{"id":325206,"date":"2017-09-09T00:35:32","date_gmt":"2017-09-08T23:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/companies-that-got-huge-tax-breaks-didnt-create-a-single-job\/"},"modified":"2017-09-09T00:35:32","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T23:35:32","slug":"companies-that-got-huge-tax-breaks-didnt-create-a-single-job","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/companies-that-got-huge-tax-breaks-didnt-create-a-single-job\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Companies That Got Huge Tax Breaks Didn\u2019t Create a Single Job\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Janine Jackson interviewed Sarah Anderson about corporate tax cuts for the <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/home\/neil-demause-on-hurricane-harvey-sarah-anderson-on-corporate-tax-cuts\/\">September 1, 2017, episode<\/a> of <strong>CounterSpin<\/strong>. This is a lightly edited transcript.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"wrapperMI_0\" class=\"wrap-mjp  \" style=\"padding:5px 0px 40px 0px;margin:0px;width:100%\">\n<div class=\"Eabove-mjp\" id=\"Eabove-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"subwrap-MI\">\n<div class=\"jp-innerwrap\">\n<div class=\"innerx\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerleft\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerright\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innertab\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"interface-mjp verdana-mjp\" style=\"height:71px\" id=\"interfaceMI_0\">\n<div class=\"MI-image Himg right-mjp\" id=\"MI_image_0\" style=\"width:auto;height:71px;overflow:hidden\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"T_mp3j_0\" class=\"player-track-title left-mjp norm-mjp plain-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bars_holder\">\n<div class=\"loadMI_mp3j\" id=\"load_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"poscolMI_mp3j\" id=\"poscol_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"posbarMI_mp3j\" id=\"posbar_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"P-Time-MI_0\" class=\"jp-play-time\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"T-Time-MI_0\" class=\"jp-total-time\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"statusMI_0\" class=\"statusMI\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"transport-MI\">\n<div class=\"play-mjp\" id=\"playpause_mp3j_0\">Play<\/div>\n<div class=\"stop-mjp\" id=\"stop_mp3j_0\">Stop<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"buttons-wrap-mjp\" id=\"buttons-wrap-mjp_0\">\n<div class=\"mp3j-popout-MI\" id=\"lpp_mp3j_0\">pop out<\/div>\n<div id=\"download_mp3j_0\" class=\"dloadmp3-MI\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"mjp-volwrap\">\n<div class=\"MIsliderVolume\" id=\"vol_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerExt1\" id=\"innerExt1_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerExt2\" id=\"innerExt2_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"Ebetween-mjp\" id=\"Ebetween-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"listwrap_mp3j\" id=\"L_mp3j_0\">\n<div class=\"wrapper-mjp\">\n<div class=\"playlist-colour\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"wrapper-mjp\">\n<ul class=\"ul-mjp darken1-mjp verdana-mjp med-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp left-mjp\" id=\"UL_mp3j_0\">\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo\">\n<div class=\"mp3j-finfo-sleeve\">\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_gif_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo-gif\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_txt_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo-txt\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mp3j-finfo-close\" id=\"mp3j_finfo_close_0\">X<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_dlf_0\" class=\"mp3j-dlframe\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mp3j-nosolution\" id=\"mp3j_nosolution_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"Ebelow-mjp\" id=\"Ebelow-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0 = [<br \/>\n\t{ name: &#8220;1. CounterSpin Sarah Anderson Interview &#8220;, formats: [&#8220;mp3&#8221;], mp3: &#8220;aHR0cDovL3d3dy5mYWlyLm9yZy9hdWRpby9jb3VudGVyc3Bpbi9Db3VudGVyU3BpbjE3MDkwMUFuZGVyc29uLm1wMw==&#8221;, counterpart:&#8221;&#8221;, artist: &#8220;&#8221;, image: &#8220;true&#8221;, imgurl: &#8220;&#8221; }<br \/>\n];<\/p>\n<p>MP3jPLAYERS[0] = { list:MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0, tr:0, type:&#8217;MI&#8217;, lstate:true, loop:false, play_txt:&#8217;Play&#8217;, pause_txt:&#8217;Pause&#8217;, pp_title:&#8217;FAIR&#8217;, autoplay:false, download:true, vol:80, height:71, cssclass:&#8217; &#8216;, popout_css:{ enabled:true, \t\t\tcolours: [&#8220;#fff&#8221;, &#8220;rgba(201,207,232,0.35)&#8221;, &#8220;rgb(241,241,241)&#8221;, &#8220;rgba(245,5,5,0.7)&#8221;, &#8220;rgba(92,201,255,0.8)&#8221;, &#8220;transparent&#8221;, &#8220;transparent&#8221;, &#8220;#525252&#8221;, &#8220;#525252&#8221;, &#8220;#768D99&#8221;, &#8220;#47ACDE&#8221;, &#8220;&#8221;, 600, 200 ],<br \/>\n\t\t\tcssInterface: { &#8220;color&#8221;: &#8220;#525252&#8221; },<br \/>\n\t\t\tcssTitle: { &#8220;left&#8221;: &#8220;16px&#8221;, &#8220;right&#8221;:&#8221;16px&#8221;, &#8220;top&#8221;:&#8221;8px&#8221; },<br \/>\n\t\t\tcssImage: { &#8220;overflow&#8221;: &#8220;hidden&#8221;, &#8220;width&#8221;:&#8221;auto&#8221;, &#8220;height&#8221;:&#8221;71px&#8221;  },<br \/>\n\t\t\tcssFontSize: { &#8220;title&#8221;: &#8220;16px&#8221;, &#8220;caption&#8221;: &#8220;11.2px&#8221;, &#8220;list&#8221;: &#8220;12px&#8221; },<br \/>\n\t\t\tclasses: { interface:&#8217; verdana-mjp&#8217;, title:&#8217; left-mjp norm-mjp plain-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp&#8217;, image:&#8217; Himg right-mjp&#8217;, poscol:&#8221;, ul:&#8217; darken1-mjp verdana-mjp med-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp left-mjp&#8217; }} };<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fair.org\/audio\/counterspin\/CounterSpin170901Anderson.mp3\"><strong>MP3 Link<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson: <\/b>In some cases, powerful interests are so invested in telling a certain story, tell it so often and so insistently, that you\u2019d be hard-pressed to guess from media coverage that it\u2019s disputed, or simply false.<\/p>\n<p>Such is the case with a certain line about the relationship between corporate taxes and job creation. CEOs complain about the taxes they have to pay, and make claims about what they\u2019d do if they were taxed less. And corporate journalists aren\u2019t generally in the business of challenging CEOs. But are we seeing some fissures in that argument, now that it\u2019s Donald Trump <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2017\/aug\/31\/trump-vows-to-bring-back-main-street-by-cutting-business-tax-to-15\">talking<\/a> about how his plan for a \u201ccompetitive tax code\u201d\u2014common parlance for cutting corporate taxes\u2014will lead to \u201cmillions of people\u201d earning a \u201cbig, fat, beautiful paycheck\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Sarah Anderson directs the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ips-dc.org\/global-economy\/\">Global Economy project<\/a> at the Institute for Policy Studies, and is a co-editor of the IPS website <a href=\"https:\/\/inequality.org\/\"><b>Inequality.org<\/b><\/a>. She\u2019s also lead author of the annual <a href=\"http:\/\/www.faireconomy.org\/executive_excess_reports\">Executive Excess Reports<\/a> on CEO pay. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to <b>Counterspin<\/b>, Sarah Anderson.<\/p>\n<p><b>Sarah Anderson: <\/b>Thanks so much for having me, Janine.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5592539\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/IPS-Corporate-Tax-Cuts.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5592539\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/IPS-Corporate-Tax-Cuts.png\" alt=\"IPS: Corporate Tax Cuts Boost CEO Pay, Not Jobs\" width=\"350\" height=\"451\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>IPS (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ips-dc.org\/report-corporate-tax-cuts-boost-ceo-pay-not-jobs\/\">8\/30\/17<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b> The claim that media consumers could recite in their sleep is that if you reduce corporate taxes, companies will use that money to invest, to expand and, as a consequence, to hire more workers. Sarah, how did you, at IPS, go about testing that for this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ips-dc.org\/report-corporate-tax-cuts-boost-ceo-pay-not-jobs\/\">new report<\/a>, and what did you find?