp legal regime no more guarantees that those companies will make “socially responsible” decisions than existing law prevents directors from doing so'.

_Citizens of MD are beng hit hard with tax increases, that is if you are the middle/lower class.  This has nothing to do with democrat or republican it has to do with corporations paying little or no tax in the state, city, or at the national level.  All tax revenue generation is now coming from you and I and corporate welfare moves taxpayer money straight into corporate profit, draining all government resources.  Whether a republican is in office or a neo-liberal like O'Malley, both working for wealth and profit, taxes and fees will be high as JQ public fills the revenue space. O'Malley ran against Erhlich using Erhlich's policies of taxing and fees then simply taxed and feed us to death anyway.  THE PROBLEM WITH TAXATION ON CITIZENS IN MD IS LOST CORPORATE TAX REVENUE AND NOT DEMS.. which by the way MD has none.  All MD pols are neo-liberals..ergo the rape and pillaging of the masses!

Repub voters need to come around to the labor/justice stance and join this dem base as it retakes the democratic party in MD.  Dems tax corporations and hold them accountable for being good citizens while neo-liberals hand all that is public over to wealth and profit.  Labor/justice is 80% of the democratic base and simply need to run and vote against these corporate dems in all elections.

That is where repubs come in.  You need to back labor/justice candidates to get rid of neo-liberals too!


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Maryland First State in Union to Pass Benefit Corporation Legislation

Posted: Apr 14, 2010 – 10:57 AM EST
 

ANNAPOLIS, Md., Apr. 14 /CSRwire/ - Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley signed into law the nation's first legislation creating Benefit Corporations, a new class of corporations required to create benefit for society as well as shareholders.


Benefit Corporations vs. ‘Regular’ Corporations: A Harmful Dichotomy

Posted by • June 18, 2012 • by Mark A. Underberg

In less than two years, seven states, including New York, New Jersey and California, have enacted laws creating a new hybrid type of corporation designed for businesses that want to simultaneously pursue profit and benefit society. Advocates for this new type of entity—typically called a benefit corporation, or B Corp– say that it fills a gap between traditional corporations and non-profits by giving social entrepreneurs flexibility to achieve the dual objectives of doing well and doing good. [1]

At first glance, the B Corp seems a welcome addition to the corporate governance landscape, that promises to advance the cause of socially responsible business. Indeed, B Corp proponents have been remarkably successful in making their case to lawmakers; the statutes were passed without a single dissenting vote in both houses of the New York and New Jersey legislatures last year, and similar proposals are pending in four additional states. Meanwhile, hundreds of businesses, most notably the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, have chosen to organize under the B Corp banner.

But viewed from a broader corporate governance perspective, the B Corp initiative—however well-intentioned–has troubling implications. The problem is that its primary rationale rests on the mistaken, though widely-held, premise that existing law prevents boards of directors from considering the impact of corporate decisions on other stakeholders, the environment or society at large. This crabbed view of directorial fiduciary duties perpetuates the unfortunate misconception that existing law compels companies to single-mindedly maximize profits and share price, and in so doing undermines the very values that corporate governance advocates should seek to promote: responsible, sustainable corporate decision-making by companies of any stripe.

“[A]t the heart of what it means to be a benefit corporation”, according to a widely distributed white paper describing the legal details of model B Corp legislation [2], is the requirement that boards of directors consider the impact of their decisions on specific corporate constituencies, including shareholders, employees, suppliers, the community, as well as on the local and global environment. [3] Although shareholders are typically listed first, it is up to the board to decide what weight should be given to the interests of each affected group.

The principal B Corp advocacy group, a California not-for-profit called B Lab, says that this provision is an essential distinguishing feature of the new entity because it protects B Corp directors from liability when they consider the interests of non-shareholders, even if those decisions do not necessarily maximize shareholder value:“Current corporate law makes it difficult for businesses to take employee, community and environmental interests into consideration when making decisions.” [4] The New York State Senate memorandum introducing the B Corp legislation goes further, suggesting that current law restricts even those corporate social responsibility measures the have potential financial benefit: “[the bill] removes legal impediments preventing businesses and investors from making their own decisions to use sustainability and social innovation as a competitive advantage”. [5]

In fact, for the vast majority of corporate decisions, there is no legal restriction on directors’ ability to consider the interests of other stakeholders, including the groups listed in the B Corp statutes. Many states have adopted so-called “constituency statutes” that expressly permit them to do so. [6] And in other states, including Delaware, courts generally require only that a business decision bear some rational relationship to a long-term corporate and shareholder interest before applying the business judgment rule to shield the decision from shareholder challenge [7]. Given the ever-increasing link between corporate conduct and the creation (or destruction) of shareholder value, consideration of the effect of corporate actions on variousconstituencies is not only permitted by law but in some cases could be a prerequisite to enable directors to discharge their duty of care obligations to make fully-informed decisions. [8]

To be sure, there are limited exceptions to this judicial deference, most notably in the takeover context or if a corporate action cannot be said to benefit the shareholders in any rationale way whatsoever. [9] As a practical matter, however, directors have close to a free hand when considering matters that are most likely to have broader social or environmental implications– how products are manufactured, marketed and sold, corporate investments, fair trade, employment and supplier issues.

