War Made Easy

In the least patriotic move of all time, private military contractors who get rich off of war and occupation set up offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. They get their entire windfall of an income from the government and refuse to give their fair share back.

Congress is finally moving to shut one of the more egregious forms of Iraq war profiteering: defense contractors using offshore shell companies to avoid paying their fair share of payroll taxes. The practice is widespread and Congressional investigators have been dispatched to one of the prime tax refuges, the Cayman Islands, to seek a firsthand estimate of how much the Treasury is being shorted.

No one will be surprised to hear that one of the suspected prime offenders is KBR, the Texas-based defense contractor, formerly a part of the Halliburton conglomerate allied with Vice President Dick Cheney. According to a report in The Boston Globe, KBR, which has landed billions in Iraq contracts, has used two Cayman shell companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions in payroll, Medicare and unemployment taxes.

Right now it's a loophole, but Senators Kerry and Obama have legislation to plug it, and as long as Max Baucus can be kept far away from the bill, they ought to be able to do it. But there's more. The House voted recently to deny government contracts to companies that don't pay their corporate taxes. This is a COMMON occurrence which over 25,000 defense contractors have taken advantage of.

And some people will go on about "runaway spending" and "earmark reform." Please. The budget could be balanced, and public health programs not raided as the President wants to do, simply by no longer funding tax evaders and thieves until they pay their fair share and stop wasting taxpayer money on useless weapons programs and endless overruns. This is one of those situations where practically everyone looks the other way and pretends the problem right in front of us doesn't exist. The military budget, and military contractors, are bankrupting the country. Bottom line.

Hopefully it got through that I'm questioning Halliburton's patriotism.