Microsoft had $60.8 billion in profits offshore in 2012. Citigroup, $42.6 billion. Exxon Mobil, $43 billion. And the amount of taxes they paid on those profits: zero. While hard-working Americans pay their fair share of taxes, many large corporations, bolstered by an army of lobbyists in Washington, are not.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz tells Bill that Americans should be outraged. Watch:
Stiglitz says tax dodging represents a misallocation of America’s scarcest resource — young people — including the students he teaches at Columbia University. “I wish that they had gone into creative activities. But so many get involved in these kinds of activities, trying to help corporations avoid their tax responsibility,” he tells Moyers.
Then there’s the ethical issue of corporations using our resources without paying for them. Stiglitz says corporations like Apple are willing to take from our country by using “the ingenuity of America, based on the Internet, created, in large measure, by government spending, but not to give back” by paying their taxes.
And guess who makes up for the tax shortage to pay for our roads, bridges, education system and a host of other public goods and services that keeps our society running? That’s right — the rest of us.
Watch Bill’s full interview with Stiglitz »