I am not aware of a single case holding directors liable for a routine business decision because they considered non-shareholder interests or that impose a general duty to maximize profits and short-term shareholder value. As Professor Lynn Stout of Cornell Law School concludes an analysis of legal precedent in her excellent forthcoming book, “[m]aximizing shareholder value is not a managerial obligation, it is a managerial choice.” [10]

The broader interests of responsible corporate governance are ill-served by creating a false dichotomy between “good” and “bad” companies based on the law that governs their conduct rather than on the choices made by those who run them. There’s no legal reason that all companies can’t consider a wide range of interests in order to make responsible corporate decisions. Nor is there reason B Corp advocates should provide them with excuses not to do so by overstating the limitations placed on directorial discretion by existing law. It is also unfortunate that this rationale is now enshrined in the legislative histories of the B Corp laws, which could have unintended consequences in future court rulings further defining the scope of directors’ fiduciary obligations.

The reality that corporate decision-making is largely a function of corporate choice rather than corporate law is no less true for the new benefit corporation. The B Corp legal regime no more guarantees that those companies will make “socially responsible” decisions than existing law prevents directors from doing so.

That’s not to say that providing the option for companies to organize as B Corps is a bad idea. [11] It seems likely that the laws’ mandatory mission statements and accountability provisions will help attract patient capital and thus provide a B Corp with a shareholder base less likely to apply pressure for short-term results. It’s also possible that companies will derive marketing or other commercial advantages from the B Corp designation. And in some states, the laws should provide directors with greater discretion to reject takeover bids for reasons other than price.

The B Corp case can and should be made to legislators, businesses and investors on the basis of these potential benefits. The B Corp initiative would not be diminished if its advocates urged all companies to consider the interests of its stakeholders and society as a whole rather than providing them reasons not do so.

Until 2012, Mark A.Underberg was a partner in the New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and is now a consultant on corporate governance and legal education and training matters. He will serve as the Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Cornell Law School this fall and teach a class on corporate governance.

This article was first published on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation and is re-published with the author's permission.

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Did you know that neo-liberals will give US infrastructure jobs to foreign corporations and privatize all public assets upgraded? From water and sewage to trash and roads.....A PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE BILL BY NEO-LIBERALS IS THE SAME AS OUTSOURCING JOBS OVERSEAS...Let's wait until we run and vote for labor and justice to replace neo-liberals and then ......build public works programs that won't be filled with fraud and corruption!

This Week's Tuesday Tax Tradeoff:

Modernize Our Infrastructure or Give Tax Breaks to Send Jobs Overseas

By William Rice, Policy Consultant, Americans for Tax Fairness

Run-down classrooms, collapsing bridges, overflowing wastewater -- America’s neglected infrastructure is a menace to our health and safety, a heavy drag on our economy, and an insult to our pride as a great nation.

An accelerated program of infrastructure investment in schools, transportation, energy and water would create over 2.6 million new jobs per year over the next five years to put Americans back to work and create an even stronger foundation for growth for decades to come. Five-Year Investment: $464 billion.

A huge loophole that allows multinational corporations like Apple to dodge billions of dollars in U.S. taxes each year is called “deferral.” It allows these companies to avoid U.S. taxes indefinitely on profits they’ve made overseas -- or claim to have made overseas -- as long as those profits remain offshore. This encourages companies to shift profits to foreign tax havens, where they are lightly taxed if at all, and promotes moving production and jobs offshore. Ten-Year Tax Break: $606 billion.

Clearly, it’s time to create jobs at home by ending tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas.


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THERE YOU GO.....THE CORPORATE TAX BREAKS FOR CORPORATIONS ROLLING IN PROFITS! THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS HAVE NO PAID ANYTHING TOWARDS THIS DEBT REDUCTION AND THEY HAVE NOT CREATED ANY JOBS WITH THE TRILLION NEO-LIBERALS SENT OUT AS JOB STIMULUS THESE FEW YEARS.....overseas jobs are being created with job stimulus money!

Obama Proposes 'Grand Bargain' For Jobs
By NEDRA PICKLER 07/30/13 11:50 AM ET EDT Huffington Post
WASHINGTON --

President Barack Obama, seeking to break Washington's fiscal stalemate, is proposing cutting corporate tax rates in exchange for more spending on jobs programs. But his offer was immediately panned by congressional Republicans, casting doubts about its prospects.

