It is a lie to say that tax breaks for large corporations lead to job creation.  Look no further than the recent taxpayer bailouts – the most enormous “tax break” and transfer of wealth upward if ever there was one.  Yet the recipients of those bailouts, bloated with taxpayer cash, are sitting on those huge piles of cash, not hiring, not lending, not doing anything to help our foundering economy.  What they are doing is continuing to buy other companies (got to do something with those piles of cash to avoid paying taxes), which results in ever more people being thrown out of work, and paying their CEO aristocracy millions in wholly undeserved compensation.

A local case in point is Black & Decker, a formerly great investment, great place to work and in decades barely remembered, a great corporate citizen/neighbor.  Black & Decker made tools, they made things you could touch and use.  People were proud to work there and it showed in the quality of products and in the pay and benefits to its employees.  Over the years, however, Black & Decker sought and received tax breaks from Baltimore County (and probably other government entities) and as recently as a few years ago threatened to leave the county if the county didn’t fork over even more in tax breaks.  All the while Black & Decker was closing US-based manufacturing plants and sending those jobs to Latin America and China.  Baltimore County paid up and Black & Decker is now defunct – gobbled up by Stanley.  Its Towson headquarters will no doubt eventually be shuttered.  What good did those tax breaks do exactly?  What jobs did those tax breaks save?

This one sad example among too many is stark proof that all the corporate extortion and governments’ willing acquiescence to it does not prevent a CEO from selling a company for his (and allegedly his shareholders) interests and leaving its employees and local community holding an empty bag.

The lie that tax breaks create jobs is nothing more than a talking point shouted into the media echo chamber and repeated by people whose vested interest is seeing that their companies (and by extension they) get to a point where they’re paying little or no taxes at all.

During the 1950s and 60s, two decades of great prosperity and growth especially for the middle class, the statutory corporate tax rate was over 50%.  It began falling in the 70s, and with the proliferation of ever more sophisticated tax shelters and tax breaks, income from corporate taxes on the federal and state level has fallen to historic lows.

While corporations have demanded and received welfare in the form of tax breaks and tax loopholes, they have decimated the working class, fired millions of people from their jobs, shipped those jobs overseas where they can pay workers pennies a day, refused to pay promised pensions and health benefits to loyal workers, polluted our environment and caused the greatest economic catastrophe in our lifetimes.

For those who rail against “entitlements”, I suggest they look at the greatest entitlement of them all – the legalized fleecing of this country in the form of corporate tax breaks, tax loopholes and the recent bailouts -  and the willing politicians who make it all possible and then lie about it.

Repeat after me:

It is a lie for anyone to say that corporate tax breaks and tax loopholes creates jobs.  I know it isn’t true because I see the unemployed, betrayed and desperate all around me.  I see the poverty level increasing to its highest level in decades and the middle class disappearing with alarming speed.

It is true that the more corporate welfare our elected officials give to corporations, the more they will suck that money out of the state and country and the more they will demand.

One of my upcoming posts will discuss how to create sustainable, living-wage jobs in our local communities.  Hint – it isn’t by giving corporations any more power and any more money.