The best damn tax training you ever had

The BEST DARN TAX TRAINING YOU EVER HAD!!!

Notenough money
IRS
SCARY
OVeRwHelMing

“Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.”
~Franklin D. Roosevelt

Assistance to fight fires and crime
Social Security
Education
Medicare

“Bring Me Men to Match My Mountains!” This is California’s need today: for men and women who can match, in the scale of their imagination and the depth of their insight, the extraordinary diversity, power, and challenge which is implicit in this immense and fabulous province which sprawls along the Pacific like a tawny tiger.”

SO SIMPLY PUT THE PROBLEM:
People don’t like paying taxes
Taxes make it seem harder to increase our personal wealth, but instead of all the money we earn going into our own personal bank accounts, a portion is set aside for government to spend on programs that serve the common good.

STRATEGIES DESIGNED BY A SMALL BUT VERY RICH SEGMENT OF OUR SOCIETY TO PERSUADE LARGER NUMBERS OF PEOPLE THAT TAXES ARE BAD AND SHOULD NEVER BE RAISED.

1. To make the idea of government look bad, so that people fear it, mistrust it, and refuse to pay for it.

2. Also to substitute “government” for “the rich and corporations” as the object of working class and middle class anger, and as the agent responsible for the deterioration of the American Dream over the past thee decades.

3. To convince people that all taxes are essentially the same , and that ANY tax increase hurts all of us.

Grover Norquist
President, Americans for Tax Reform
“I don’t hate government. I just want to make it small enough that I could drown it in the bathtub.”

Closer to home we have:
THIS GUY

We Believe:
The government exists to help people
That sufficient revenues and educated lawmakers are necessary preconditions for that to happen

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them-that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works-whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”

During the period from the end of World War II to about 1980, income in the United States was more evenly distributed than it is today. This was due to three things:
The strength of unions
more progressive tax structure
A prevailing belief that the role of government was to make the entire society more secure through tax supported programs.

THE TOP 1%:
Today the top one percent of wealth holders in the United States- about three million people in a country of 300 million- owns more than one third of the country’s wealth
The top 1% makes an average of 1.6 million per year.

Why? :
a.)The decline of the labor movement
b.) Relentless attacks on government and taxes by conservative forces marshaled by the 1%.
TAX BREAKS FOR THE RICH
NLRA
PROP. 13
2/3 MAJORITY VOTE

WHO IS THIS?

But today things are back to the way they were then…
General Electric
CEO: Jeffrey Immelt
2010 Pre-tax Profit: $14.2 billion
Taxation strategy: GE's "innovative" accounting methods—which allowed it to accrue a $3.2 billion tax benefit in
2010, $833 million in 2009 and $651 million in 2008—are legendary. The company employs an entire team of former IRS and Treasury officials, dubbed the "world's best tax law firm," to make sure that profits are recorded in tax havens, tax breaks are maximized and laws passed on Capitol Hill are favorable to its interests. In the last five years, its fillings show $26 billion in domestic profits, padded with a net tax benefit of $4.1 billion.

Google
CEO: Eric Schmidt
Taxation strategy: Transfer pricing. Incomes are reported in foreign tax havens while liabilities are reported domestically. Google’s patents are also licensed outside of the U.S., allowing it to license its patents domestically and write off the expense.

Boeing
CEO: W. James McNerney
Taxation strategy: Despite a double-digit tax rate, Boeing has managed to escape paying federal taxes for the last three years thanks to a plethora of foreign subsidiaries, which act as a tax haven. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, the airplane maker paid 0.3% of its pre-tax income in federal income taxes in 2010.

Pfizer
CEO: Ian Read
Taxation strategy: Like many pharmaceutical and technology multinationals, Pfizer has used transfer pricing to record sales in one country to profits (on paper) in another country entirely.

Oracle
CEO: Lawrence Ellison
Taxation strategy: Transfer pricing—though not without implications. Oracle suffered a bit last fall when its Japanese subsidiary had to negotiate an advance agreement with tax authorities in the U.S. and Japan so that it wouldn’t get hit with transfer price taxes in Japan. But the agreement forced the subsidiary to agree to pay higher royalty fees and had to lower its earnings projections. Its stock closed 9 percent below the previous day’s close on the Nikkei, the Japanese stock market.

Goodrich
CEO: Marshall Larsen
2010 Pre-tax Profit: $804 million
Taxation strategy: In the past, Goodrich’s effective tax rate was as low as 11.3 percent. Since Goodrich is an aerospace company, one straightforward reason is the tax breaks it can claim are related to the depreciation of assets.