The White House painted the new offer as a way for Washington to create jobs and generate short-term economic growth even as hopes for a grand deficit reduction deal fade. Obama was to announce his proposals Tuesday during a trip to an Amazon.com distribution center in Chattanooga, Tenn.

"We should be looking for other avenues of progress, other `grand bargains' that can be for middle class job growth," White House economist Gene Sperling said.

The president has previously insisted such business tax reform be coupled with an individual tax overhaul. His new offer drops that demand and calls only for lowering the corporate rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, with an even lower effective tax rate of 25 percent for manufacturers.

Obama wants those rate changes to be coupled with significant spending on some sort of job creation program, such as manufacturing, infrastructure or community colleges.

Congressional Republicans have also long insisted on tying corporate and individual tax reform so that small business owners who use the individual tax code would be offered cuts along with large corporations. But they oppose using the revenue generated from changes in the corporate tax structure for government spending programs.

"This proposal allows President Obama to support President Obama's position on taxes and President Obama's position on spending, while leaving small businesses and American families behind," said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Obama's plan could hurt small businesses that file taxes as individuals. He called on the president to reconsider his proposals and consult with Congress before moving any further.

But signaling that the White House may not be in the mood to compromise further, Obama communications director Jennifer Palmieri said the new "bargain" the president is proposing, "isn't supposed to be for the Republicans. It's supposed to be a bargain for the middle class."

Senior administration officials described the corporate tax proposal as the first new economic idea Obama plans to offer in the coming months, with budget deadlines looming in the fall. Administration officials wouldn't put a price tag on the proposal or say how much would be a "significant" investment in jobs since the dollar figures would be part of negotiations with Congress. But in an example from this year's State of the Union address, Obama proposed $50 billion to put Americans to work repairing roads and bridges and other construction jobs.

The officials said money to pay for the jobs creation would come from a one-time revenue boost from measures such as changing depreciation rules or having a one-time fee on earnings held overseas.

Obama planned to make his remarks from an Amazon fulfillment center in Chattanooga, one of more than a dozen warehouses operated by the world's largest online retailer, which announced Monday that it would increase hiring. The company said it would add 7,000 new jobs, including 5,000 more at U.S. distribution centers that currently employ about 20,000 workers who pack and ship customer orders. Amazon.com Inc. has been spending heavily on order fulfillment to help its business grow.

Obama planned to tour the packing floor of the Chattanooga warehouse, which opened in September 2011. It is one of the company's largest and newest facilities, with more than 1 million square feet – the size of more than 28 football fields full of merchandise.

The plant was the source of tax controversy when it opened; Amazon originally was granted an indefinite waiver on collecting sales tax in a deal to bring two distribution centers to Tennessee. The state's retailers were outraged that they were put at a competitive disadvantage, and Amazon has agreed to start collecting Tennessee sales tax next year.

The White House said Obama wasn't visiting Amazon because of the company's position on taxes, but because it's an example of a successful American business growing and creating more jobs.

. The U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, but many businesses avoid the full cost by taking advantage of deductions, credits and exemptions that Obama wants to eliminate.

Obama wants to do away with corporate tax benefits like oil and natural gas industry subsidies, special breaks for the purchase of private jets and certain corporate tax shelters. He also wants to impose a minimum tax on foreign earnings, a move opposed by multinational corporations and perhaps the most contentious provision in the president's plan.

When Obama unveiled the corporate tax plan last year, congressional Republicans called for even deeper cuts for the business world. His campaign rival, Mitt Romney, wanted a 25 percent corporate tax rate.

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Baltimore doles out tax errors in businesses' favor Paying, or not, for mistakes in calculating Baltimore property bills


By Jean Marbella, The Baltimore Sun 10:41 a.m. EDT, July 27, 2013  Baltimore Sun

Remember that card in Monopoly, "Bank error in your favor, collect $200?" With the top-hatted rich guy jumping in surprise and glee as the teller hands him the bills?

In Baltimore, it's more like, "Tax assessment error in your favor, keep the $1.5 million."

Because after all, it's not like the city is hurting for revenues.

As Luke Broadwater and Scott Calvert reported in the The Sun this week, the city has decided to let bygones be bygones when it comes to the tax breaks mistakenly given to some commercial property owners. The city's finance chief, Harry E. Black, said that because the owners had paid what they were billed — however erroneously — they couldn't be re-billed for the amount they actually owed.

Wait, what?

Under billing hasn't stopped the city from going after back taxes in the past — numerous homeowners who were found to have gotten a variety of property tax credits in error were subsequently billed for the difference.

