Bernie Sanders: 1 in 4 Profitable Corporations In America Pay 0 Federal Taxes

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Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:23 am

Bernie Sanders has a message for America. The battle over getting the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share will continue as long as 1 in 4 corporations in America pay 0 federal taxes.

Here is the video:

During his Brunch With Bernie segment on Thom Harmann’s radio show, Sen. Sanders said,

Mitch McConnell was on the floor of the Senate saying the revenue discussion is over. Well, not for me. The truth of the matter is that right now you have one out of four profitable corporations in America paying zero in federal taxes. The percentage of revenue that we get compared to GDP today in corporate taxes is much much lower than it used to be. As I mentioned many times, we’re losing one hundred billion dollars a year from corporations and wealthy individuals who stash their money in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens. We have just enormous loopholes that corporations and wealthy people continue to take advantage of.

So where we are at Tom, right now is a huge and very very significant philosophical debate. And that is whether or not we cut programs that working families and lower income people desperately depend upon, or whether we ask the wealthiest people and largest corporations all of whom are doing very very well to start paying their fair share of taxes. And I would remind every listener, and this is not talked about too much in Congress or certainly not in the media, that the United States not only has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth. But also it is as bad today as it was, it is worse today than at any time since the late 1920s. Please remember that the top one percent in America owns forty two percent of the wealth. The bottom sixty percent own 2.3%

Sen. Sanders provided a huge reminder that the fight to get wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share didn’t end with the fiscal cliff deal. As President Obama said, the fiscal cliff deal was just a down payment on getting the wealthy to pay their fair share. Republicans like McConnell tried to sell the fiscal cliff bill as a one time dose of bitter medicine that they Republicans had to swallow, but this isn’t how Obama and the left see it.

At the heart of the political struggle is a philosophical battle over who should pay more. The left won the first victory with the fiscal cliff deal, but Republicans are gearing up to fight a war over the debt ceiling. Democrats and the left need to dig in their heels, because Republicans are coming after the series of beloved and essential programs that they refer to as “entitlements.”

Only through continued struggle will that first victory be translated into a real shift in policy that will result in the wealthy and big corporations paying their full fair share.

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Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

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Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association

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