Microsoft
CEO: Steve Ballmer
2010 Pre-tax Profit: $25 billion
Taxation strategy: Microsoft has a history of shifting its reported income through various foreign locales—to Bermuda via The Netherlands via Ireland—to limit domestic income. The tactic isn’t just for the long-established techies, it has also been adopted by Facebook.

News Corp
CEO: Rupert Murdoch
Taxation strategy: In December 2008, the Government Accountability Office reported that 83 of the 100 largest companies in the U.S. had subsidiaries in foreign tax havens. One of the companies with the highest number was News Corp., which then had more than 150 subsidiaries in tax-haven locales.

Hewlett-Packard
CEO: Leo Apotheker
2010 Pre-tax Profit: $11 billion
Taxation strategy: As a tech company, H-P does what most do. It keeps its IP and incomes registered in other countries. In 2004, when companies were temporarily allowed to repatriate earnings abroad, H-P claimed $14.5 billion of the $15 billion it had earned abroad as domestic earnings.

WHY?
In the early nineties Governor Pete Wilson raised taxes on the richest Californians. The measure was rescinded a few years later , resulting in three to five billion dollars per year the state doesn’t receive.
California is the only state in the nation (of 21 oil producing states) that fails to tax oil as the corporations, harvesting huge profits at the gas pumps, extract it from the ground (exactly 1 billion dollars per year the state doesn’t receive.
Due to Prop. 13 commercial real estate holdings are not reassessed for tax purposes until they are sold. If a corporation continues to hold real estate it continues to pay taxes on it corresponding to its value when it was purchased. Result ( several billion dollars per year cities, counties, and schools don’t receive.

A SOLUTION
Progressive Taxes

What is progressive taxation?
The simple idea that people with more money should pay more in taxes. And people with a lot more should pay a lot more.
What is a regressive tax and what is the difference?
Regressive taxes –like a sales tax seem fair on the surface because they charge everyone the same percentage. In reality someone that makes $300,000 per year is going to feel the pain from a 1% bump in the sales tax far less than someone who makes $30,000 per year and is just getting by.

REVENUE OPTIONS
Restore top income tax brackets
Commercial property reassessment (“split roll”)
Oil production/severance tax
Restore vehicle license fee
Broaden the sales tax base (non-labor “services)
Sales tax increase

RESTORE TOP INCOME BRACKETS
Several billion dollars in state revenues would result by bumping up the top joint income tax rates from the current limit of 9.3% to 10% for people who make over $300,000 per year, and to 11% for people who make over $600,000.

COMMERCIAL PROPERTY REASESSMENT/ “SPLIT ROLL”
Commercial property is currently only reassessed when sold. With a statutory change we could raise between $1 and $2 billion per year. With a constitutional change it would be 4+ billion.

Oil production/ severance tax
California is the only oil producing state (out of21) that does not
Tax oil when it comes out of the ground. The average tax for the other states is 6%. The oil corporations will not “leave Caliofrnia” if this tax is imposed. Their profits-at all time record highs-will withstand the new tax, which would raise $.75 billion per year with oil at $50/barrel.

Restore vehicle license fee
By returning to the 2% rate repealed by Governor Shwarzenegger,
The state would take in close to $5 billion per year.

Broaden the sales tax base (non-labor “services)
$1 billion to $4 billion (higher amount includes telecom and cable) could be raised from including admissions, entertainment, parking/temporary rentals of space. Considerably more could be raised with a tax on stock transactions.

SALES TAX INCREASE
A ½ cent increase equals $3 billion. A 1% sales tax increase would bring in $6 billion
For the record I think it’s spelled B-o-l-o-g-n-a

SHEESH THAT’s A LOT OF INFO NOW WHAT?
BECOME A PART OF OUR NETWORK OF VOTERS
EDUCATE YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY MEMBERS
3) GET ACTIVE IN YOUR LOCAL ANCHOR ORGANIZATION
We are Californians. We are our best hope for change.
If you believe the California Dream is possible, and you're willing to support the hard work it takes to get us there, make a donation to California Calls. If all of us extraordinary people give ordinary donations to fund the work that happens every day, all year long, we can rebuild the road toward the California Dream.

http://betteranever.blogspot.com	17
http://www.betteranever.blogspot.com	2
http://betteranever.blogspot.ca	1

The best damn tax training you ever had

by Melissa Chadburn on May 07, 2011

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

3 Embeds 20

Statistics

The best damn tax training you ever had — Presentation Transcript