This time, though, Black said an analysis by the city's legal department concluded that the owners of the commercial properties couldn't be billed for the taxes that they actually owe. And these are substantial sums in some cases — the Atrium apartments in the former Hecht's department store on Howard Street downtown, for example, was under billed by $576,000.The Sun's review of the top 10 recipients of tax credits for restoring historic properties found under billing mistakes totaling more than $1.5 million.

The tax breaks for rehabs are, on the face of it, a worthy incentive, rewarding those who have converted warehouses into cool condos or given new life to row houses that otherwise would be left vacant. Those who qualify don't have to pay property taxes on the value of the improvements for 10 years.

But, as The Sun has documented, the credits are frequently miscalculated — much in the same way as other property tax breaks have been, such as those for new construction or even the most common one, the homestead exemption for people who live in their homes.

Admittedly, these tax credits are no easy thing to administer, each has different qualifications, some only go to the original owner, some transfer with the property, some are valid for five years, others for 10. And there are a bunch of them, I learned from looking at the city's tax credit page. There are credits for dwellings on cemetery property, for example, and for artists in residence in neighborhoods like Station North and Highlandtown. And, of course, as the developers of Harbor Point have taken advantage of, there are credits for building on contaminated Brownfields, and in impoverished Enterprise Zones.

So yes, it's complicated, but surely not impossible to calculate an accurate bill. Can there really not be a computer program out there where you plug in an address, and all the approved tax credits for that property are automatically applied? Why are we still hearing of "clerical" errors, "coding" problems and the ever-popular system "glitches?"

But the greater problem, it seems to me, is what the city does once it learns of a mistake. The city previously had a no-excuses policy when it came to the private homeowners, some of whom hadn't even applied for the tax breaks that appeared on their bills, under vague wording like "special credit." However blameless the owners might have been, the city demanded they pay back the ill-gotten credit.

But now, the city seems willing to forgive commercial property owners whose historic credits were miscalculated in some cases — to the owner's benefit and the city's loss — by more than $500,000.

Shades of Leona Helmsley, the hotel magnate and so-called Queen of Mean who when convicted of tax evasion supposedly said, "Only the little people pay taxes."

I don't know, maybe life really is like a Monopoly game, which always seemed skewed toward the rich getting richer anyway. Everyone knows you pay more rent when you land on Park Place than on Baltic Avenue, but who knew the former was getting better tax breaks than the latter as well?

But of course, however much or little they were billed, it still was only play money.



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Remember, corporate tax breaks are the next agenda and neo-liberals like Obama will pretend they are closing loopholes and subsidies.....but as always happens with that promise....they always come right back!


Obama Shouldn’t Buy The Lower-Corporate-Taxes Line
By Dave Johnson | April 1, 2013
Campaign for America's Future




There is a big push going on to again reduce tax rates for the giant multinational corporations. See if you can guess who will make up the difference? (Hint: it will be you paying through cuts, and smaller companies that are trying to challenge the incumbency of the giant multinationals.)

Recently in the post Beware the New Corporate Tax-Cut Scam: LIFT Is A Big LIE, I warned about the LIFT coalition of large corporations trying to get rid of taxes on profits made outside the country. Of course this would result in giant companies moving jobs, factories and profit centers out of the country.

The executives who run the giant multinationals want to be let off the hook for paying taxes on profits they make outside our borders. As an Apple executive said to The New York Times, giant multinationals “don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.” And to prove it, American corporations are holding $1.7 trillion in profits outside the country – just sitting there – rather than bringing that money home, paying the taxes due and then paying it out to shareholders or using it to “create jobs” with new factories, research facilities and equipment.

Laura Tyson Argues For Corporate Tax Cuts

LIFT is mostly about profits the giant multinationals make outside of the country. There is also the RATE coalition, another group of giant companies working to get corporate taxes cut here, too. To that end, Laura Tyson has a syndicated opinion piece out, Why Give Corporations A Tax Break? in which she argues a “pro-growth rationale” for giving the giant multinationals a tax break to make them “more competitive.”

After its 1986 tax overhaul, the United States had one of the lowest corporate tax rates among OECD countries. Since then, these countries have been slashing their rates in order to attract foreign direct investment and discourage their own companies from shifting operations and profits to low-tax foreign locations. In the most recent and audacious move, the British government has embarked on a three-year plan to reduce its corporate tax rate from 28% to 20% – one of the lowest in the OECD – by 2015.

The US now has the highest corporate tax rate of these countries. Even after incorporating various deductions, credits, and other tax-reducing provisions, the effective average and marginal corporate tax rates in the US – what corporations actually pay – are higher than the OECD average.

Cutting the rate to a more competitive level would encourage more domestic investment by US corporations, and would also make the US more attractive to foreign investors.

