America Panders to The Plutocrats: Apple, Google, Microsoft Avoid Taxes By Keeping Billions In Profits Offshore

America Panders to The Plutocrats: Apple, Google, Microsoft Avoid Taxes By Keeping Billions In Profits Offshore

The Microsoft logo. Microsoft and other companies have been accused of using complicated schemes to avoid paying taxes.

American multinational corporations have something in common with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, aside from being people, too: They both keep a lot of their income overseas to cut their tax bills.

Companies such as Microsoft and Apple quietly dodge billions of dollars in taxes each year with potentially illegal schemes to move their profits offshore, according to a Senate subcommittee report released on Thursday.

"Some multinationals use our current tax system to engage in gimmicks to avoid paying taxes they owe," Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations, said in a hearing on Thursday. Levin described "a system used to shift billions of dollars of profit offshore and avoid billions in taxes."

Microsoft, Apple, Google and Hewlett-Packard were among the companies Levin singled out for criticism over their tax-avoidance practices, but they are not alone. Most multinational companies pay a tax rate well below the 35 percent rate mandated by law. Some avoid paying taxes altogether, or even get the government to pay them money. These loopholes cost the U.S. government billions of dollars in revenue that could be used to help close the budget deficit.

Using complex schemes to shift U.S. revenue overseas, Microsoft was able to avoid paying taxes on $21 billion in revenue between 2009 and 2011, amounting to about half its total U.S. sales, according to the subcommittee report. The company avoided paying $4.5 billion in taxes, or about $4 million per day, during that time, according to the report.

Using similar schemes, Levin said, Apple avoided taxes on $34.5 billion between 2009 and 2011, and Google has dodged taxes on $24 billion.

Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, used a series of constantly revolving short-term loans between itself and its subsidiaries that have helped it avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes since at least 2008, according to Levin. Though he didn't say how much money H-P has avoided paying, Levin did say that H-P has kept billions of dollars in cash offshore -- more than $17 billion in 2010, for example -- that it would then "lend" to its U.S. parent company in a steady stream.

"HP has complied fully with all applicable provisions of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code and auditor Ernst & Young has consistently reviewed and approved the accuracy of HP’s financials," Hewlett-Packard responded in a statement emailed to the Huffington Post. "HP has always had an extremely productive and professional relationship with the IRS, who has permanent offices at two of our facilities and has been continually auditing HP since the filing of our 1962 tax return. They have never raised any concerns about these programs. We are disappointed to see what appears to be a politically motivated attack on one of America’s largest employers.”

Apple and Google did not immediately return requests for comment. A Microsoft representative was scheduled to address the subcommittee later on Thursday.

"In conducting our business at home and abroad, we abide by U.S. and foreign tax laws," Microsoft said in a statement emailed to the Huffington Post. "That is not to say that the rules cannot be improved -- to the contrary, we believe they can and should be. U.S. international tax rules are outdated and not competitive with the tax systems of our major trading partners."

The ranking Republican on the subcommittee, Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), defended the companies, saying they were following the letter of the law to avoid what he called onerous tax rates and an overly complex tax code.

"This is perfectly legal tax avoidance," Coburn said, arguing that the 35 percent corporate tax rate mandated by law is twice that of the average rate around the world. "They take advantage of every loophole we have created in the tax system. There is nothing heinous in that. Nothing illegal in that."

Levin responded that he wasn't sure, but it seemed "highly dubious" that Hewlett-Packard's revolving loan program, for example, "complies with current tax law." He also blamed the IRS for lax enforcement of that law.

Just because something is legal does not mean it is ethical. All of these companies depend on U.S. infrastructure and the U.S. military to create a safe and economically advanced country that makes it possible for these companies to even exist.

Freaky conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has accused Amb. Susan Rice of totally unfounded misdeeds, FLASHBACK: When Krauthammer Excused Condi Rice For Pushing "Defective" Iraq War Intelligence

The Republican Speaker of the House is clueless, John Boehner(R-OH): No ‘Difference’ If Revenue Comes From Middle Class Or Super Rich

Republicans Have Abandoned All Pretense To Morality With Shameful 'Dreams From My Real Father'

Republicans Have Abandoned All Pretense To Morality With Shameful 'Dreams From My Real Father'

After four years of invective, four years during which the right has called President Obama a traitor, a communist, a fraud, an affirmative-action case, a terrorist-sympathizer, and a tyrant, its shrillest voices have been reduced to the most primal insult of all. They are calling Obama’s mother a whore.

