The over $1.3tn of ANNUAL Corporate welfare

[DemocratForJustice]

(N.B. this is in addition to the over $1.2tn a year of government and Federal Reserve subsidies and handouts being given to the big banks
See here http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023293726 ).

Summary

$105bn a year currently spent on keeping 7,000 mercenaries in Iraq.
$170bn a year spendt on building new and supplying existing foreign bases.
$88bn for the Afghan war - get out now.
End all the mercenary contracts.
Cut the over $100bn a year of medicare fraud.
Drastically cut the price of prescription drugs.
Fine the big banks $200bn for their various frauds (one off).
End the tax breaks, dodges and subsidies to large Corporations that mean they pay next to nothing in Corporation tax - $200bn a year of extra revenue.
Stop the $200bn a year of Corporate Pork.
Stop the phoney war on drugs, save $200bn a year and cut the levels of crime and corruption and the number of hard drug addicts.
End all Corporate Welfare.
End all foreign "aid".

Details

Cut $500bn from military spending from the current $1,219bn in 2012.
By :-
Cut the $105bn p.a. budget for keeping 7,000 mercenaries in Iraq (Pentagon budget).

Cancel ALL of the current mercenary contracts. They cost about 5 times as much as using US troops. They are a political tool and folly in order to hide US military involvement and spending.

Cut the size of the worlds largest embassy in Baghdad - swap for smaller premises with someone else in the green zone and rent the rest out.

Bring back the 138,000 military that are currently stationed in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy & UK. Let them pay for their own defense.

Drastically cut the $170 bn spent every year on building and supplying foreign military bases
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-engelhardt/military-spending-cuts_b_2277360.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics

http://www.alternet.org/world/us-taxpayers-are-shelling-out-170-billion-year-pentagon-occupy-planet

Stop buying reaper and predator drones at $36m a pop - they are counter productive.
Stop spending money on hellfire missiles that serve only to recruit more jihadists and radicalize the local and general Middle East populations because of the extremely high number of innocent civilians killed.

Stop the $1.45 TRILLLION development of the next generation of stealth aircraft.
The US hasn't had a plane shot down since the 1st Gulf War.
STOP the development of the next generation ballistic missile submarines. A new contract for the next stage was just signed for $1.8 billion.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/R41129.pdf
Current estimates to just build the boats in 2021 are $56bn. Likely total costs $200bn and up.

Cut the size of the NSA and DHS, they are not cost effective.
A new $2bn datacenter is being built in Utah to store EVERY email sent in America.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/15/data-whistleblower-constitutional-rights
The budgets of NSA and DHS have been massively increased over the last few years.
The new datacenter is estimated to require $40 million worth of electricity every year
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_nsa10.htm
$10's of billions of taxpayer money are being spent on software each year to collect and decrypt financial transactions of EVERY American citizen. Even for people that have committed no crime, no criminal investigation is underway and no search warrant is required.

Withdraw immediately from Afghanistan - saving $88bn on current war costs.

The latest examples of Pentagon waste.
Did Jesus die for Klingon's too?
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/did-jesus-die-klingons-too-and-other-pentagon-projects

Obama now plans to send troops into as many as 35 more African countries in 2013.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/14050-us-troops-to-be-in-up-to-35-african-countries


Cut the $100bn+ medicare fraud.

Cut the price of FDA drugs or go generic earlier.
Pure pharmaceutical greed - How Big Pharma is ripping off Americans
http://www.alternet.org/pure-pharmaceutical-greed-11-out-12-new-fda-approved-medicines-cost-100000-year-patient

Fine the big banks for the mortgage, Libor, money laundering and other frauds they have committed that should bring in over $200bn (one off).

Stop the phoney war on drugs and save $200bn p.a. and have a MASSIVE reduction in crime and corruption.
Proving the so called war on drugs is a joke. HSBC has just settled for a slap on the wrist fine of $1.9bn (equivalent to 5 weeks of revenues) for massive Mexican drug money laundering. No execs are to be criminally charged.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213



Stop the $200bn of new Pork issued each year.

Stop ALL foreign aid. $33.6bn in 2010 to the top 25 recipients.

Stop ALL corporate welfare and subsidies.


Stop buying drones for border patrol.
They are VERY expensive, very inefficient, very easy to hijack their GPS systems and positively DANGEROUS to US citizens.
If a bunch of Texas University students can hijack a drone with less than $1,000 of equipment - you can be sure a Mexican drug gang can.


I just saved $1tn+ without even trying and I hardly cut any jobs at all.



Then we can start talking about cutting the next $500bn of government spending.
This would mean a reduction in the number of government bureaucrats.
This would be done in conjunction with further tax cuts for the poorest which would be an economic stimulus and create more jobs.

We can also talk about closing tax loopholes whereby multinationals siphon off profits to tax havens abroad and pay very little or no corporation tax.
That money can then be used to reduce corporation tax on small and medium sized businesses who are the real job and wealth creators. This would also be an economic stimulus.
This has just been proposed to the G20 by the UK and Germany.

Is This A Galling Tax Dodge From Facebook: It Paid 0.3% Taxes On $1.34 Billion Profits
http://www.businessinsider.com/surprise-facebook-avoids-its-european-taxes-2012-12?0=sai
You can bet Facebook have a similar scheme to avoid paying US Taxes. Like Google's scheme to pay royalties to a subsidiary set up for the purpose in Bermuda.



