On Wednesday, Aug. 6, Walgreens — the drugstore where most of us go to get our condoms, razors, and Halloween candy — rejected their option to re-incorporate in Switzerland. They weren’t considering moving their store to Switzerland, their employees to Switzerland, or their supply chain to Switzerland. They were simply considering a paper transaction, a change in their corporate address. This tactic is called tax inversion, a loophole that allows a company that does most of its business in the United States to cut its tax bill by merging allegedly relocating its headquarters to a foreign country.

Because of this scheme, corporations are making up less than 10% of all tax payments. The tax burden in America is being shifted from these incredibly profitable corporations to small businesses and individuals.

We can’t shoulder that burden anymore. One of the biggest myths in American politics today is that the country is broke and that in this time we have to “do more with less,” and “tighten our belt.” We are not living in a time of scarcity, we are living in a time of enormous inequality. America is not broke, its tax system is broken. Congress needs to fix our tax code so that it doesn’t favor corporations and the wealthy, allowing the tax burden to fall on the rest of us.

When companies move their headquarters overseas to avoid paying taxes, the lost revenue still has to be made up somewhere. It ends up falling on hard-working, everyday Americans. Whether it’s by increasing our taxes or reducing our services, the Treasury has to find a way to be fulfilled. Meanwhile, the corporations that aren’t contributing to our Federal tax bill are still reaping the benefits of being situated in America.

Many Democrats in Congress have been pushing legislation to make it harder for U.S. firms to move their companies overseas. However, the GOP is making it difficult for the Democrats to pass this proposal.

Republican senators blocked a bill that would limit tax breaks for U.S. companies that move themselves to a foreign country, according to a July 30 Associated Press article. That’s right, Republicans are fighting to keep giving corporations money to move jobs out of America. The bill would have stopped giving corporations tax breaks for moving their companies overseas. It also would have rewarded corporations that kept their headquarters in the United States with tax credits. The Senate voted 54-42 to end the bill, which is six short of the 60 votes needed to advance it.

An August 6 article by Think Progress stated that 76 big U.S. companies have done this in the last 3 decades, 42 of them have done it since 2008 when the Great Recession hit, and 11 more companies are planning on doing an inversion in the near future.

Walgreen’s decision to sacrifice inversion in favor of doing the right thing is the exception, not the rule, and we have to acknowledge that and take action to change our tax code. You can’t expect corporations — who are not people — to be patriotic, especially corporations that are governed all over the world.

The current tax code is putting companies that keep their business here, hire their workers here and pay their fair share of taxes at a disadvantage. We should be in bipartisan agreement that our corporations need a government on their side. Unfortunately, the Republicans that are currently in charge are decidedly unpatriotic. Economic patriotism means fighting for what is right by America — and that means bringing our jobs back home and our money back home.

Published on August 14, 2014 at 10:10 pm