To: The United States House of Representatives and The United States Senate
How about ending tax breaks for CEO bonuses instead?
With a shrinking middle class and rising inequality, no corporation should get a tax break for shelling out giant bonuses to CEOs. We urge you to take action to close the performance pay loophole.
Instead of making deep cuts to working families, why doesn't Congress close this loophole that gives extra incentives for excessive CEO pay?
Why is this important?
Right now huge corporations like WalMart get a tax break for handing out huge CEO bonuses. Meanwhile, the House has recently passed budgets that would drop 570,000 kids out of Head Start, make a deep $175 million cut to SNAP food assistance funding, and cut job assistance training for 2 million Americans.
The tax code sets a $1 million limit per executive for the amount of pay that corporations can write off their income taxes. But the problem is that there’s a loophole that exempts “performance-based” pay.
So, corporations are shelling out huge CEO bonuses to pay less in taxes. For example, during the past six years, WalMart pocketed $298.6 million in fully deductible “performance pay,” lowering the company’s federal tax bills by $104 million.
We simply can't afford tax loopholes that help the biggest corporations dodge paying their fair share. It's time we close these loopholes and invest in an economy that works for all of us, not just the CEOs.