The tax increases proposed under the so called "Fiscal Cliff".
EVERYBODY's taxes are about to go up.
http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/178778/Income+Tax/2013+Federal+Income+Tax+Update
When you add in state/city taxes, income taxes are TOO HIGH for EVERYBODY.
The Payroll tax cut of 2% is also due to expire at the end of the year.
Increasing taxes on medium / low income workers will kill the economy and MUST be stopped.

The increase in taxes for the top 2% is equivalent to 8 days of government spending.
This is just fiddling around with the deckchairs on the titanic.


CUT the wasteful spending.

If you want to tax something - tax donations to churches.
Churches are a business like any other business.
They are a business selling faith.
Most of church spending is not charity - it is spent on employee wages (priests/pastors) and the upkeep of their buildings (churches).

I agree with Robert Reich "we should be cutting military spending and Corporate Welfare"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/cliff-hanger-the-president_b_2338483.html

Rex Nutting - Marketwatch
Why isn't Barack Obama targeting $2.6 trillion of Corporate Welfare?
When a stock market shill starts asking why Corporate Welfare is not being cut, you know something is up.
http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/story/print?guid=A524B3DC-4888-11E2-ACE1-002128040CF6

Someone in Congress finally goes after tax avoidance by the multinationals
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/a-choice-for-corporate-am_b_2652176.html

At the moment multinationals are paying very little or zero Corporation Taxes, while small and medium sized business are paying around 29 or 30%.
So we have situations like Starbucks which pays no Corporation Tax, competing against a small coffee shop owner paying 30% tax.
EVERY company should pay the same - all the tax loop holes and tax breaks should be removed.
Corporation tax should be set at about 25% for EVERY company (no loopholes) and gradually reduced over time.
The first $100,000 of profits should be made tax free to give a huge tax break for small and medium businesses.
The number of businesses per 1,000 people is rapidly falling.
Increases in the number of small businesses should be encouraged to put competition back in the marketplace and create jobs for Americans, not subsidies to giant corporations who offshore jobs overseas.



Bernie Sanders identifies $128bn of tax avoidance by just 31 large Corporations.
There are many other examples and the true cost must be well over double this for all multinationals.
To put this in context the payroll tax expiry was $108bn a year in additional revenues - almost all of it paid for by the middle class and the working poor.
He has still managed to miss some of the largest offenders.
These include Apple, Google, Amazon and Starbucks.
These are all large donors to the Democrats and Obama of course.

How much would the additional revenues be if we went through the list of every company in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100?

To put this in context the payroll tax expiry was $108bn a year in additional revenues.

The diversion of US generated profits to foreign tax havens to avoid paying US Corporation Tax must be well over double that.

The practice is now becoming so widespread that even medium sized businesses are now getting in on the act.
I read about a largish law firm that was setting up an off shore subsidiary, purely as a mechanism to avoid US Corporation Tax a few months ago.

We have single office buildings in the Cayman Islands that are the registered offices of over 8,000 subsidiaries of mostly US Corporations.
How big is this one office building in the Cayman's, probably a few floors?

And that is before you get into the industry and company specific tax breaks for large Corporations.
Is the $9.4bn a year for offshore loans by the big banks included in these numbers?
The tax breaks for the large arms companies certainly aren't.

For Bernie Sanders report in full, read :-
http://www.politicususa.com/sanders-report-corporations-tax-dodge.html

Top Ten list : Tax evaders wall of shame
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/ad-lib/2011/apr/10/tax-evaders-wall-shame/

This list includes Wells Fargo - I cannot imagine why this was missed off from Bernie Sanders list (sic).
Also Google and Citigroup.

Facebook gets a multi billion dollar tax break. $1.1bn in profits and a $429m tax REFUND for 2012. Corporatism gone mad.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-15/facebook-gets-a-multi-billion-dollar-tax-break

Tax breaks to corporations are worth $180bn a year.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/19/michael-moore-irs-scandal_n_3303395.html?ir=Business

The Billionaire Hedge Fund Tax dodge - set up an offshore reinsurance company to recycle funds and delay your tax bill indefinitely.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-19/paulson-leads-funds-to-bermuda-tax-dodge-aiding-billionaires.html


The Pentagon plan to spend $12.6bn every year thru to 2037 on the F-35.
John McCain called the F-35 project a total waste of taxpayer money. Why hasn't Obama stopped it?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/11/us-lockheed-fighter-report-idUSBRE92A13R20130311

The F-35 is plagued with problems. It is of poor design in the first place.

Winslow Wheeler, at the US Center for Defense Information described the F-35 programme as a “gigantic performance disappointment”, which was not even as stealthy as the F-22 Raptor.
He added: “It’s the counterintuitive problem of paying a huge amount of money thinking you’re getting a Lamborghini or Ferrari: You’re not, you’re getting a Yugo (the cheap, mass-produced cars made in the former Yugoslavia).”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9813125/Lightning-will-ground-F35-fighter-jet-known-as-the-Lightning-II.html

Even cutting back on America's current ballistic nuclear submarine fleet would save $2bn a year.
It is still at cold war levels.
Did no one tell the government that the USSR had collapsed and there were no longer 1,000's of ballistic missiles pointed at American cities?

60 outrageous ways that the US government is wasting money.
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/60-completely-outrageous-ways-the-u-s-government-is-wasting-money

The huge drone that could not be grounded
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/07/16/12969/huge-drone-could-not-be-grounded

[MannyGoldstein]

1. If the White House does those things then

Fox News will say mean things about the President, the Republicans won't cooperate with us on legislation, and the job creators won't create jobs.

Can you imagine what that future would be like?