Recently ousted French President Nicolas Sarkozy is planning to move to London in order to found a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, a move that would conveniently avoid France’s new tax hike on the super-wealthy and stymie a police investigation into Sarkozy’s allegedly corrupt campaign tactics. Sarkozy’s intentions were discovered in a police raid on his home:

If the move goes ahead, the former French president could escape a planned top tax rate of 75 per cent in his home country.

He and wife Carla Bruni would be likely to settle in an affluent area such as South Kensington, and would become the most high-profile Gallic celebrity couple in the capital.

Though France is currently restructuring its plan to tax citizens with incomes over one million euros ($1.33 million) at a 75 percent marginal rate, Sarkozy is not the first rich man to run away: actor Gérard Depardieu fled to Russia on explicitly tax-related grounds, favorably comparing Russian authoritarianism to French democracy in the process.

Upon taking office in 2007, Sarkozy more than doubled his personal salary.

Politico’s Anna Palmer reports that K Street lobbyists are gearing up for a last-ditch effort to save a slew of “tax perks, credits and other goodies worth billions to industry.”

These special tax favors, encapsulated in a “tax extenders” package, have had little trouble passing in recent history. But this year “the price tag — about $30 billion over 10 years — makes them unpalatable when slashing spending is the agenda.” That’s why K Street’s lobbyists have mobilized themselves to defend these special tax breaks for industries such as real estate, energy, and automobiles. One lobbyist even likened passing the package of tax extenders to Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star:

“I’m working on several tax extenders, and we’re working our butts off,” said Holland & Knight’s Rich Gold, who gave the package a 1-in-10 chance of passing this year. “I’ve also been telling my clients it’s a little bit of Luke Skywalker threading the needle to get to the Death Star.”

While there may be merit to some of the tax policy contained within the tax extenders package (particularly the renewable energy production tax credit), most of these tailored tax credits and tax breaks are a result of lobbying by a handful of industries. They are a prime example of how special interests utilize K Street’s lobbyists to craft public policy for their own benefit.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman David Camp (R-MI) today released his long-promised plan to overhaul the country’s corporate tax code. As he’s been hinting, the plan not only cuts the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, but also implements what’s known as a “territorial system,” which exempts U.S. corporations from paying taxes on money they earn overseas.

Currently, U.S. corporations pay to the Treasury the difference between the tax rate of the country in which they earn money and the U.S. rate. (So money earned in a country where the rate is 25 percent would require a corporation to pay 10 percent — the difference between 35 percent and 25 percent — to the U.S.) However, corporations are allowed to defer paying their U.S. share of taxes until the bring the money back to the U.S., giving them every incentive to shift and keep money (and jobs) offshore.

Instead of fixing this problem, Camp’s plan to shift to a territorial system, as Citizens for Tax Justice explained, will make it even worse:

First, [under a territorial system] corporations would have a greater incentive to engage in profit-shifting, meaning practices used to disguise U.S. profits as foreign profits. A common example is the manipulation of transfer pricing to shift corporate profits into tax havens (countries that do not tax, or that barely tax, certain types of profits).

Second, corporations would have a greater incentive to shift actual operations — and jobs — to other countries.

Our current system already encourages these practices because U.S. corporations are allowed to “defer” their U.S. taxes on their offshore profits. But the incentives would be even greater under a territorial system, in which corporations would NEVER pay U.S. taxes on their offshore profits.

Camp said today during an interview that “the rest of the world has gone to a lower corporate rate and a territorial system of taxation. So our employers are really at a competitive disadvantage when they try to do business around the world.” However, governments with territorial systems are “having tremendous problems enforcing their existing international corporate tax rules, particularly the transfer pricing rules.” It’s such a problem, in fact, that “the European Union is considering moving away from the territorial system for determining how corporate profits are allocated among its member states.”

Camp has already proven that he is not concerned with actually having corporations pay taxes, saying that corporate tax dodging is all the more reason to cut the corporate tax rate. But U.S. corporations already pay the second-lowest taxes in the developed world and are sitting on record amounts of cash, so there’s little reason to slash their taxes any further.

