Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) has had enough. "It's time for the big corporations to pay their fair share," Dorgan said. The focus of his frustration is the fact, confirmed by a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study, that in the US, 66% of US corporations and 68% of the foreign companies doing business in the US avoided paying federal income taxes. The GAO’s study, which was requested by Dorgan and his colleague, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), covered a period from 1998 to 2005. It developed the statistics, but did not delve into why this was happening.
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We expect a fair degree of corruption, arrogance and drooling self-interest from our elected officials. After all, in the last 206 years, we have fallen a great distance from the days of the “virtuous republic” that existed—or was thought to exist—in that first decade after the Revolution. Yes, we expect it, but I would have more respect for the operatives, the party-men and the politicos themselves if they could be just a little intelligent about it. The current issue with the Bush Administration, Congress, the SBA and the awarding of a great deal of money earmarked for small business, is a case in point.
When Big Business Seems Small
It is illegal, a felony that comes with fines and a prison term, to try to pass your big business off as a small business to get one of the 23% of Federal contracts reserved for small businesses. Yet, it happens all the time. According to the American Small Business League, a non-partisan watchdog group, some $... [Read Full Article]
