Tax Fairness
February 11, 2013
Senate leaders this week hope to settle on a plan to avoid nearly $1 trillion in federal spending cuts set to take effect March 1 under a so-called budget sequester. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday cosponsored legislation by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse to replace the across-the-board cuts. The proposal would raise $960 billion by closing tax loopholes that benefit the wealthiest Americans and big corporations. “At a time when revenue is near a 60-year low in terms of GDP and when corporations are doing phenomenally well while the middle class in America is collapsing, it is absolutely appropriate to ask corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes so we don’t balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the young, the sick and the poor,” Sanders said on Monday. Sanders last Thursday proposed his own bill to stop letting profitable corporations shelter income in the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax shelters (S.250). “Wall Street banks and large companies love America when they need corporate welfare. But when it comes to paying American taxes or American wages, they want nothing to do with this country. That has got to change,” Sanders wrote in a column last weekend for The Huffington Post. Read the column here.