In the op-ed Tyson argues that we cut corporate taxes in 1986 to be “more competitive”, but since then other countries have been slashing their corporate tax rates, which makes our giant multinational corporations “less competitive,” so we should slash our corporate tax rates again to be “more competitive.”

Tyson’s argument, summed up:

1. In the 1986 tax overhaul we cut corporate taxes a lot.
2. But then other countries cut their corporate tax rates “in order to attract foreign direct investment and discourage their own companies from shifting operations and profits to low-tax foreign locations.”
3. So we are now above the average.
4. Therefore we need to cut corporate taxes even more to be more “competitive” and “attract investment.”
5. Go to step 2 until corporate taxes worldwide are zero, then giant corporations start threatening to leave the country unless the country gives THEM money. (Tyson leaves out this obvious next step.)

Tyson understands that cutting corporate taxes (even more) means a loss of significant revenue for the country. She explains, “a rate cut would be costly in terms of foregone revenues: each percentage point would reduce corporate-tax revenues by about $100 billion over the next decade.” Since Tyson supports Obama’s call to cut corporate taxes from 35% to 28%, which means a loss of about $700 billion in tax revenue over the next decade. To make up the difference, Tyson argues for new revenue sources,

Similarly, a modest carbon tax or value-added tax, with credits or subsidies to offset the regressive effects on low-income households, could generate enough revenue both to pay for a significant reduction in the corporate tax rate and to make a meaningful contribution to deficit reduction.

But both of these new revenue sources — carbon tax and VAT — are good ideas and badly needed for policy reasons regardless of revenue raised. We should just do them. There is no need to reward large corporations with a tax cuts to get these. Also a Financial Transaction Tax!

“Revenue-Neutral” Means Someone Pays More. Guess Who?

Tyson says that since cutting corporate taxes would lose a lot of tax revenue we should cut these taxes in a “revenue neutral” way, meaning that we collect the same amount of tax revenue by “broadening” the tax base. In other words, cut back on deductions and loopholes. (Never mind that we ought to do away with loopholes anyway — they’re loopholes.)

Of course collecting the same amount of revenue from corporations would make them just as “less competitive” as when we started. The trick here of course is that corporations other than the giant multinationals that are “less competitive” now would have to make up that difference.

The giant multinationals pushing this new “tax reform” scheme understand that the process of cutting back on deductions and loopholes means their lobbying power will make sure the burden falls on their competitors — smaller companies, non-multinational companies, entrepreneurs and innovators. (In Lobbying and declining corporate tax burdens The Sunlight Foundation speculates on the relationship between continued corporate tax breaks and corporate lobbying.)

Corporate Taxes In Historical Perspective

The top corporate tax rate was 52.8% in 1970, 48% through that decade, then 46%, then the 1986 tax “reform” phased them down to 35%, which is where the top rate is currently.

When we cut corporate taxes, the revenue has to be made up somewhere and that “somewhere” is never at the top. A 2011 report by Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy ITEP) found that as a share of total tax revenue corporate taxes fell from 26.4 percent of total tax revenue in 1950 to just 7.4 percent of total tax revenue in 2010. Meanwhile personal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes increased from 51.4 percent to 83.8 percent of total tax revenue during the same time period.

According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Corporate tax revenues as a share of GDP have fallen to near historic lows.



At 1.7% of GDP in 2009, the US has the third-lowest effective corporate burden in the world. according to the latest OECD analysis (for 2011 revenues), based on corporate taxes as percentage of GDP.

Meanwhile America’s corporations aren’t suffering too much from being “less competitive.” Corporate profits are the highest ever, as a share of GDP.

Finally, are these supposedly “high taxes” even being paid, thereby making the giant multinationals “less competitive?” The CTJ/ITEPstudy also found that 78 of 280 of the nation’s largest and most profitable companies paid no federal income taxes in at least one of three years.

Downward Spiral

Imagine states A and B. State B cuts their tax rates and passes laws that restrict unions, keep minimum wages low and other wage-lowering measures to “attract businesses” and their jobs from state A. As successful as state B might be at getting companies to move there, what is the effect on the larger economy of all of the states? Obviously the overall wages in the larger economy will fall as the same jobs move to a state with lower pay. And even the jobs that remain in state A are under pressure to reduce their wages, with the employers threatening to move their companies to state B as well.

And the government of state A has less revenue to fund their schools and courts and infrastructure, while the government of state B sacrificed revenue to make their state more attractive. So the overall level of investment in public goods also drops.

By reducing standards State B is undercutting the ability of the people in state A to control the companies in state A. State B has enabled companies to extort lower wages and other advantages elsewhere. State B is undercutting State A’s ability to be an effective democracy.