For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. If Obama is reelected, it’s hard to imagine where the right goes from here.

It’s tempting to ignore Dreams From My Real Father because it’s so preposterous. The movie claims that Obama’s actual father was the poet and left-wing activist Frank Marshall Davis, who Dunham met through her father, who was a CIA agent merely posing as a furniture salesman. “My election was not a sudden political phenomenon,” says the narrator, speaking as if he were Obama reading his autobiography. “It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades.”

Davis enjoyed taking nude photos of women, and the images said to be of Dunham, to which the director pays lascivious attention, are presented as evidence of their intimate relationship. “These photos were taken a few weeks before 1960, when Mom was about five weeks pregnant with me,” the narrator says. “Frank then sold the photos to men’s mail-order catalogs.”

What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million] or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.

Newsbeast discusses President Obama’s early life and his reelection campaign.

Gilbert won’t say who is funding this distribution, and there’s no way to verify his numbers. Had he not made other right-wing documentaries in the past, I might suspect that the whole thing is a brilliant conceptual art project about the limits of anti-Obama credulity. But the fact is, people are reporting receiving the disc in the mail. Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri.

What would Republicans do without the politics of hysteria and character assassination. They might have to start actually standing up for something that resembles American values and ideals. And they can't do that because genuine democratic republicanism ( note the small r - Thomas Jefferson started the Democratic-Republicans Party - the beginnings of what has been shorted to the Democratic Party), because that political philosophy, is the opposite of what conservatism stands for.More here, CNN Lets Dinesh D'Souza Peddle Conspiracy Theory That Obama Is "Anti-American"

Noted White Lady Ann Coulter Explains the Black Experience to Whoopi Goldberg. I guess Coulter deserves some kind of kudos. She has not worked for a living during her adult life, yet make enough money to live in Palm beach and hang out at expensive night clubs. She better love America, what other country could she find so many rubes willing to finance her luxurious lifestyle in return for being no more than a bad insult comic.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or as some call him Scott Brown(R-MS) plans a career on the stage should his stint as a hand puppet for Mitch McConnell (R-KY) fall through -  Scott Brown Won't Release Client List While Demanding Elizabeth Warren's.

Shaking With Paranoia, Conservatives Hire Expert Sleazy Character Assassin To Take Out Obama

Shaking With Paranoia, Conservatives Hire Sleazy Expert Character Assassin To Take Out Obama

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran a story about how synchronized the anti-Obama messages in unrelated television commercials seem to be, despite being aired by a variety of ostensibly independent, conservative political groups involved in the 2012 Presidential campaign. “To see many of the anti-Obama ads that have run on television recently, it would be easy to conclude that they were made in the same studios, by the same producers working for the same campaign,” Jeremy W. Peters wrote.

....Recent F.E.C. filings show that McCarthy’s tiny Washington, D.C.,-based firm, McCarthy Hennings Media Inc., has been simultaneously involved in producing anti-Obama ads for Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, a nonprofit “social welfare” group masterminded by the Republican political operative Karl Rove; the separate nonprofit “social welfare” group Americans for Prosperity, co-founded and partly funded by the conservative industrialists Charles and David Koch; and Restore Our Future, the main pro-Romney Super PAC. The filings show that during August and the beginning of September, McCarthy’s firm is identified as the “media production” company for $21.8 million worth of ad buys by Americans for Prosperity, a $21.7 million worth of ad buys for Restore Our Future, and $7. 1 million worth of ad buys for Crossroads GPS. Cumulatively, as the Times reported, these outside ads have filled huge gaps for Romney’s campaign, not just supplementing his campaign’s ad buys but at times outspending them.