<\/p>\n<p><b>SA: <\/b>We\u2019re not the first people to look at this question, but we did come up with a new methodology, which is that we looked at the US companies that have already been paying next to nothing in taxes. Our official corporate tax rate is 35 percent, but many companies don\u2019t pay anywhere near that. So we looked at all the ones that paid less than a 20 percent effective tax rate, during the period of 2008 to 2015, that had been profitable every year, so they had no excuse for not paying taxes. And what we found was that these companies had not been using their tax savings to create jobs. In fact, their record on job creation was much worse than private companies throughout the economy as a whole. The tax-dodging companies had median job growth of -1 percent, whereas for the rest of the economy, it was positive 6 percent growth.<\/p>\n<p>And so that was step one in our task, so we looked a little bit further: If they aren\u2019t spending their tax savings to create jobs, where is all of that money going? And, surprise, surprise, we found out that a lot of it was winding up in the pockets of their top executives. The companies that were dodging taxes and slashing jobs were paying their CEOs, on average, about $15 million dollars last year, whereas the average, which is already pretty obscene, for big company CEOs is quite a bit lower, at just $13 million.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>It\u2019s interesting; this report is actually part of the Executive Excess series, so that connection between tax-dodging and CEO pay is really important. Well, what is this stuff about companies buying back their own stock?<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5592543\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/Sarah-Anderson.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5592543\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/Sarah-Anderson.jpg\" alt=\"Sarah Anderson (photo: IPS)\" width=\"350\" height=\"448\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Sarah Anderson: &#8220;If they aren\u2019t spending their tax savings to create jobs, where is all of that money going? And, surprise, surprise, we found out that a lot of it was winding up in the pockets of their top executives.&#8221; (photo: IPS)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>SA: <\/b>That has been a big trend, growing over the last decade, where if companies want to make themselves look stronger without actually becoming stronger, they can take profits and use them to repurchase their own company stock on the open market. You\u2019re reducing the availability of stock, so that drives up their share price. It&#8217;s a way to artificially increase the value of your shares. And one thing that it does is it expands the paycheck of the top executives, because most CEO pay these days is in the form of stock-based compensation. So they have a personal, vested interest in spending money on these stock buybacks instead of putting it into things like research and development, or investing in new facilities or technologies that might help create jobs over the long term.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>It seems to me, just going bigger picture, that many people have internalized this idea of &#8220;makers and takers,&#8221; you know; corporations are the drivers of the economy. It&#8217;s as though they\u2019re in charge, so if we just give them what they want, maybe they\u2019ll be nice and they\u2019ll let us have some jobs. It just seems like a weird way for a government, or a society, to think.<\/p>\n<p><b>SA: <\/b>And there is just no evidence to back it up. So one thing that is really important to look at is in 2004, the US government offered companies that were stashing their profits overseas, and avoiding US taxes, they allowed them to bring the money back to the US at a 0 percent tax rate. The way it normally is, they don\u2019t have to pay US taxes on these foreign earnings unless they bring the money back here, and then they would pay the full 35 percent tax rate. But in 2004, they decided to give companies an incentive to bring the money back by giving them this 0 percent tax rate. And they were sure, they claimed, that these companies then would create oodles and oodles of new jobs in the US. And instead, the companies that got the most benefit out of this just turned around and cut jobs. So we have the evidence there, that&#8217;s just an extreme example, of how companies that got huge tax breaks didn\u2019t create a single job; they cut jobs.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5592542\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/NYT-Corporate-Tax-Cuts.