Forum Post: For those inclined to take immediate action...

post up here if you wish to help defeat S 1671, the Foreign Earnings Reinvestment Act.

Background: In 2004, the American Jobs Act was enacted which gave some of America's largest and wealthiest corporations an 85% deduction on any dividends (earnings) they received from repatriated earnings from their controlled foreign corporations (CFC). This resulted in an effective tax rate on those earnings of 5.25%, an obscenely low tax rate compared to the minimum corporate tax rate of 35%. This act was passed ostensibly to stimulate job growth and reinvestment in American companies. The result was quite the opposite. Most of the companies that repatriated earnings through dividends from their CFCs laid off workers and did not invest in capital improvements. Most of the repatriated earnings were used to pay CEOs huge bonuses and dividends to shareholders.

As we protest publicly many of those same corporations that received special tax benefits from the 2004 American Jobs Act are silently lobbying congress for another round of the same. The Foreign Earnings Reinvestment Act is simply a resurrected version of the 2004 American Jobs Act with a few tweaks. The deduction for repatriated earnings has been reduced to 75%, resulting in an effective tax rate of 8.75% for companies bringing their offshore, tax haven profits back into the U.S. It also attempts to instill some accountability by requiring jobs to be created by corporations using the tax benefit. We all know how accountability works in congress so I won't belabor that issue.

Senate Bill 1671 was introduced by Senator Kay Hagan and is endorsed (sponsored) by 9 other Senators. The related House Bill is H R 1844. Follow this link to read the text of the proposed bill.

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.112s1671

On October 6, after its introduction, the Senate version was referred to the Senate Committee which then referred it to the Senate Finance Committee.

This bill embodies everything that we are striving against - the further accumulation of wealth by the already wealthy and powerful, the exercise of power by a wealthy minority over our elected officials and a blatant attempt to further disenfranchise American workers.

I will be more than happy to continue to provide updates about what is happening to this bill but we need to start making phone calls, sending emails and writing letters now to our Senators. This is an opportunity to have an impact right now and demonstrate the power of the not-so-silent majority.

Anyone who is interested in working with me on this, post up and I will provide all the necessary information on how to contact our Senators.