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I don't expect we'll see any Republicans willing to support his legislation, but good for Sen. Sanders for doing this: Senator Introduces Bill To End Huge Corporate Tax Giveaway:

Corporations offshoring profits costs both the federal government and states billions of dollars per year. One of the more egregious giveaways is known as “deferral,” which allows U.S. corporations to avoid paying taxes on overseas profits until they bring that money back to the U.S., giving them every incentive to leave it overseas permanently.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, “The current tax system provides incentives for U.S. firms to locate their production facilities in countries with low taxes as a way to reduce their tax liability at home,” ultimately resulting in compensation for U.S. workers being lower. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is introducing a bill today that would end this practice and close several other corporate tax loopholes: [...]

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, “the provisions in this bill will raise more than $590 billion in revenue over the next decade.”

Due to the proliferation of loopholes, credits, and the use of tax havens, major corporations haven’t paid the full statutory tax rate in 45 years. In 2011, the 12.1 percent effective rate that corporations paid was the lowest in 40 years.

Here's more from Sen. Sanders' site: End Offshore Tax Havens:

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It seems former President George W. Bush isn't too worried about giving Mitt Romney some bad press just before the election. As Steve Benen noted, the contrast between how Bill Clinton is spending his time these days and Bush couldn't be more stark -- A tale of two former presidents:

Just this week, former President Bill Clinton has campaigned for President Obama in Florida, Ohio, Minnesota, Colorado, and Iowa. Today, Clinton will hit the stump for Obama in Wisconsin and again in Ohio. By most measures, the former president has become Obama's most popular and most effective surrogate.

And then there's Clinton's successor.

[George W. Bush] will spend Thursday in the Cayman Islands, delivering the keynote address at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit. As Romney struggles to convince voters that he understands their economic struggles, having the previous Republican president reminding them of the questions surrounding Romney's financial dealings in the Caymans is beyond unhelpful.

Yes, as we first discussed in September, George W. Bush, with just five days remaining before Election Day, is headed to one of the most politically inconvenient locations possible for Mitt Romney: the Republican will deliver the keynote address this evening at the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit.

In case anyone's forgotten, Romney ran into a little trouble over the summer when we learned he has stashed cash in the Cayman Islands, and played fast and loose with the facts, hoping the public won't realize that Romney is using the Caymans as an apparent tax-avoidance scheme.

Which reminds me -- has anyone asked Romney about his secret tax returns lately?

Fat chance of that happening. Romney's been running from reporters asking him questions he doesn't like for months on end now.

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Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland delivered a barn burner of a speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention this Tuesday night and landed some body blows to Mitt Romney for everything from his offshore tax havens to his vulture capitalism at Bain to wanting to allow Detroit to go bankrupt, which would have devastated Ohio's economy.

The HuffPo has the entire speech, but here's the portion from the clip above:

Now, Mitt Romney, he lives by a different code. To him, American workers are just numbers on a spreadsheet.

To him, all profits are created equal, whether made on our shores or off. That's why companies Romney invested in were dubbed "outsourcing pioneers." Our nation was built by pioneers—pioneers who accepted untold risks in pursuit of freedom, not by pioneers seeking offshore profits at the expense of American workers here at home.

Mitt Romney proudly wrote an op-ed entitled, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." If he had had his way, devastation would have cascaded from Michigan to Ohio and across the nation. Mitt Romney never saw the point of building something when he could profit from tearing it down. If Mitt was Santa Claus, he'd fire the reindeer and outsource the elves.

Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps. In Matthew, chapter 6, verse 21, the scriptures teach us that where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. My friends, any man who aspires to be our president should keep both his treasure and his heart in the United States of America. And it's well past time for Mitt Romney to come clean with the American people.

On what he's saying about the president's policy for welfare to work, he's lying. Simple as that. On his tax returns, he's hiding. You have to wonder, just what is so embarrassing that he's gone to such great lengths to bury the truth? Whatever he's doing to avoid taxes, can it possibly be worse than the Romney-Ryan tax plan that would have sliced Mitt's total tax rate to less than one percent?

My friends, there is a true choice in this election. Barack Obama is betting on the American worker. Mitt Romney is betting on a Bermuda shell corporation. Barack Obama saved the American auto industry. Mitt Romney saved on his taxes. Barack Obama is an economic patriot. Mitt Romney is an outsourcing pioneer. My friends, the stakes are too high, the differences too stark to sit this one out. Let us stand as one on November 6th and move this country forward by re-electing President Barack Obama.

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This Sunday's Up With Chris Hayes was not quite as annoying as when they brought in Michael Steele for the entire hour to ruin the show, but I'm really not sure what arguing with supply-side economics, Club for Growth, professional liars like Stephen Moore brings to the table, especially when a lot of the lies he was spewing went unchallenged.

Note to Chris Hayes. If I want to hear Stephen Moore spout B.S. I can turn on any one of about a dozen shows that he's regularly on week after week, day after day. I watch your show because I don't want to listen to anyone having inane arguments with lying wingnuts.

Hayes did get Moore to admit, begrudgingly, that Romney might end up facing enough public pressure that he's forced to release more of his tax returns in the weeks to come. I am not holding my breath to see that happen any time before the election, but I'm happy to see Republicans having to admit it's a real problem for Romney.

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After his refusal to release most of his tax returns and as there are more revelations about his offshore tax havens coming to light, Martin Bashir believes that Mitt Romney will go down as the most secretive presidential candidate in history, and notes that it begs the obvious question. Why?