Romney and Ryan cannot win on health care policy, tax policy, foreign policy, education policy, care for veterans policy, environmental policy, science policy, internet freedom policy or much of any other policy that will make government effective for the majority of Americans. So what do they do, they flood the airwaves with batsh*t insane propaganda. Yes it is legal to do that. To win an election like that is not an American value. It is not a Christian value. It is the values of radical who believe in The Big Lie.

A Republican columnists at Politico named Roger Simon did what he thought was some clever satire about Romney being behind in the polls and Paul Ryan's likely resentment. Saying that Ryan's political future was tarnished by the "stench" of Romney. because it is so badly written, some people of course believed that Ryan did call Romney The Stench. While right-wing bloggers try to blame the "liberal" media, they have only their own camp to blame.  This is Simon's orginal post, Paul Ryan vs. The Stench. Republican pundits should stay away from satire, they don't do it well. Add that to the very long list of things for which they are incompetent.

Romney was wrong about there being 47%. It is more like 96% of Decent Americans who pay into and receive benefits from government, including millionaires.

Eric Bolling's Obama Conspiracy Theory Trifecta. America, please forgive Mr. Bolling, he is part of the Fox News attempt to give jobs to people are are too weird to get honest work.

Sleaze Bag of the Week Paul Ryan (R-WI) - His Votes in Congress Added $6.8 Trillion to Our Nation’s Federal Deficits

Sleaze Bag of the Week Paul Ryan (R-WI) - His Votes in Congress Added $6.8 Trillion to Our Nation’s Federal Deficits

The reputation of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as a fiscal hawk is at odds with his record of supporting nearly every single budget-busting law of the past decade. Since 2001 he has voted for at least 65 separate pieces of deficit- and debt-increasing legislation, with the total tab for all those votes a whopping $6.8 trillion in cumulative deficits.

Rep. Ryan has served as a member of the House of Representatives since 1998. That year the budget was in surplus and stayed that way for the next three years. But with the start of the George W. Bush administration came the return of the red ink. In January 2001, before any Bush administration policies had been passed, the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, was projecting budget surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion over following decade. Instead, we got cumulative deficits totaling $6.1 trillion, an $11.7 trillion difference. CBO estimates that laws passed by Congress and signed by Presidents Bush and Barack Obama are responsible for $8.5 trillion of that difference. Rep. Ryan cast his vote for about 80 percent of that $8.5 trillion.

Indeed, during the period when the bulk of the deficit-increasing legislation was passed during the Bush administration Rep. Ryan’s record as a fiscal hawk is even more dismal. From 2001 to 2008, Congress passed and President Bush signed legislation that increased the deficit (just in that period) by a cumulative $4 trillion (policies passed during those years added over $6 trillion to the deficits through 2011). Rep. Ryan voted for well over 90 percent of that. (see figure 1).

Those debt-increasing votes began with the first round of Bush tax cuts—estimated at the time to reduce the projected surplus by nearly $1.3 trillion—and continued with every subsequent round of tax cuts. In total, since 2001 Rep. Ryan voted for over $2.5 trillion worth of deficit-financed tax cuts.

Rep. Ryan also voted, repeatedly, to increase federal spending without paying for it. Most notably, he voted in support of every single defense spending bill over the past 11 years. These votes, on both the regular defense appropriations bills and on a series of “emergency supplementals,” have added nearly $1.9 trillion to the deficit since 2001.

Rep. Ryan also voted numerous times to increase nondefense spending. Of course, the most well-known of these votes was on Medicare Part D, which added over $270 billion in unpaid-for spending. But there are many lesser-known examples. In 2002 he voted for an agriculture bill that added $80 billion to the deficit. He voted for changes to military retirement in 2003 that cost $20 billion in added spending. And he voted for increased borrowing authority for flood insurance that increased federal spending by $17 billion.

Rep. Ryan also voted in favor of many of the annual appropriations bills that authorized spending increases for “nondefense discretionary programs.” To be sure, Rep. Ryan occasionally voted against a handful of these, but the net effect of all of his votes was to increase nondefense spending by $1.3 trillion.

