A US Senate committee has alleged that technology giants Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard avoided billions in US taxes over the past three years by transferring profits to offshore jurisdictions.
According to Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, several US multinational companies have exploited the current tax system to “engage in gimmicks to avoid paying taxes they owe.”
America’s super high net worth individuals saw their net worth grow by 13 percent in the past year to $1.7 trillion, according to Forbes annual wealth survey. Collectively, their wealth and assets are equivalent to Bhutan’s 2011 gross domestic product.
At the same time, the average net worth of the 400 wealthiest Americans rose to a record $4.2 billion, up more than 10 percent from a year ago, while the lowest net worth came in at $1.1 billion versus $1.05 billion last year, said Forbes.
The United States will see a significant boom in crude oil production over the next ten years, said a report by Platts’s energy data analytics unit Bentek Energy on Monday, with production expected to increase to an average of 11.6 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2022 – compared to 6.7 million bpd today.
Roughly 30 percent ($750 billion) of all medical spending in the U.S is wasted on unnecessary treatments, poor administration, fraud and other forms of pervasive inefficiencies each year, claimed a report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on Thursday, with nearly 75,000 deaths in 2005 believed could have been averted if every state had delivered care at the quality level of the best performing state.
According to the latest polls, public support for the U.S. Congress is now at a record low, with few believing that its members can overcome a prolonged period Of congressional paralysis & polarization . What if members of the US Congress, now returning from their summer recess, were to receive a “back to school” memorandum from concerned citizens? At a minimum, it should call on Congress and the president to converge on a multi-prong, multi-year policy initiative that makes simultaneous advances in six critical areas.
Nearly 17 million Americans, or 5.5 percent of the population, have to skip meals or not eat for a day due to a lack of money to buy food, said a study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday, with a record 46.7 million Americans now enrolled for food stamps in the country.
Mitt Romney may not be a tax evader, but he certainly is a tax avoider on a grand scale. And the problem is not just Romney; writ large, his level of tax avoidance makes it difficult to finance the public goods without which a modern economy cannot flourish – and weakens the bonds of trust that hold a society together.
NEW YORK – Mitt Romney’s income taxes have become a major issue in the American presidential campaign. Is this just petty politics, or does it really matter? In fact, it does matter – and not just for Americans.
The baby boomer generation in United States currently stands around 80 million Americans, contributing to nearly half of America’s total consumption. While they may be ageing, some retiring earlier than before, can this influential generation of Americans help to revive the national economy?
A study by the Institute for Policy Studies has found that twenty-six big US companies paid their chief executive officers more last year than they did in federal taxes.
In the report, Executive Excess, the Institute said that of last year’s 100 highest-paid US executives, 26 took home more in CEO pay than their companies paid in federal income taxes.
Regardless of who wins the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, the next American president will only have limited room for manoeuvre on economic policy. The real choice as such should concern the social policies that accompany a broadly similar set of economic measures; and, here, the differences between the candidates are highly consequential.