I think most people paying a bit of attention to this election already know the answer to that. If Romney ever does release all of his tax returns or if there's a way to ever find out just how much money he and his wife are parking overseas, I have to wonder just what percentage of their income they actually pay in taxes. Who wants to bet it's a lot lower than 14 percent?

Thom Hartmann responds to a caller's question about Supply Side Economics and why St. Ronnie's theories on what stimulates job growth are completely upside down. As Hartmann explained, the middle class spending is what drives the economy and when you lower taxes on the rich as Reagan did, all they do is gamble with it causing booms and busts, leave it to their kids or put it in offshore tax havens like Mitt Romney.

As Hartmann noted, all lowering taxes on the rich has led to is record income disparity and the richest in the country having their incomes increase 275 percent since Reagan's time, with the rest of us essentially gaining nothing or losing income.

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Joe Scarborough seems to have a little problem understanding why people would be upset with Mitt Romney's great wealth and how much he pays in taxes, or at least he pretended to on this Monday's Morning Joe. Here's Scarborough doing his best to carry a little water for Mittens and downplay whether those things should be an issue in the general election.

SCARBOROUGH: John Heilemann, Americans didn’t care that Jack Kennedy was rich. They didn’t care that Roosevelt was rich. They didn’t even care that John Kerry was rich in ’04. People aren’t talking about that. But Mitt Romney has given the Obama team so many buzzwords, Swiss bank account, Cayman Islands, "I like firing people," 14 percent, "let the market bottom out"...

BRZEZINSKI: "I know what it's like to be unemployed."

SCARBOROUGH: ...pink slips, I know what it's like.. You could go on and on. He has set himself up for a November killing.

BRZEZINSKI: He's the 1 percent.

After John Heilemann noted that Romney's "painted himself as a combination of Gordon Gekko and Richie Rich" and that his refusal to release his tax returns is going to come back to haunt him, Scarborough came back with this.

SCARBOROUGH: I’m not trying to be argumentative, but I think it’s a fair question to ask. [...] Why would they care that Mitt Romney paid a 14.3 percent tax on his income when John Kerry paid a 13.1 percent tax on his income and he had more money than Mitt Romney?

Simple answer Joe. Because they weren't advocating for austerity and policies that would make the fact that we've got record income disparity in the United States worse while also pushing policies that would make their own taxes lower, like Mitt Romney is now.

From Ring of Fire Radio:

Mike Papantonio appears on The Ed Schultz Show to talk about Mitt Romney's vulture capitalism problem, and why voters are not going to be very receptive of a man who enjoys being able to fire people.

The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur weighs in on a recent article at the Huffington Post via Reuters, which at a time when we've got record income disparity in the United States is yet another example of why we need to get the money out of politics, do something to fix these corporate tax loopholes and offshore tax havens and last but not least, address the issue of CEO pay being completely out of whack with what the average employee out there is making.

Highest-Paid CEOs Often Earn More Than Company Pays In Income Taxes, Study Finds:

Twenty-five of the 100 highest paid U.S. CEOs earned more last year than their companies paid in federal income tax, a pay study said on Wednesday.

It also found many of the companies spent more on lobbying than they did on taxes.

At a time when lawmakers are facing tough choices in a quest to slash the national debt, the report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-leaning Washington think tank, quickly hit a nerve.

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As our friend Jed Lewinson pointed out over at the Daily Kos, GOP candidate and so-called "moderate" Jon Huntsman called for some "shared sacrifice" from the rich on the PBS Newshour this Thursday, but of course that "sacrifice" should not come in the form of a tax increase. I agree completely with this assessment of that statement by Huntsman during the interview:

Excuse me, but isn't punting on that question pretty much the definition of hesitating? And how can you be taken seriously if you simultaneously rule out tax increases?

Sure, Huntsman talks a good game, and he's great at delivering "adult in the room" soundbites, but when comes down to it, on the most important issues, he's every bit as big a baby as every other Republican in the field.

What Lewinson left out was some of the claptrap we heard leading up to that. This guy is supposed to be what's considered a "moderate" candidate in the GOP presidential primary field, but what was he touting here? The same old tired talking points we've heard out of the rest of them. Flatten our tax structure and raise taxes on lower income earners, meaning the poor and the middle class. Qualified with weasel words like we could take a "progressive approach" to raising income taxes on those who don't make enough money to be paying them now.

During this interview he also promoted means testing Social Security which would turn it into a welfare program, which of course is just one step in getting rid of it altogether. He also promoted lowering taxes on corporations to make us "more competitive" and to "attract investment" which just equals another race to the bottom on wages and rewarding our under taxed corporations who still would have no incentive to put Americans back to work if we don't do something to fix our trade laws and our tax structure which rewards companies for offshore tax havens and for hiring slave labor overseas.

I don't know how much worse things are going to have to get before we move both parties back over to the left instead of what passes for the "center" these days and either party starts enacting policies where they do the right thing and help the unemployment problem we've got here before we end up as some third world country with nothing but rich and poor. Sadly the only group of politicians I've seen that from who look like they genuinely have the interests of the American worker at heart is the Progressive Caucus in the House.

All I heard from this supposedly "moderate" Republican candidate was more of the same promoting the policies that got us to where we are now with our economy being in horrible shape, more tax cuts for those that don't need them, and more dismantling of our social safety nets.

Transcript via PBS below the fold:

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