Americans for Tax Fairness has even created "Corporate Tax Dodger" trading cards.
One of their favorite arguments against fair taxation is that it "redistributes wealth."
Vicious Circle
We're certainly redistributing our wealth to the tax-dodging defense contractors behind anti-Medicare and anti-Social Security groups like "Fix the Debt."
One of Fix the Debt's leaders is Honeywell CEO David Cote, who also served on President Obama's Deficit Commission. Cote's corporation received $1.5 billion in taxpayer money in 2012 from the Defense Department alone, and paid no taxes at all in 2009-10. (It paid a 2 percent rate in 2011.)
While it was siphoning off our wealth, cluster-bomb-manufacturing Honeywell also raised total executive compensation for Cote and his top four executives to $54 million. That's a 15 percent raise during the worst recession in modern history, funded by your tax dollars.
Now that's wealth redistribution.
It's no coincidence that Honeywell also spent more than $18 million on lobbying. That's our money -- spent to corrupt the political process which decides how to spend our money.
We're also redistributing wealth to high-net-worth bankers who were bailed out with taxpayer dollars, then promptly went back to shafting the same taxpayers with usurious business practices. The Federal Reserve still provides them with risk-free profits without requiring them to lend very much money -- which is, after all, what banks are for.
How do they get away with it? The lobbying helps. So does the money they spend on "grassroots" groups like the Tea Party.
The Fighting Side of Us
"Big Government Plus Big Spending = Slavery."
That's what a Tea Party sign said in 2009. We've since learned that some of those demonstrators were actually hired and paid to show up for the cameras, but the movement's real enough. And yet polls show that Tea Partiers overwhelmingly support Social Security and Medicare, two key government programs now on the chopping block.
The "Fix the Debt" corporate-welfare crowd and "anti-government" Tea Party they help fund want it both ways. They love what they get from taxed revenue, but they don't want to pay taxes. And they lecture us on the evils of government.
To use a line Merle Haggard deployed so effectively against peace demonstrators in the Vietnam days: "They love our milk and honey but they preach about some other way of livin'."
Two Nightmares
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