The “Fix the Debt” scam
by David Atkins
IPS and Campaign for America’s Future came out with a report last week detailing the rank hypocrisy of the people behind the “Fix the Debt” campaign:
A new report by IPS and Campaign for America’s Future shows that America’s top CEOs are pocketing massive taxpayer subsidies at the same time they’re pushing austerity cutbacks in government programs that benefit ordinary citizens.
Thanks to a “performance pay” tax loophole, large corporations in the United States today are routinely deducting enormous executive payouts from their income taxes. In effect, these companies are exploiting the U.S. tax code to send taxpayers the bill for the huge rewards they’re doling out to their top executives.
During the three-year period 2009-2011, the 90 publicly held corporate members of the austerity-focused “Fix the Debt” lobby group shoveled out $6.3 billion in pay to their CEOs and next three highest-paid executives.
These 90 Fix the Debt member firms raked in at least $953 million — and as much as $1.6 billion — from the “performance pay” loophole between 2009-2011. The exact full value of corporate windfalls from this loophole will remain impossible to compute until we have more complete mandated disclosure for executive compensation.
Top executives at these same Fix the Debt companies are aggressively advocating cuts to government programs that benefit the ordinary American taxpayers subsidizing their compensation. Many of these executives have also added to America’s debt and deficit by using tax havens and other accounting tricks to have their corporations avoid paying their fair tax share.
Of course, none of these people and organizations are actually interested in “fixing the debt.” They’re interested in a direct wealth transfer from regular wage earners to their executive and corporate bank accounts. “Fixing the debt” is an excuse to slash social welfare spending to the bone so that employees become more desperate and malleable cogs in the economic machine while keeping taxes low on the John Galts. It’s just a scam, plain and simple.
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