Source Weekly

On June 7, I attended a presentation titled “You Cut” by our U.S. Representative Greg Walden. Its subtitle was: “A product of the economic recovery group.”
While I applaud any politician in Washington, Salem or for that matter Bend who is attempting to lower the cost of government for us citizens, I could not stop the thoughts flowing through my mind.

Politicians allocate resources to where they perceive worth in order to acquire and hold power for themselves, by buying votes from the greedy, the uneducated and the deluded.
A nation directs its resources toward what it truly values rather than what it says it values.

Some of your readers may be interested in taking a look at the recently passed “American Jobs and Closing Tax Loophole Act” currently pending in Congress. The part I found most interesting is the closing of offshore tax loopholes to large corporations. An estimated $100 billion is lost through these offshore tax dodges each year by companies like General Electric, Bank of America, Halliburton and others. Many of these companies also get huge government contracts while dodging taxes – in some cases, lowering their taxes to around 2-3 percent. Halliburton is an especially egregious example of greedy tackiness. The company hired hundreds of employees through a front company in the Cayman Islands that is little more than a P.O. Box, which allowed Halliburton to avoid hundreds of millions of bucks in Social Security and Medicare taxes. All the while they were getting billions in Government contracts.