Over a four years period from 2008 to 2011, Corning Inc. was one of 26 companies that managed to avoid paying any American income taxes, even though it earned nearly $3 billion during that time. In fact, according to Citizens For Tax Justice, the company received a $4 million refund from 2008 to 2010. That didn’t stop Susan Ford, a senior executive at the company, from telling the House Ways and Means Committee this week that America’s high corporate tax rate was putting her company at a disadvantage:

American manufacturers are at a distinct disadvantage to competitors headquartered in other countries. Specifically, foreign manufacturers uniformly face a lower corporate tax rate than U.S. manufacturers, and virtually all operate under territorial systems which encourage investment both abroad and at home.

Ford told the committee that Corning paid an effective tax rate of 36 percent in 2011, but as CTJ notes, she is counting taxes on profits earned overseas that haven’t yet been paid and won’t be unless the company decides to bring the money back to the United States. Corning’s actual tax rate in 2011, according to CTJ’s analysis, was actually negative 0.2 percent.

The territorial system Ford testified in favor of would actually encourage the offshoring of profits earned by American companies, thereby reducing the amount they pay in taxes even more. And rather than helping remove a disadvantage that prevents companies from creating jobs, an economic analysis of such a tax system found that it could actually cost the United States as many as 800,000 jobs.

The United States does, indeed, have one of the highest marginal corporate tax rates in the world. In reality, however, few corporations pay it, and the nation’s effective tax rate is far lower than the rate in other developed countries.

A recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Safe Small-Dollar Loans Research Project showed that Americans who use payday loans pay an average of $520 per year in fees. As CNN Money noted, “Over the course of two weeks — when payday loans typically come due — fees averaged $15 per $100 borrowed, amounting to a 391% annual percentage rate. ”

These predatory loans suck borrowers into a vicious cycle known as “churning,” which is repeat borrowing by customers who manage to pay off their previous loan, but require another due to interest and fees. The poorest Americans are increasingly using payday loans to pay for basic necessities, including food and elctricity.

And some members of Congress want to make it even easier for these loans to proliferate by removing state regulations that protect consumers from some of the payday loan industry’s practices:

A bipartisan team of House lawmakers is pushing new legislation that would allow nonbank lenders, including those typically known as payday lenders, to choose to operate under a federal charter and avoid dealing with a patchwork of often conflicting state laws. [...]

The new federal charter would carry some specific rules, including prohibitions against loan periods shorter than one month – longer than the two-week period of a traditional payday loan. Firms also couldn’t make loans they don’t believe the consumer can repay or hit consumers with fees for repaying early. But consumer advocates say none of these rules would prevent lenders from engaging in what they see as harmful lending practices such as charging triple-digit interest rates.

The legislation, for instance, would bar regulators from capping the interest rate or fees that nonbank lenders could charge for loans made under the federal charter, which would allow these lenders to evade state usury laws.

Big banks wanted very much the same thing during the debate over the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, asking for state consumer protection laws to be preempted by national regulations. Major banks, including Wells Fargo and Bank of America, finance billions of dollars worth of payday lending.

Payday lenders have been throwing an increasing amount of money at Congress in recent years. In this instance, lawmakers seem to be giving the industry exactly what it wants.

Republicans have consistently denounced President Obama’s plan to allow the Bush tax cuts on income over $250,000 to expire at the end of the year. “We ought not raise taxes on anyone at the end of the year,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said of the Obama plan, which would raise taxes on roughly 2.1 million high-income earners (while still preserving a piece of the tax cut for them).

A new Senate GOP tax plan released by McConnell and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch (R), however, raises taxes on nearly 10 times as many Americans by allowing certain tax breaks signed into law by President Obama expire at the end of the year. Putting an end to those three tax breaks — the Child Tax Credit, a tax break on college tuition, and a more generous Earned Income Tax Credit — would raise taxes on 20 million families, as shown by this chart from Seth Hanlon, the director of fiscal reform at the Center for American Progress:

According to Hanlon, 13.1 million families would see higher taxes if the enhancements to the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit are allowed to expire. Another 9.1 million benefited from the American Opportunity Tax Credit, a break on college tuition.

The Senate GOP claims it wants to prevent tax hikes on Americans at the end of the year. The McConnell-Hatch plan, however, is yet another example of the fact that the only tax hikes Republicans can stomach are those that only hit the poor.

