Bush Does a Good Deed

I am happy to say that a glaring loophole which allowed defense contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan to avoid paying payroll taxes has been closed by President Bush.
Bush signed the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act, which provides tax relief for military families and also closed the loophole which was cheating the Social Security and Medicare programs out of millions of dollars. Shame on those defense contractors. They are earning BILLIONS of dollars but were too greedy to pay their fair share into programs that help the elderly and the poor.

Defense companies such as Combat Support Associates and KBR (a Halliburton Company) set up shell companies in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens to avoid paying those taxes on their American workers.

The AP reported that Combat Support Associates, which has offices in Orange, Calif., created the shell company CSA Ltd. just months after winning a military support contract that has totaled more than $2 billion so far.

The loophole does not, however, affect Halliburton itself, as Halliburton didn't simply set up a shell corp to avoid taxes. No, Halliburton moved its Headquarters completely out of the United States to Dubai.

The greedy move is an obvious ploy to stop paying taxes on the BILLIONS of dollars in profits Halliburton has made from No-Bid contracts. Dubai's friendly tax laws will add to Halliburton's bottom line. Last year, Halliburton earned $2.3 billion in profits.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-N.H., called the company's move "corporate greed at its worst. This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years. At the same time they'll be avoiding U.S. taxes, I'm sure they won't stop insisting on taking their profits in cold hard U.S. cash."

Thought for the day:
Technically, isn’t McCain’s foreign policy experience that of sitting in a cage in Vietnam not speaking to the enemy? What kind foreign policy experience does that teach?