Sarah Anderson: Trump-GOP Supported Corporate Tax Cuts Don't Produce Jobs

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

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Trump's GOP-Supported Corporate Tax Cuts Don't Produce Jobs

Posted Sept. 13, 2017

Interview with Sarah Anderson, director of the Institute for Policy Studies' Global Economy Project, conducted by Scott Harris

During the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump promised to pass the biggest tax cut since Ronald Reagan’s $200 billion tax reduction in 1981. While the administration hasn’t yet produced a detailed proposal, analysis of the broad outlines of the plan found that their tax cuts would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest Americans and the billionaire and millionaire members of Trump’s own Cabinet. While Trump has refused to release his federal tax returns, it’s a safe bet that he himself – as well as his luxury real estate development company would be primary beneficiaries of the tax reform plan.

In line with long-standing Republican dogma, the rationale for cutting corporate taxes is to make more capital available to companies so they can invest, create more jobs and boost the economy for all Americans. The only trouble is that the standard GOP “trickle-down” philosophy has for many years been solidly debunked by economists who have researched the real world impact of tax cuts on job creation.

While Trump and Republicans denounce the current top U.S. tax rate of 35 percent as being the highest in the world, the Government Accountability Office found that between 2008 and 2012, profitable large corporations paid on average an effective tax rate of only 14 percent, due to built-in loopholes within the federal tax code. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Sarah Anderson, director of the Institute for Policy Studies' Global Economy Project. Here, she talks about why corporate tax cuts don't produce more jobs, as detailed in Anderson’s recent New York Times op-ed piece. [Rush transcript]

SARAH ANDERSON: Many people have looked at this question of whether slashing the corporate tax rate will be good for job creation. But our research is a little different in that we looked at specific companies that have already been paying next to nothing in federal income taxes. And AT&T jumped out as really an extreme example of a company that has been avoiding paying their fair share of taxes and using the tax savings not to create jobs – but putting a lot of it into executive compensation. We looked at companies that were profitable every year, over the period 2008-2015 and yet we're paying an effective tax rate of less than 20 percent. The official rate is 35 percent, and AT&T was actually paying only an 8 percent effective federal tax rate during that period.

What did they do with the tax savings? Instead of creating jobs, they laid off nearly 80,000 people and their CEO Randall Stevenson has made quite a fortune during this period. And what amazed me is that he is out there very vocally promoting Trump's tax cut plan and bemoaning how burdensome the current tax code is and how much competitive it could be if only they had to pay less taxes. And, they're already paying next to nothing in taxes. So, I think with these specific examples, it will be even more clear to people that this is just a hoax, this idea that cutting the corporate tax rate will lead to more jobs.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Sarah, what do you make of the media coverage of this very narrow part of the debate where an advocate of cutting taxes for the wealthy and big corporations always tell us that the United States has the highest tax rate in the entire world? Which sounds, "Oh my god, how could we be doing such a horrible thing to our corporate brothers and sisters?" So how do you think that's generally handled by the hosts of these talk shows, particularly on cable news, where a lot of people get their information?

SARAH ANDERSON: Yeah, they usually eat it right up, so I'm really appreciative of shows like yours, where we get to dispel some of these myths. The official corporate tax rate in the U.S. is 35 percent at the federal level. But the rate is meaningless because there are so many loopholes in the tax code that most big corporations don't pay anywhere near that. So, even though the rate might be high relative to a lot of countries, the amount of revenue that our government gets from corporate taxes is lower than the average for industrialized countries.

So that is another huge myth you're going to hear over and over again from President Trump, from House Speaker (Paul) Ryan. It's another mantra of the Republican party that our corporations are just being strangled by these high taxes that are so much higher than anywhere else in the world.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And Sarah, I wanted to ask you, with the discussion we see now unfolding in Washington, about tax reform and the need to create a fairer system, what are some of the proposals that you would recommend for genuine tax reform that would benefit the majority and not just the wealthiest one percent and the most profitable corporations?

SARAH ANDERSON: The focus should really be on closing up the loopholes that are currently allowing these big, profitable corporations to get away with paying so little in taxes. And this whole game around hiding profits offshore is one that would raise tremendous amounts of revenue and also even the playing field between these big multinational corporations that have the ability to hide their money in tax havens and domestic-rooted companies and small businesses that don't have that option.

But I think we also need to look at additional ways to make sure that the wealthy and big corporations and Wall Street are paying their fair share. And the one that I decided to highlight in the New York Times op-ed is a small tax on Wall Street speculation, which, at a very, very low rate that would really just target the real high-flyers in the financial casino, the ones who are flipping stocks and making trades thousands of times a day – even a tax at very small rate on each one of those trades of derivatives and so forth, could really add up on these high-flying traders in the market, but have very little effect on ordinary folks and their pension funds or whatever investments they might have.

And that would just be one way that I think we could make our system more fair. It's amazing to think that ordinary Americans pay their taxes every year, they pay taxes when they buy a gallon of gasoline and often if you buy basics like a new winter coat – but people who are trading millions of dollars and derivatives every minute don't pay any kind of sales tax when they're doing that kind of activity.