This is what is happening around the world as these giant companies put the squeeze on governments, with the threat to just go somewhere else. This is what happens when corporate power is allowed to reach such a level that it challenges the power of governments to control them. Originally the corporations We the People enabled in order to accomplish things that are good for US have changed into a force with enough wealth and power that instead of providing good jobs and goods and services, they instead demand we pay them tribute.

Laugher Curve

Tyson concludes her “pro-growth” op-ed with a big dose of taxes take money out of the economy, and cutting taxes will raise revenue logic, writing,

Of all taxes, corporate taxes are the most harmful to economic growth – without which meaningful deficit reduction is far more difficult to achieve.

Got that? She says taxes are harmful to growth, and corporate taxes make deficit reduction “far more difficult to achieve.” So she says we should cut corporate taxes to fight the deficit. (Pouring water out of a glass will magically fill the glass with water.)

Good Lord, is it April Fool’s Day or something?

Some Real Solutions

We should remember why We the People set up a system of laws that allows the formation of corporations. There are public benefits to enabling investors to pool funds to accomplish large-scale projects so we give them all kinds of advantages, not just limitations on personal liability. In return we (used to) ask for some things for us — like honest and ethical behavior, good-paying jobs, high-quality products and services, and a cut of the proceeds to fund our schools, infrastructure, and other things to make all of our lives better. And those schools and infrastrucutre etc., helped the businesses prosper… It was a beneficial cycle.

So here are some things that will help restore balance:

1) Tax the foreign earnings of these companies whether they “bring the money home” or not. Currently they are holding $1.7 trillion outside of the country, pretending this means they don’t owe the taxes on these profits. This cheats their shareholders either because the companies should be using that money to invest in new factories, equipment, R$&D, human capital, etc. thereby raising the value of the compay, or just distributing it to the shareholders!

2) Get rid of the loopholes that have been described. They are loopholes, and they should be closed. There is no reason to “balance” doing the right thing with a “reward” of a tax cut.

3) Bring the corporate tax rate back up to pre-Reagan rates, and start providing adequate funding to schools, universities, R&D, infrastructure, courts, antitrust efforts, etc. again. This will enable all of the parts of our economy that are not giant multinational corporations to be more competitive.

4) Bring the top tax rates back up to 91%, thereby discouraging the current quick-buck business models. Right now people can grab a fortune overnight and keep it. With a very high top tax rate people would have to build wealth slowly by building solid companies. And this requires the communities that surround these companies to have good schools, good infrastructure, etc.

5) Get rid of the capital gains tax break except for very long-term investments of certain kinds. The “incentive” to invest ought to be to make money on the investment. BUT keep a lower rate for long-term (5-10+ years) investment. This is an incentive for a long-term business model instead of get-rich-quick scams. People should build wealth slowly to encourage long-term business models. (See #4)

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Four Trillion-Dollar Tax Cuts = Four Trillion-Dollar Budget Cuts Wednesday, 21 September 2011 05:14 By Jack Rasmus, Truthout | News Analysis

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This past Monday, September 19, President Obama revealed his proposals for how to pay for his $447 billion tax cut/jobs bill announced last week. In the same speech, he announced a goal of cutting the deficits and debt by $4.4 trillion. But what he didn't tell us is that the $4 trillion plus in deficit and debt reduction is almost exactly the amount of tax cuts that have been enacted over the past decade, 2001-2011, roughly three-fourths of which have gone to corporations, banks, investors and the wealthiest 10 percent households.

$4 Trillion Budget Cuts to Pay for $4 Trillion Tax Cuts

Here's how the $4 trillion tax cuts stack up:

• Bush tax cuts, 2001-2010     $2,900 billion

• Bush 2008 stimulus tax cuts     $90 billion

• Obama 2009 stimulus tax cuts     $313 billion

• AMT tax "fix" for high income households  $70 billion

• Supplemental tax cuts June 2009-October 2010  $50 billion

• Obama December 2010 tax cuts  $802 billion

• Obama September 2011 "jobs" bill tax cuts  $270 billion

       ___________
 Total tax cuts $4,495 billion ($4.49 Trillion)

Approximately 75 percent of the $4.482 Trillion in tax cuts accrued to corporations, bankers, investors and the wealthiest 10 percent households. Today, the consensus of policy makers from Obama to the Deficit Commission to the "Supercommittee" is that the "appropriate mix" of budget cuts should be 75 percent spending reductions and 25 percent tax hikes. Most of the spending cuts will be social programs benefiting seniors; retirees (Medicare, Social Security); the working poor and children (Medicaid, CHIP); students (loans, assistance to schools); and just about every other social program aiding the least fortunate.