Walmart is under fire after an investigation by Mercy for Animals revealed inhumane practices at a plant operated by one of its pork suppliers, Christensen Farms. The non-profit sent an investigator to a Christensen plant in Minnesota who came away with video evidence documenting several practices, including gestation crates and tail-docking, that are widely condemned by animal advocates and banned in a number of states. Watch it (warning for intensely graphic content):

Christensen, one of the largest pork producers in the country, claimed its practices are “within standard animal welfare practices.” Both a veterinarian and an animal behavior expert who reviewed the footage disagreed in strong terms. One said, “what I saw in this video is all too familiar to me from other factory farm footage I have seen: it is an unremitting hell on earth.” Gestation crates — the impossibly small cages that cause much of the pain documented in the video — are being phased out in the EU after a comprehensive expert review of the harm they do to animals.

Mercy for Animals has had success working with corporations to stop doing business cruel suppliers in the past. A campaign against egg producer Sparboe Farms caused both McDonald’s and Target to drop the company. Costco recently decided to end its relationship with farms that employ gestation crates, though the company claims the decision was unrelated to Mercy for Animals’ investigation. Many other major restaurant and grocery corporations have voluntarily asked suppliers to stop using gestation crates.

Mercy for Animals is circulating a petition asking Walmart to end its relationship with Christensen.

Our guest blogger is Jennifer Erickson, Director of Competitiveness and Economic Growth at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Saturday marks the two year anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. The landmark suite of reforms were designed to fix a broken financial system following a crisis that cost America 10 million jobs and $17 trillion in household wealth.

Two years later there is still more to be done — there always will be with a task this big — but it is worth pausing to reflect on five ways our markets are stronger now than they were before Dodd-Frank:

• A consumer watchdog is now on the beat. There is now an agency devoted solely to protecting consumers. Just this week the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau scored its first high-profile win by calling Capital One’s deceptive marketing practices to account, returning $140 million to customers and fining the credit card giant $25 million.

• Every financial institution must now play by the rules. Before, “nonbank financial institutions,” ranging from small payday lenders to massive too-big-to-fail investment banks, were outside the scope of regulation and could play by different rules. Dodd-Frank changed that.

• Increased capital requirements are now in place. Before the crisis many banks were grossly overleveraged, like Lehman Brothers, which had $1 in equity for every $30 it was borrowing when it failed. When banks didn’t have the capital to cover their losses, taxpayers were forced to pick up the tab. Dodd-Frank mandates they have sufficient capital to withstand another crisis.

• Regulators now have the authority to wind-down failing institutions. Large banks and nonbank financial institutions now have to submit “living wills” describing how they would facilitate an orderly wind-down in the event of failure. Under the process, management is fired and shareholders bear the losses — not the taxpayer.

• New rules will help rein in executive compensation. In 1980, CEO pay relative to average worker pay was 42:1. By 2011, it was 380:1. And as Warren Buffett noted, “In the half a dozen financial institutions that needed help the most during the crisis, that were too big to fail… the managers which led them into the trouble in all cases went away very, very wealthy.” Dodd-Frank calls for say-on-pay votes which allow shareholders to vote on executive compensation plans at least once every three years.

Dodd-Frank started an important job in keeping American markets — and American citizens — safer. A recent poll showed that “voters favor the Dodd-Frank financial reform law by a 53-point margin” of 73-20.

Click here to read about five concrete things that must be done to further bring common sense regulation to the nation’s financial markets.

The financial industry’s quest for profits led to increased securitization of student loans and more aggressive lending practices that “resembled the subprime mortgage market” that collapsed ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, a government report released Friday says.

Total outstanding student loan debt surpassed $1 trillion in 2011, the report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Education found. $150 billion of that total is on private student loans, and defaults on private loans total more than $8 billion, according to the report.

The default total has risen over the last decade because of industry practices that are similar to those that led to the subprime housing collapse. A large portion of the student loan boom that took place from 2005 to 2008 was financed by Asset-Backed Securities (ABS), and because more money could be made off such loans, lenders became more aggressive in their lending practices. Increased profits gave lenders “an incentive to increase loan volumes” with “less incentive to assure the creditworthiness of those loans.” Lenders relaxed their lending requirements, lowering the minimum credit score required to secure a loan.

The lenders also created new ways to reach students by bypassing school financial aid offices and going straight to customers through direct marketing, which “could
simultaneously increase the number of borrowers and the amount each one borrowed,” the report found.

As the report notes, the practices resemble lending practices that overheated the housing market before the financial crisis, when banks and lenders relaxed standards to push more and more Americans into homes through subprime mortgages. Those mortgages were then securitized — divided, packaged, and traded — leading to a complex market that collapsed when borrowers began defaulting en masse.

And much as minorities were more likely to be affected by the housing crisis, minority borrowers are more likely to attend schools with higher default rates than are white borrowers.

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