A numbre of large US and multinational corporations lobbyed hard for the American Jobs Creation Act. Ostensibly, this Act was to repatriate earnings from abroad to help the US economy. Whata ctually ended up happening:
Spend $1, make $220
For every $1 they spent on lobbying for the tax break, corporations reaped a $220 benefit on their US income taxes, according to three University of Kansas professors. Some 840 firms – including several of today’s bailout babies, including Citigroup, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch – repatriated more than $312 billion at a maximum tax rate of 5.25 percent.
Companies that spent more than $1 million on tax lobbying did even better: a 24,300 percent return, the researchers found. For example: In its disclosure statements, drugmaker Eli Lilly & Co. acknowledged spending $8.52 million in 2003 and 2004 to lobby for the tax break. It reaped more than $2 billion in return.
“It’s a sign when a corporation’s most profitable enterprise is lobbying,” said Stephen Mazza, a law professor at the University of Kansas and coauthor of the study with colleagues Raquel Meyer Alexander and Susan Scholz.