In his September 19 speech, Obama "threatened Monday to veto any bill that cuts Medicare benefits without increasing taxes on corporations or the wealthy," according to the front page story in the September 20 Wall Street Journal. Among those experienced in bargaining, that statement means, "I am signaling I will cut Medicare if you, Republicans, agree to raise taxes," but not until you do. In other words, folks, bigger Medicare cuts are not "off the table" by any means. In fact, as a "sweetener," Obama has already agreed to start with $320 billion in Medicare and Medicaid cuts out of the gate, which he already announced. Once again, a "freebie" concession up front for nothing in return, which is the president's negotiating "style," it appears. Republicans get an initial pass from agreeing to any tax increase, in exchange for Obama's first "down-payment" of $320 billion in Medicare cuts as a prelude to a later final deal in December.

The $4 Trillion Consensus

For some time now there's been a clear consensus among Democrats and Republicans alike, Obama and Boehner, Deficit Commission, "Gang of Six," "Supercommittee of 12," and all the rest. That consensus is to cut $4 trillion minimum from the budget.

The original Simpson-Bowles deficit commission report issued last December 2010 called for about $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the coming decade. Then, last spring, Republicans demanded that same amount. Even Tea Party Congressman Paul Ryan's budget last spring proposed $4 trillion in cuts. It's just that he wanted the lion's share taken out of the hides of seniors and Medicare. After that, in June, Vice President Joe Biden held his then secret backroom negotiations with Republican leaders on behalf of the Obama administration. When news of the negotiations leaked out, it was reported Biden had agreed to a $3 trillion deficit reduction, with 87 percent composed of spending cuts, including Social Security and Medicare, and 13 percent in tax loophole closings. The Democrat Party base choked when it found out what was going on. The negotiations blew up and Republican House Leader John Boehner walked out. In July, the magic number of $4 trillion was once again quickly reintroduced by the "gang of six" senators. President Obama then directly jumped into the public negotiations in July and proposed his "grand deal" of $4 trillion of deficit cuts, composed of 75 percent spending reduction and 25 percent tax loophole closing. And now, most recently, the magic number of $4 trillion in budget cuts is offered up again by Obama.

One trillion dollars is already in the bag, as they say. This past August's "debt ceiling deal" between Obama and Republicans amounted to roughly $1 trillion in immediate cuts and required a further minimum $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion guaranteed cuts by end of this year from the "Supercommittee" in Congress that will make its proposals public on November 19. So, that adds up to a guaranteed minimum $2.5 trillion. But wait! Obama's recent proposed $447 billion "jobs" bill will raise that $2.5 trillion to $2.95 trillion, since Obama has publicly said the Congressional Supercommittee should add that amount to $1.5 trillion additional cuts mandated by year end. That same Supercommittee is already talking about cutting more than the $1.5 trillion, however. So, to the $1 trillion cuts this past August will be increased, at minimum, by another $2 trillion and possibly more. This writer predicts the eventual final deficit cutting package by year end will add at least another $1 trillion. That adds up to the consensus $4 trillion number.

$4 Trillion Tax Cuts and 25 Million Jobless

The $4 trillion in 2008-2011 tax cuts were supposed to create jobs, but they didn't. Nor will Obama's $447 billion "jobs" bill - composed of 60 percent of tax cuts - create jobs. We had 25 million jobless when Obama came in office. After $420 billion in tax cuts in 2009 and another $802 billion in tax cuts in 2010, we still have 25 million jobless today. By what logic does anyone think another $270 billion in tax cuts will create jobs when more than $1.2 trillion did not? Whether another $270 billion in Obama's "jobs" bill or more (which is likely after Republicans take a whack at it), six months from now, there will still be 25 million jobless - as the US and global economies continue to drift inexorably toward a double-dip recession.

$4 Trillion Tax Cuts and $4 Trillion Corporate Cash Hoard

But wait, there's still more. That $4 trillion in deficit cuts for tax cuts is also just about the amount that big business, multinational corporations and banks have been hoarding in cash since they were bailed out during 2009-10.

According to various sources and estimates, large US corporations - not small businesses - are sitting on a cash hoard of $2 trillion and refusing to invest it and create jobs in the US. Multinational corporations are reportedly hoarding another $1.2 trillion to $1.4 trillion in their offshore subsidiaries, refusing to return it to the US and pay the normal 35 percent corporate income tax rate. And US big banks are sitting on an excess cash reserves hoard of at least another $1 trillion. That's all just about ... guess what? Four trillion dollars.

$4 Trillion Tax Cuts and $9 Trillion US Debt

In 2001 the total federal debt as George W. Bush entered office was approximately $5.5 trillion. That total debt accelerated to $14.5 trillion today. So, the run-up in the total federal debt over the last decade was about $9 trillion. As already noted, about $4 trillion attributable to tax cuts. Another $1 trillion in lost revenue due to chronic joblessness. That leaves ... $4 trillion of the $9 trillion debt run-up due to excess spending over the decade. So, where does this $4 trillion in excess spending derive from?