Last week, Republican spokesperson and former Bush administration operative Karl Rove showed up on Fox News to tell host Neil Cavuto that, contra the claims President Obama has made to justify the new taxes in his proposed deficit reduction package, the rich are already paying more than their fair share in taxes.

ROVE: Here are the facts. One percent of the American taxpayers pay 39 percent of the burden. The top two percent pay over half the burden. 50 percent of all the taxpayers pay 97 percent of the burden. You know, people are paying their fair share.

During the discussion, Fox News also threw up a series of charts (titled “Fair Share”), including one showing the top 1 percent of income earners paid 38.02 percent in federal personal income taxes in 2011. A panel on Fox Business took up the meme the same day, repeating several of the statistics and the charts, with four of the five panelists agreeing with Rove.

This general attitude — that the rich are unfairly taxed while the poor and working classes have “no skin in the game” — has become nearly ubiquitous amongst both right-wing politicians and their co-travelers in the media over the course of this year’s budget debate. On Fox News Sunday, for instance, host Chris Wallace brought up these numbers again: “The top one percent of households with the highest incomes pay 38 percent of federal income taxes… And the president thinks that the wealthy aren’t paying the fair share?”

First of all, these numbers apply only to federal income taxes — which Wallace, to his credit, acknowledged. But the distinction is often elided, allowing the impression that this applies to all taxes to slide by uncontested. Rove, for instance, never mentioned it. It’s just in the fine print of the charts. And whether it gets mentioned in other contexts on Fox News, or in arguments by Republicans, is highly hit or miss.

But individual income taxes made up only 44 percent of federal revenues in 2009. That same year, payroll taxes made up 42 percent of federal revenue. And in 2006, 86 percent of households with wage earners had higher payroll taxes than income taxes.

Payroll taxes apply a flat percentage rate to all of an individual’s income under $106,800, which makes payroll taxes highly regressive — i.e. the overall portion of income lost to the tax goes down as a person’s income goes up. In other words, while roughly two-fifths of the federal government’s revenue comes from progressive income taxes which fall harder on wealthier Americans, another two-fifths of that revenue comes from payroll taxes which fall harder on poorer and working class Americans.

Once state and local taxes are added, the right’s picture of the overtaxed rich deteriorates even further. Read more

A new poll from Winthrop University finds that a plurality of self-identified Republican voters from the state of South Carolina do not think it’s possible to balance the U.S. budget without the use of tax increases. One of the poll’s directors called the finding “shocking,” given the media narrative that people who identify as Republicans are opposed to any and all tax increases:

Forty-seven percent of S.C. Republican and Republican-leaning voters surveyed said they did not think it was possible to balance the budget without a tax increase, while 45 percent said a tax increase is not necessary. Seven percent said they were not sure.

“That is surprising, simply because it goes against the echo chambers and punditry who are constantly saying, ‘No Republicans believe in any tax (hikes),’ ” said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University political science professor and director of The Winthrop Poll.

One local Republican, South Carolina’s own Rep. Mick Mulvaney, had some sympathy for the views of these voters. He told a local paper that he was not surprised by the results and that he thought it was politically impossible to deal with the budget deficit without raising taxes. Mulvaney stressed that he intends to do this mostly through eliminating tax loopholes, even if that does bother “the extreme right wing of the party” that just wants to “starve the beast”:

However, U.S. Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a Republican from Indian Land, said the results did not surprise him. “I don’t think it’s possible to fix this problem politically without raising taxes,” he said. But that position hinges on Mulvaney’s definition of a tax increase. Mulvaney said removing loopholes in the tax code that benefit some companies – but not others – would require those companies to pay more taxes. But he doesn’t see that as a tax increase.

