Business for Shared Prosperity

Columbia Regional Business Report (SC), Nov. 4, 2011

A leader of a South Carolina small business organization has joined calls for tax reforms aimed at closing loopholes benefitting large corporations that off-shore jobs and profits.

"Big businesses are getting away with taxation murder," said Frank Knapp, president and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce and vice chairman of the American Sustainable Business Council. "They pay little or no taxes on massive U.S. profits and then have the gall to lobby for lowering the 'high' corporate tax rate. Patriots pay their taxes; they don't dodge them."

Knapp, of Columbia, was reacting to a report released Thursday by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which cited a need for tax reform to close loopholes that large global companies get for offshoring U.S. profits and jobs.

According to the report, 280 profitable large corporations paid an effective tax rate of half the official rate; 37 of them paid no income tax at all on combined 2010 profits of $50 billion.

The report also noted that corporate taxes funded more than 25% of the federal budget in the 1950s; last year they funded 6%.

The Sustainable Business Council, along with the Business for Shared Prosperity, and Main Street Alliance, which represent 300,000 businesses and business men and women, sent a letter to the congressional supercommittee asking members “to level the playing field for small business, stop corporate tax dodging, and raise revenue to rebuild the infrastructure and public services that underpin our economy.”