The amount of $2.1 trillion was from escalating defense spending and wars. Defense spending rose at an annual rate of 8.2 percent over the decade. If it had just risen at the normal consumer price rate over the decade of roughly 2 percent, instead of the 8.2 percent, it would have lowered the deficits over the past decade by $2.1 trillion. Add at least another $400 billion to $500 billion in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program introduced by Bush that was not funded, but paid for by borrowing; add another $200 billion in excess inflationary health care cost increases that have pushed government Medicare and Medicaid payments through the roof; add the $700 billion cost of the TARP bailouts of banks in 2008 plus $140 billion in bailout costs for the government housing agencies, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac; and then add $589 billion in non-tax spending provisions in Obama's 2009-10 stimulus packages. The total in spending contributing to the $9 trillion debt now comes to roughly ... $4.179 trillion. And that's before any interest charges on the debt from the $4.179 trillion.

Summing it all up, about $4.495 trillion of the $9 trillion debt added since 2000 has been due to tax cuts that didn't create jobs. And another $4.179 trillion of the $9 trillion is the product of inflationary defense spending, inflationary health care costs, unfunded prescription drug plan, bank bailouts and stimulus spending that didn't create a sustained economic recovery. (The remaining $500 billion to $1 trillion is a consequence of three years of 25 million unemployed and lost income tax revenue and interest on the $9 trillion debt.)

Some Simple Alternatives to $4 Trillion Budget Cuts

If the consensus budget cut target is $4 trillion, why not just reverse the $4 trillion tax cuts? Or address the four major causes of deficit spending: wars, health care cost inflation, bank bailouts and poorly targeted stimulus spending? Or why not tax the $4 trillion cash hoard big corporations, multinational companies and banks are sitting on and refusing to spend to create jobs after we bailed them out? Or, while we're at it, how about taxing the $4 trillion that US wealthy investors have squirreled away in offshore tax havens from the Cayman islands to Cyprus to Vanuatu to Seychelles ... and, of course, Switzerland?

So, why are politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, Obama and Tea Partiers, liberals and libertarians, all so focused on cutting $4 trillion at the expense of seniors and retirees, students and middle-working class households when they had nothing whatsoever to do with the deficits and $9 trillion debt run-up? They didn't cause the economic crisis and weren't bailed out even to this day. They are the 25 million unemployed. They are the 11 million foreclosed homeowners. They are the 20 million with homes "under water." They are the 44 million seniors who will soon have to pay twice as much for their Medicare and receive no cost of living increases in their Social Security checks. They are the tens of millions of children of the poor who will soon be denied Medicaid. They are the millions of students now facing decades of financial indenture due to accelerating college debt.

Who will speak for them, as the politicians this coming December 23, 2011, cut another $3 trillion from social programs, and as we are offered yet another tax-cut bloated jobs bill from the president that won't create jobs and only add to corporations' cash hoarding? Don't count on the politicians in Washington, whatever their party affiliation or ideological stripe. It's time to take to the streets and be heard.




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Baltimore citizens first must be aware that Baltimore's solicitor works squarely with corporate interests and as a regular at the Board of Estimates meetings I know he does not interpret law to the people's favor so we need to go outside the city's purview to follow up on this.  It seems a Federal investigation needs to be done as it is not only these property taxes that the public loses, we have huge problems with corporate tax credits and failures in contractual agreements in obtaining them.

It is interesting that these two buildings....Muncie et al are mentioned as they are struggling with solvency.  As someone with friends fighting to get back $1,600 overcharge from the city for water bill estimates...two years and they still will not return this revenue, Mr Black is giving up pretty quick on these corporate tax problems.


City says it can't collect $1.5 million in erroneous tax breaks 'They've already paid what they were billed,' finance chief says


By Luke Broadwater and Scott Calvert, The Baltimore Sun 2:30 p.m. EDT, July 24, 2013 Baltimore Sun

Baltimore can't legally recoup more than $1.5 million in erroneous tax breaks given in recent years for renovations to historic commercial properties, Finance Director Harry E. Black said Wednesday.

"Based on advice we've received from the city's law department, although those errors were identified, the city doesn't have the ability, legally, to go back and rebill those individuals," Black said in response to questions from The Baltimore Sun.

"They've already paid what they were billed," Black added.

Black's comments Wednesday represent a major shift from past city practice. Officials had consistently maintained they could issue revised tax bills going back seven years if they learned that a property tax bill was inaccurate for any reason — including for other tax credits that go primarily to homeowners.

More than a year ago, the state Department of Assessments and Taxation acknowledged making chronic miscalculations on historic credits for several big commercial properties in Baltimore. The error