All told, Rep. Ryan voted in favor of increasing federal spending by $3.2 trillion—all without offsetting the costs. Combined with his support for $2.4 trillion in tax cuts, Ryan’s votes contributed to adding trillions of dollars to the national debt, which itself led to more spending as the interest payments on that debt grew. Put it all together, and Rep. Ryan voted for over $6.8 trillion worth of cumulative deficits over the past 11 years.

Republicans have always been big spenders. They just never pay for what they put on the tax payer credit card. So the borrowed money has to be paid, plus interests. They know that the general public regularly votes to throw out whoever is in power. That makes it easy to blame Democrats who inherit the crazy irresponsible debt that Republicans leave behind. Republicans cat this way because of the twisted psychology of the right-wing conservative mind. They hate democracy, the had the concept of government by and for the people, so they just do not care how much damage they do to America as long as it benefits the Republican party. Today's icing on the lying hypocrite cake - Paul Ryan denied he sought stimulus fundsQuestioned, he acknowledges his requests. When you get close to Ryan that stink is the thick layer of unwashed hypocrisy.

Romney's Unethical MediScare: No, “ObamaCare” Doesn't Cut Medicare, It Strengthens Benefits And Cuts Costs

Romney's Unethical MediScare: No, “ObamaCare” Doesn't Cut Medicare, It Strengthens Benefits And Cuts Costs

I’m sorry, but do Republican politicians have no shame? They’ve been running with the bold faced lie that “ObamaCare”, aka the Affordable Care Act, “cuts Medicare” since the day it was signed into law. Jesse Kelly pasted signs that “Gabby voted to cut $500 Billion Medicare” on his campaign signs in 2010. What do you do when a lie doesn’t stick? Tell a bigger lie. Now that Mitt Romney has selected Paul Ryan as his running mate Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” Budget Plan that converts Medicare into a voucher system that will result in much high medical cost for future retires has become a campaign issue. So Romney figures the best defense is a good offense and has dusted off the old “Obamacare cuts Medicare” lie and upped the ante – now he claims the Affordable Care Act “cuts Medicare” by an absurd $700 Billion.

Whatever amount you want to use, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t “cut Medicare” – it saves Medicare by reducing expenses. Let SeniorCorps.org explain:

    Despite the doom and gloom tactics of some members of congress and talking heads, the cuts will come from two prime sources; (1) eliminating Medicare fraud, and (2) a reduction in the amount of payments that are paid into Medicare Advantage programs that are offered by private insurance companies.

Medicare fraud cost the program an estimated $60 Billion every year. By beefing up the enforcement of fraud detection, the Affordable Care Act enables the Medicare Administration to significantly reduce this waste. As for Medicare Advantage program, that was a program passed by a Republican Congress under the theory that private business can always do something better than government. Enron anyone? Medicare Advantage benefits typically cost much more than benefits directly from Medicare. As my blogging colleague Denise in her Medicare and More blog explains so well in her Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan article today, Medicare administrative costs average 3-4%, while private insurance companies’ administrative costs average around 15%. One reason is that the Medicare Administration doesn’t pay hundreds of millions in salaries & benefits to CEOs like the big insurance companies do. And private insurance companies don’t like to lose money, so they got the Republicans to include a “risk adjustment” factor into the Medicare Advantage program that guarantees the insurance companies will always get paid more than their actual cost. It doesn’t matter if their higher costs are from bloated administrative costs or actual benefits paid out to enrollees, they always get paid more. The Affordable Care Act remedies that by reducing and capping payments to insurance companies offering Medicare Advantage policies. The leaner, more efficient companies will do just fine and continue to offer policies, while the companies with bloated costs will abandon the market. Capitalism at its finest. And seniors don’t lose a single benefit – if they don’t fine find a Medicare Advantage policy that meets their needs they simply re-enroll to get those benefits directly from Medicare.

Another big “cuts Medicare” lie about the Affordable Care Act is that it makes drastic cuts in payments to doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers. Nope, that’s a law passed by the Republican Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1997. It went into effect in 2002, but so far Congress has constantly voted to defer those payment reductions. If there are any reductions in payments to healthcare providers, it will be from an Act of Congress, not the Affordable Care Act.

