Sacrifice?

Ask not what you can do ...



VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney still receives paychecks from Halliburton. This money is “deferred compensation” from his time as the conglomerate’s CEO. Apparently, taking deferred compensation when he resigned, instead of a lump sum, offered “tax advantages.”

No one likes paying taxes. And lots of people use creative means to lower their tax bite. But there is something unseemly about the vice president of the United States remaining on the payroll of a private company in order to elude taxes — especially considering that Cheney is awash in money after his rocky tenure at Halliburton.

He made $10 million in salary and bonuses, plus something like $30 million in stock options. That’s for five years of work. You’d think Cheney could afford to share a little of that wealth with the government he’s helping to lead, especially to avoid the ethically questionable situation of remaining on the payroll of a company that gets billions of dollars in government contracts.

We’ve come a long, long way from “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Then again, under Cheney’s leadership, Halliburton found plenty of “tax advantages.” The number of Halliburton subsidiaries establishing offshore headquarters to evade federal taxes increased from nine to 44 during Cheney’s five years.

The company went from paying $302 million in taxes in 1998 to receiving an $85 million rebate in 1999. Meanwhile, much of the income Halliburton didn’t pay taxes on was coming from billions of dollars in government contracts Cheney helped secure.

Halliburton isn’t the only company sneaking offshore to ease or erase its tax burden. The IRS estimates that eliminating the offshore loophole would bring in $70 billion annually. Coincidentally, that’s almost enough to pay for President Bush’s war in Iraq.

Legislation to outlaw this practice, called the “Corporate Patriot Enforcement Act,” is going nowhere, perhaps because so many of these companies use a small fraction of their ill-gotten gains to shower money on Congress.

Republicans in Congress even derailed an attempt to simply prevent corporate “ex-patriots” from winning homeland security contracts.

Tax cheats shouldn’t get government contracts. And a person more interested in “tax advantages” than in honorably, honestly and ethically serving his country shouldn’t be vice president of the United States.

http://www.wvgazette.com/section/Editorials/200304201/