Too Much Online, 11 Feb. 2012

From this week's Too Much Online's "Progress and Promise" column:

America's state and localities spend about $40 billion annually on fire fighting and parks. American corporations and wealthy individuals, a new study reveals, are using offshore tax havens to deny states and localities about that same $40 billion. And tax havens are costing Uncle Sam even more. In Congress, lawmakers Jan Schakowsky from Illinois and Bernie Sanders from Vermont have just introduced legislation that would end the most pivotal tax haven loophole, the tax code clauses that let U.S. firms pay no taxes on profits they report overseas until they “repatriate” those profits back home. This loophole, notes Citizens for Tax Justice, gives corporations an incentive to “shift their U.S. profits, on paper, to foreign tax havens and avoid billions of dollars in taxes.”

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