Birong: Tax Day — the real April fools
As April 18 looms near, it’s hard not to have taxes weigh heavy on our minds.
For a lot of Vermont small businesses, this day can be bittersweet. Paying taxes typically means that, as a business, you’ve made money; and for most small businesses that alone is an achievement. Small business owners recognize that paying our fair share of taxes to local, state and federal governments is a societal responsibility and a part of doing business. We recognize that our tax dollars fund important investments in education, infrastructure and health care, to name a few. Unfortunately, in the United States, this cost of doing business disproportionately affects small business. Small business owners proudly pay our fair share of taxes, while many large and multinational corporations use an arsenal of tax loopholes to shelter their profits outside the U.S., depressing the very system and economy they benefit from.
But the craziest thing of all is that most of what they’re doing is actually legal. This needs to change. We need a tax code that levels the playing field between small and large employers, and ensures that businesses of all sizes pay their fair share.
The problem isn’t just weak morality on the part of many corporations, but also the laws that provide them with the legal opportunity to execute these practices. Whether they are paid to look the other way or are just blind to manipulation, our government’s complacent corporate tax code is as responsible for this problem as anything else.
Just this past summer, Americans for Tax Fairness released a report highlighting Wal-Mart’s use of offshore tax havens to dodge taxes. The creation of overseas subsidiaries allows this practice to continue, regardless of the fact that these subsidiaries have no retail operations and have few, if any employees. Congress must require that Wal-Mart and other multinational corporations pay all legally required taxes on their growing pile of overseas earnings, which would raise substantially more revenue to make new economy-boosting investments. The recent “Panama Papers” leak also exposed international offshoring and tax avoidance at a scale few believed existed and with political figures at the highest levels of government. Some of the same institutions involved in this scandal were also major players in the financial collapse of 2008. Only time will tell just how many U.S. corporations are involved in this or other scandals.
Large multi-national corporations, like Wal-Mart, that benefit from consumers, the workforce and the infrastructure in the U.S. must also reinvest in the very community they benefit from. Currently, they have the financial, political and intellectual power to dodge paying their fair share of taxes. This hurts our workforce, our small businesses, and the very economy that sustains all of us. This country has provided these corporations the tools to attain success, and their legal tax-dodging practices only enable them to suppress that dream for people like you and me. There is an opportunity — and a desperate need — for our leaders to take action and hold these corporations accountable. Politicians on both sides of the aisle need to focus on reforming the corporate tax structure to close the loopholes that allow these practices and bring an end to one of the greatest confidence schemes in our country’s history.
