Bush signed the massive corporate tax giveaway yesterday, though his handlers didn’t make a big stink over it. Perhaps they were hoping we little people wouldn’t notice that it’s an unconscionable $143-million-over-10-years pork smorgasbord for the oh-so-special interests, at a time of record deficits ($413 billion and counting). Oh, and it’s an environmental abomination too.
Commentator Connie Rice of The Tavis Smiley Show on NPR — who dubbed the bill the “Corporate Looting and Piracy Act” — summed up just a few of its most stomach-churning provisions:
Unlike the Leave No Child Behind bill, this corporate boondoggle is fully funded. ExxonMobil, Home Depot, cruise ships, corn farmers, coffee roasters, and makers of fishing tackle boxes, bows and arrows and ceiling fans all have special tax breaks specially tailored for their needs. And unlike the nation’s children, who will be paying down our trillion-dollar deficit their whole lives, 60 percent of these corporations will likely continue to pay zero federal taxes, because their armies of lawyers will figure out how re-open newly closed loopholes that allegedly will pay for this bill. … And get this: [Congress] also cut the charitable car donation deduction that middle-class people take, cut the child tax credit for the poor, blocked restoration of overtime for millions of workers, cut unemployment benefits, cut and then restored war veterans hospital benefits, and made it harder for regular folk to apply for bankruptcy.
As reported in The Washington Post:
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) dismissed [the corporate tax bill] as “a lobbyist’s dream and a middle-class nightmare.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called it “the worst example of the influence of special interests that I’ve ever seen.”
