Word: taxingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...relative newcomer to the FSC gambit is Microsoft, which helped lobby for a 59-word clause in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 that sweetened the tax break for software makers. The result will cost taxpayers an extra $1.7 billion over the next 10 years. That's ostensibly meant to encourage Microsoft and others to export, but Microsoft is already an aggressive exporter. So the tax break is in effect a bonus to encourage Microsoft to do something it already does...
Microsoft wanted--and got--what record and movie companies already had: the right to ship master tapes or films overseas, make copies there and funnel the resulting income back through an FSC to generate a tax subsidy. The IRS allows the deduction, even though the manufacturing actually takes place abroad. Software lobbyists sold the change as one that would encourage the creation of high-wage, high-skilled U.S. jobs. It won't, although the company's workers in Ireland, who make CDs and floppy diskettes for sale in Europe, surely are grateful...
...trade deficit, the object of these legislative exercises? The nation has run deficits in all but one of the 26 years since the tax breaks on export income were enacted in 1971. Total deficits for those years: $2.3 trillion...
...collected more than $150 million in corporate welfare from federal and state governments. There have been federal export subsidies; Eximbank projects in China, India and Venezuela; and research contracts with the Department of Energy. Louisiana has excused the company from paying nearly $2 million annually in real estate taxes. Kansas came up with a package of incentives valued between $11 million and $14 million to persuade Allied to erect a headquarters building for one of its subsidiaries in Olathe. The Indiana city of Franklin lopped 78% off the company's personal-property tax bill over five years...
Part of GE's corporate welfare came from its FSC, which has allowed the company to skip payment of more than half a billion dollars in taxes since 1986. The rest comes from a variety of business tax credits, deductions and other incentives. During those same years, GE received contracts potentially worth half a billion dollars from the Department of Energy to conduct research in such areas as turbine systems for utilities--a core business of GE for decades. The Eximbank arranged more than $3 billion in financing or loan guarantees on some 40 GE projects in 20 countries. OPIC...