H.R. 5108/S. 2459, the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, would roll back a lot of the corporate welfare that the Republicans' recent tax "reform" bill handed out, by treating "foreign" corporations more like domestic corporations if they do most of their work here in America, and thus collect more taxes from them. When you think about it, you'll see how unfair the "inverted corporation" concept is to small businesses -- no small business in America has the financial ability to buy, say, a Canadian corporation like Tim Hortons and then pretend it's a "foreign" corporation to avoid paying taxes in America. But that's what Burger King did in 2015, and they're getting away with it even though most Burger Kings -- and the good folks who work there, and the good folks who eat there -- are right here in America. Hence Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to crack down on corporate welfare by supporting the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act.
Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Scott "Cone of Silence" Pruitt is, as we speak, trying to close the National Center for Environmental Research (or NCER), which does scientific research on threats to children's health. Indeed, the NCER has done important work on childhood asthma, early births, immune system issues, neurodevelopmental problems; lately it's done work arsenic in baby food and pesticide levels in farmworkers' children, which I'm sure you heard about on the news. Do these sound like the things we should be doing less of? And n.b. I said "we" -- if our government does research, that means we pay for it, and we prod our Congressfolk to oversee it; if our government decided research is best left to the "free" market, then we will find ourselves learning mainly whatever big corporations want us to know. Indeed, it's almost like that's the whole idea! So Penn PIRG helps you tell the EPA not to close the NCER.
Finally, the Project on Government Oversight (or POGO) reported last month on how little money our government collects from oil drilling corporations on public lands, and now POGO (via Sign for Good) helps you tell the President to make these corporations pay their fair share for using the land that belongs to all of us. It ain't just that, you know, oil drillers tend to pollute stuff, it's also that our government had reduced the amount of money it's charged oil drillers by almost 96% over the last 35 years! No doubt the President stands ready to whine that if we charge oil drillers too much for using our land, they won't be able to make any money and create jobs, which is to laugh. Even if corporations ever created jobs when they weren't forced to, either by policy or circumstance, why would we believe that we can't have both jobs and royalties earned for the public? Isn't this America, the can-do country that always finds a way and that rejects artificial hostage situations?
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