“If we do our job on fixing the tax code, lowering the rates but broadening the base, it may result in more revenue to the government,” Mulvaney said. “And that does bother the extreme right wing of the party sometimes, who just want to try and starve the beast. “(But) we are trying to bring fairness to the tax code and equity to the tax code.”

The poll of South Carolina’s self-identified Republican voters and Mulvaney’s stance are a refreshing reminder that there are many conservatives who do not align with the anti-tax orthodoxy preached by the leaders of the Republican Party and right-wing activists like Grover Norquist.

ThinkProgress filed this report from Greenland, NH.

At the Republican presidential debate in Ames, Iowa last week, the GOP presidential candidates were asked if they would have rejected a deal to raise the debt ceiling that contained a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to new revenue. All eight candidates raised their hands in opposition to such a deal, further proof that the GOP is set on continuing the intransigence on taxes that played a major part in Standard & Poor’s downgrade of America’s credit rating.

Rep. Frank Guinta (R-NH) was asked about such a deal yesterday at a town hall in Greenland, NH. He dodged the question — admitting to the crowd “I don’t know if that answers your question” — and instead told attendees that he was not opposed to new revenue as long as it didn’t come from actually raising tax rates. Multiple attendees then challenged him, asking him why he wouldn’t support raising rates on corporations or the wealthiest Americans:

QUESTION: At the debate in Iowa last week, all eight candidates said they would reject a 10-to-1 deal that the new super committee comes out with. Would you reject a 10-to-1 deal? [...]

GUINTA: I don’t feel the need to raise rates, but I do think we can raise revenue. I don’t know if that answers your question, but –

ATTENDEES: Why not rates? What’s wrong with rates? How do you raise revenue? [...]

GUINTA: Well I think the way you raise revenue, my personal feeling is […] I don’t feel that raising taxes has to be the first option, there have to be many other options and alternatives before you raise tax rates. I feel like it can be regressive to raise rates on small businesses […]

WOMAN: Most small businesses are never even in the bracket of which we speak. They never reach that. And when they do it’s only the first dollar above the first $250,000 that is taxed at that higher rate. So it’s really very misleading when ‘Our small businesses need to be protected.’ They already are. Because 80, 90 percent of them never even have taxable income at the rate you’re talking about, so it’s really very misleading, and I’m really sick of hearing this misleading stuff.

Watch it:

The woman who challenged Guinta was absolutely correct: exceedingly few small businesses would be affected if taxes on the wealthiest Americans were raised. At another point in the town hall, Guinta was unable to answer why he has not supported allowing the Medicare program to negotiate with drug manufacturers, which would save billions of dollars every year.

In an attempt to “revive profit,” corporate giant Cisco Systems is expected to announce that it’s laying off 10,000 workers, or 14 percent of its workforce:

The cuts include as many as 7,000 jobs that would be eliminated by the end of August, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t final. Cisco, based in San Jose, Calif., is also providing early-retirement packages to about 3,000 workers who took buyouts, the people said. [...]

Eliminating jobs will help Cisco wring $1 billion in expenses in fiscal 2012, the company said in May.

The news comes at the same time that Cisco is lobbying Congress for a huge corporate tax break in the form of a repatriation holiday, which would allow companies that have stashed money offshore to bring it back to the U.S. at a much lower rate than they would normally pay. As ThinkProgress has reported, Cisco is part of a group of corporations called WinAmerica that continue to lobby for a repatriation holiday, even as the companies already pay extremely low taxes.

Cisco, for instance, has paid an effective tax rate of 19.8 percent — far below the statutory corporate tax rate of 35 percent. Additionally, Cisco has dodged $7 billion in taxes since 2005.

Ironically, WinAmerica corporations are pushing for a tax holiday based on the claim that it will allow them to bring funds into the U.S. that they will invest in domestic operations and job creation. However, Congress approved a repatriation holiday in 2004, and data show that the companies that benefited most wound up cutting jobs in subsequent years, laying off tens of thousands of workers. The news that Cisco is laying off 10,000 American workers to boost their bottom line is further proof of just how empty the claim still is.