My congratulations to workers in 16 states — from Maine to Georgia, New Jersey to Colorado! Many of you will be thrilled to know that the income taxes deducted from your paychecks each month are going to a very worthy cause: your corporate boss.
Good Jobs First, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center, has analyzed state programs meant to create jobs that instead have created some $700 million a year in corporate welfare. This scam starts with the normal practice of corporations withholding from each employee’s monthly check the state income taxes their workers owe. But rather than remitting this money to pay for state services, these 16 states simply allow the corporations to keep the tax payments for themselves! Adding to the funkiness of taxation-by-corporation, the bosses don’t even have to tell workers that the company is siphoning off their state taxes for its own fun and profit.
These heists are rationalized in the name of “job creation,” but that’s a hoax, too. They’re really just bribes the states pay to get corporations to move existing jobs from one state to another, or they’re hostage payments to corporations that demand the public’s money — or else they’ll move their jobs out of state.
Last year, Kansas used workers’ withholding taxes to bribe AMC Entertainment with a $47 million payment to move its headquarters from downtown Kansas City, Mo., to a KC suburb on the Kansas side, just 10 miles away. What a ripoff! Among the 2,700 corporations cashing in on such absurd diversions of state taxes from public need to private greed are Goldman Sachs, GE, Motorola and Procter & Gamble.
For more information — and for ways you can help stop this despicable giveaway — get the full report, entitled “Paying Taxes to the Boss.” It’s available at www.GoodJobsFirst.org.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
For more information on Jim Hightower’s work — and to subscribe to his awardwinning monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown — visit www. jimhightower.com.
