Citizens Media Resource: Burger King's Tax Dodge Shifts Bill to You-and-Me Taxpayers

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Burger King's Tax Dodge Shifts Bill to You-and-Me Taxpayers

Burger King decided to have it their way and avoid paying taxes in the United States by moving its corporate headquarters to Canada.

Burger King is only the latest in an onslaught of U.S. companies that are fleeing America -- on paper -- to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, which shifts more tax burden to working American families.

Many Americans are gearing up to not only hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, but to hold everything and boycott Burger King. This is one special order that will upset Burger King's Brazilian majority owners, 3G Capital, which bought Burger King in 2010 and sold stores and cut employees to help its bottom line. Burger King is merging with a Canadian coffee and donut chain and will claim by corporate tax loophole magic that it is a Canadian company.

The 3G partners pocketed the profits instead of investing in and strengthening the business. Burger King's top line has dipped lower and lower every year 3G has owned or controlled the company. They returned the company to the public markets in June 2012, and their stock price has increased 100% since then.

This is a typical private-equity takeover deal, about which Americans heard much during the 2012 presidential election campaign as Mitt Romney's former private equity firm, Bain Capital, was in the news. The private equity outfits target companies which they can pillage and plunder -- taking huge profits off the top for the key principals, themselves, at every juncture, including refinancing -- then return the stripped-down company to the stock market, which at that point likes the lean-looking balance sheet.

The puns are too easy and foretell a whopper of a PR disaster for the crowned burger.

Links to an online petition and 5 stories:

Petition: Burger King, reverse your plans to abandon America.

Huffington Post

CNBC

Fortune

U.S. drug giant Abbott booking it to The Netherlands.

Buffet's Burger King Bet

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Wish List of Research

1. Who makes money on war? And on military buying, protecting and occupying? Yeah, we already know, but let's audit this with excellent research that lays out who profited and continues to profit from our invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afganistan....or any other military activity and occupations, past or present. We have at least 823 foreign bases that the U.S. admits to; those are paid for by taxpayers, and the military bases are there principally to guard the oil for Exxon-Mobil. I believe we will find that taxpayers spend a huge amount on corporate welfare and subsidies to giant corporations, whose profits obviously are more important than the lives and limbs that are sacrificed in military actions. While we are at it, we should study who makes money from natural disasters, and how they get handed huge government contracts---in a no-bid rush, of course, since it is an emergency. There are capitalistic exploiters who feed off this as an industry; they are just not so long-established as what President Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex."

2. Economic impact of legalizing use and sale of marijuana. There's another economic stimulus and revenue raiser. It would be regulated for safety and legal for individuals and small outfits to grow and sell. With the chance for broad participation, and the exclusion of monopolistic takeover of the market, many Americans would have the opportunity to be entrepreneurs.