This meshes great with Clark's widely applauded tax reform proposal.
Closing Corporate Loopholes
Thursday, Wes Clark announced a four-part plan to "end corporate welfare as we know it." This plan will save $10 billion a year - money Clark will use to cut the taxes of 31 million American families and lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty.
Clark told a Concord, New Hampshire audience that our tax code "contains a series of loopholes tailor-made for tax dodgers. Some companies haven't hesitated to exploit them, constructing elaborate tax shelters with one purpose in mind: to avoid paying the taxes they owe."
Clark appeared with Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins. She said, "When I was deciding which candidate to support, I was searching for someone who was going to stand up for the interests of ordinary Americans - not the special interests. Wes Clark is that candidate."
The four-part plan will:
Outlaw tax shelters. Stop companies who take advantage of artificially generated losses from transactions whose sole purpose is to avoid paying taxes.
Double the fines imposed on companies that engage in tax shelters and quadruple fines for repeat offenders.
Review every single corporate tax deduction on the books, scrap those that are nothing but a free lunch. Currently companies get tax deductions when they take out life insurance policies for their non-executive employees, like custodians. When the custodian dies, his or her family doesn't see a penny of the benefits the company pockets all of it. This is wrong. Wes Clark will eliminate deductions like this one.
Make sure that no one can avoid paying taxes by renouncing their citizenship.
"Rather than working to develop new products, better train employees or increase productivity," Clark said, "some companies devote their resources to cheating the system. Our companies and our workers will be better served by a simpler code."
> Read the plan to close corporate loopholes
http://www.clark04.com/issues/loopholes/
> Read the full tax policy
http://www.clark04.com/issues/familiesfirst/
