Tie tax holiday to infrastructure bank, minimum wage hike.
5:18PM EST December 4. 2012 – Truthfully, you can’t blame the American people for being frustrated with Washington these days. Washington’s dysfunctional cycle stays predictably the same: Accuse the opponent of “ruining” America/capitalism/The New Deal, play the blame game, let the perfect become the enemy of the good, and allow politics to stand in the way of what’s best for our country.
When the American public split power between the parties, as they have in the past two elections, they weren’t calling for purity of policy and adherence to ideology above all else. They were hoping for collaboration. Meeting this expectation is long overdue and one way to demonstrate a new commitment is to come together for a multi-trillion dollar deal to create more jobs.
We want to enlist American corporations and both political parties to join us on a mission of economic recovery. Here’s how:
First, many of these big businesses are holding trillions offshore – not out of malice, but because they’re pursuing the end-game that American companies are designed for: maximizing profit. There is nothing new with these corporations choosing strategies that make the most economic sense for them. Right now, however, they want to bring the offshore cash back home, but won’t because of systemic failures in our tax code. While correcting those failures is a certainly a necessary project for the long haul, the American people need progress now.
We believe we should encourage companies to re-shore those investments with a one-time repatriation tax holiday at a substantially discounted rate. Giving a one-time repatriation to big businesses may not sit well with many Democrats, but we believe it is a sensible way to bring trillions sitting in the sidelines back into the game. But, this benefit to big business shouldn’t come for free.
For this initiative to have any legitimacy across the political spectrum, we shouldn’t just repeat the holiday from 2004, then cross our fingers and hope for the best. We shouldn’t just take the business community’s word that they will “pay it forward.” Instead, the beneficiaries of a repatriation tax holiday must be required to invest in America.
These funds must be leveraged into making a fundamental difference in our economy as a whole, not just by helping the investing class, but also the working class. An expansion in payrolls, new hires at home and a bigger domestic workforce are part of the deal — and that’s not all. The profits they’re poised to make should be tied to the capitalization of an infrastructure bank. These businesses ship their goods to warehouses, stock shelves and reach customers by American railways and roadways. These companies benefit from sound, resilient infrastructure more than anyone and its time they contribute to the cause in new and innovative ways.
The last piece of this jobs puzzle should be a shot in the arm for everyday working families: raising the minimum wage and permanently indexing it to inflation. This doesn’t just help middle-class teenagers working part time jobs at the mall. Indeed, most minimum wage earners are employed by big businesses and are now older and more educated than in the past. Leaving the federal minimum wage at historically low levels would force families to continue to live in poverty. That is an outcome we are just not willing to accept.
Overall, this initiative can boost consumer spending in the short term, creating jobs in its own right and growth for businesses in communities everywhere, while pursuing the long-term moral cause of a living wage.
This is a genuinely bipartisan, “all-of-the-above” approach to the jobs crisis we face. With the election now behind us, now is the best time to put a comprehensive jobs package back on the table and actuate the areas where we’ve already found common ground. The corporate-infrastructure-worker triumvirate we’ve proposed has the makings of a blockbuster deal.
Rep. Michael Honda is a Democrat from California. Andy Stern is the former president of the Service Employees’ International Union.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors.
Source Article from http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2012/12/04/living-wage-bipartisan-issue/1744105/