No, the Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”, if you must) doesn’t cut Medicare – it saves Medicare expenses by eliminating fraud and billions in payments to inefficient insurance companies. But “RyanCare” clearly does – it raises the age for eligibility to age 67, and converts Medicare to a government subsidy to private insurance companies. And if the fixed voucher payments to insurance companies doesn’t cover the cost of private insurance, future retirees will be faced with making up the difference out of their own pocket, or do without.

UPDATE: Thanks to a link in a comment from my fellow Tucson Citizen blogger Fort Buckley, I’m updating my blog with some excellent information from a blog at the WashingtonPost.com by Sarah Kliff:

    On July 24, the Congressional Budget Office sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner, detailing the budget impact of repealing the Affordable Care Act. If Congress overturned the law, “spending for Medicare would increase by an estimated $716 billion over that 2013–2022 period.” As to how the Affordable Care Act actually gets to $716 billion in Medicare savings, that’s a bit more complicated. The majority of the cuts, as you can see in this chart below, come from reductions in how much Medicare reimburses hospitals and private health insurance companies.

I can’t include the chart in my blog as it’s copyrighted material. You can see it at the link to Sarah Kliff’s article, or I’ll explain it: It’ s pie chart showing that 34.8% of the $716 Billion in Medicare savings over the next 10 years comes from reduced reimbursements to hospitals. The hospital companies agreed to it as they expect to have many more paying customers (as opposed to the uninsured) from the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of medical insurance coverage. About 30.2% of savings comes from reduced payments to insurance companies in the Medicare Advantage program. Ms. Kliff explains how that works:

    Medicare Advantage plans allows seniors to join a private health insurance, with the federal government footing the bill. The whole idea of Medicare Advantage was to drive down the cost of health insurance for the elderly as private insurance companies competing for seniors’ business.

    That’s not what happened. By 2010, the average Medicare Advantage per-patient cost was 117 percent of regular fee-for-service. The Affordable Care Act gives those private plans a haircut and tethers reimbursement levels to the quality of care administered, and patient satisfaction.

Reducing the government subsidy to insurance companies to provide benefits that cost more than if Medicare itself provided them, and ties reimbursement rates to the quality of care provided and patient satisfaction. Sounds like a darn good thing to me. Finally, around 35% of Medicare savings come from a number of small changes. Reductions to Medicare’s Disproportionate Share Payments — extra funds made to hospitals for services made to  uninsured patients. Lower payments to home health providers make up another 8.8 percent. About a dozen cuts like this make up the 35% in savings. Ms. Kliff concludes with this point:

    It’s worth noting that there’s one area these cuts don’t touch: Medicare benefits. The Affordable Care Act rolls back payment rates for hospitals and insurers. It does not, however, change the basket of benefits that patients have access to. And, as Ezra pointed out earlier today, the Ryan budget would keep these cuts in place.

The bold emphasis is mine. The Affordable Care Act, “ObamaCare” if you must, doesn’t cut back on any benefits for Medicare. It saves over $716 Billion in Medicare expenses over the next 10 years. Repealing it – which Mitt Romney and pretty much anyone with an “R” after their name has vowed to do – would add over $716 Billion to the deficit.

Gail Wilensky, a former administrator of the Medicare program under George H. W. Bush, made clear in a June 28 Bloomberg article, "there are no reductions in the Medicare benefits promised in the law." In a June 28 post FactCheck.org similarly concluded that the ACA "stipulates that guaranteed Medicare benefits won't be reduced."

Why are conservative Republicans lying so loud and so often about how they are the ones who would gut Medicare, because they know that seniors vote and they don not want anyone to touch a very sucessful program started by liberals back in the 1960s.

FACT CHECK: Obama, Ryan, Romney Backed Medicare Cuts. The word cuts is confusing. In this context it means they cut waste and introduced cost saving measures like hospitals meeting certain efficiencies, instead of piling on costs.

In one of Romney's ads he says he will restore that mythical $700 billion to Medicare. In other words he would take away the cost savings. He cannot do that as president. He would need both houses of Congress to vote to repeal those cost savings and to repeal all of Obamacare. That is not going to happen. If elected Romney will be President, not Emperor.