2015’s Winning Coalition
by Hazel Henderson
The incoming Republican Congress in the United States, elected by the smallest voter participation since World War II, provides a new opportunity for galvanizing a winning coalition on tax reform. This new Congress faces the spate of tax-avoiding “reversion”: companies moving their taxable “headquarters” offshore by acquiring foreign firms (e.g. Burger King’s acquisition of Canada’s Tim Hortons); demands by business for reducing corporate tax rates (now the highest nominal rates worldwide); and call for further tax cuts by the Tea Party and Libertarians.
Today these demands by powerful corporate, Wall Street and conservative interests are aligned with many progressive groups demanding similar cuts on income and payroll taxes. These groups include environmentalists and economic justice groups targeting inequality, poverty and inadequate wages. Many small businesses, including the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC), also want taxes shifted away from incomes and payrolls to all kinds of pollution and other activities harming human health and community wellbeing.
A winning coalition is now in sight as more public understanding grows of the pernicious practices still condoned in many obsolete economic textbooks: “externalizing” social and environmental costs from company and government agency balance sheets. Our economies expanded using this narrow accounting – spawning many costly efforts to clean up or mitigate the toxic wastes and health effects. Additional problems range from addiction to urban blight, the housing bust, lost jobs, foreclosures to climate risks and global warming.
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Hazel Henderson, D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, founder of Ethical Markets Media, is a futurist, evolutionary economist and author of award-winning Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy. She leads theTransforming Finance initiative, created the Green Transition Scoreboard®, tracking global private sector investment in green tech, and developed with Calvert Group the widely used alternative to GNP, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. In 2010 she was honored as one of the “Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior 2010” by Trust Across America.
