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War Profiteering
by Name Not Printed
January 16, 2002

In this time of national crisis, amid calls for sacrifice, I’m truly troubled by some of the choices of the Republican party leadership. Here’s their idea of an economic stimulus package:

$1.4 billion for IBM
$833 million for General Motors
$671 million for General Electric
$572 million for Chevron Texaco
$254 million for Enron

This is war profiteering, and it’s simply wrong. Yet the House has just approved it, on a virtual party line vote, ending the recent spirit of bipartisan cooperation in Congress.

While our nation was reeling from the Anthrax threat, the House voted to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax on corporations. This law normally requires hugely profitable companies to pay at least some tax, no matter how many loopholes they can find. Its repeal would allow many companies to pay zero U.S. income tax in perpetuity - a loss of more than $12 billion in revenue next year alone.

The repeal is retroactive, so companies would get rebates of all the Alternative Minimum Tax they’ve paid for the last 15 years. The numbers above are a sampling of these rebates.

The House also voted to allow corporations to store their profits overseas as a tax shelter. That’s right - this “stimulus” would actually take money out of the U.S. economy. It’s backwards.

The right approach to stimulus is to put more money in the hands of everyday people who need it most - by expanding unemployment insurance, for example. People living marginally will spend it quickly on consumer goods, so it circulates through the economy, benefiting everyone.

Helping people would make economic sense. Giving billions in tax breaks to America’s biggest corporations doesn’t. For more information, check out the website: www.moveon.org/warprofiteering.