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5592542\" src=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/NYT-Corporate-Tax-Cuts.png\" alt=\"New York Times: It\u2019s a Myth That Corporate Tax Cuts Mean More Jobs\" width=\"350\" height=\"440\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Sarah Anderson&#8217;s op-ed in the <strong>New York Times<\/strong> (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/08\/30\/opinion\/corporate-tax-cuts-jobs.html?_r=0\">8\/30\/17<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>And yet we\u2019re hearing those same ideas get circulated again, and we\u2019re supposed to believe them\u2014this time.<\/p>\n<p>You have an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/08\/30\/opinion\/corporate-tax-cuts-jobs.html\">op-ed<\/a> in the <b>New York Times<\/b>, \u201cIt\u2019s a Myth That Corporate Tax Cuts Mean More Jobs,\u201d and it has gotten a really good deal of pickup, which is terrific. But besides hoping to drive a stake into this particular zombie idea, what else would you like to see come out of this moment? Obviously, we\u2019re talking about it because Congress is going to be considering tax policy soon, but you have some other ideas in that piece about things that we might look at doing.<\/p>\n<p><b>SA: <\/b>Absolutely, and people really should buckle up and get ready for a very intense fight over taxes. I know that this issue makes a lot of people\u2019s eyes glaze over, but this is a huge and important fight. If the Republicans get their tax plan through, it would mean losing trillions of dollars because of tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations, and that would just mean huge cutbacks on things that mean a lot to working people, like education and Medicare and so forth.<\/p>\n<p>So this is really important. And what we should be pushing policymakers to focus on is, instead of more tax breaks for people that don\u2019t need them, and companies that don\u2019t need them, we should be focused on closing up the loopholes that have allowed our system to get so perverse and unfair. And one of the big ones is the one that I just mentioned, where companies can stash profits overseas, often in tax havens, and not pay any US taxes on those profits indefinitely. And if we ended that loophole, we could generate enormous amounts of money in a very fair way, that could go for the urgent needs we\u2019re facing in this country, around infrastructure and jobs and so forth.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s one thing we should be looking at, is closing the loopholes. We should also be looking at new forms of taxation that would also make our system more fair. One I love to talk about is putting a tax on Wall Street speculation. So as it is now, when ordinary folks go out and buy something like a winter coat or put gas in their car, they pay a sales tax on that. But \u00a0these extremely wealthy hedge fund investors and other traders on Wall Street, who are buying millions and millions of dollars worth of stocks and derivatives all day long, they pay no tax on that. Even a very small tax on each trade would add up to a lot for these big high-flyers in the financial system. So we need to be going on offense here, rejecting the false claims that cutting corporate tax rates will create jobs, and really insisting on making the system more fair.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ: <\/b>We\u2019ve been speaking with Sarah Anderson, director of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ips-dc.org\/global-economy\/\">Global Economy project <\/a>at the Institute of Policy Studies. They\u2019re online at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ips-dc.org\/\">IPS-dc.org<\/a>, and that\u2019s where you\u2019ll find the new report, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ips-dc.org\/report-corporate-tax-cuts-boost-ceo-pay-not-jobs\/\"><i>Corporate Tax Cuts Boost CEO Pay, Not Jobs<\/i><\/a>. Sarah Anderson, thank you so much for joining us this week on<b> Counterspin<\/b>.<\/p>\n<p><b>SA: <\/b>My pleasure.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"et_bloom_bottom_trigger\"><\/span><br \/>\nThis piece was reprinted by <a href=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\">RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from <a href=\"http:\/\/fair.org\/home\/companies-that-got-huge-tax-breaks-didnt-create-a-single-job\/\">FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Janine Jackson interviewed Sarah Anderson about corporate tax cuts for the September 1, 2017, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. Play Stop pop out X MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0 = [ { name: &#8220;1. 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