Liberal group chides Boeing on taxes

A liberal group is bashing Boeing’s tax record, on the same day President Obama visited one of the aerospace giant’s plants.

Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), in a Friday news release, cited its November report stating that Boeing was one of 30 corporate heavyweights that had a subzero federal tax liability between 2008 and 2010.

In the process, the group also questioned the White House push to incentivize U.S. manufacturing with targeted tax breaks.

“President Obama says he wants to help American manufacturers. But cutting their already very low taxes even further is not the way to do so,” the group stated in its release. “Repairing our decaying infrastructure and better educating our workforce would be much more promising approaches.”

Boeing has been tagged in the past, including by CTJ, for having a relatively low tax bill. But the company has consistently said it follows U.S. tax rules and pays millions of dollars per year in taxes.

In all, CTJ found in its report last year that many Fortune 500 companies paid much less than the top statutory corporate tax rate of 35 percent — with 67 companies paying less than 10 percent between 2008 and 2010.

The White House has said it plans to offer a framework for corporate tax reform in the coming weeks, and has already proposed that U.S. companies with offshore operations pay a minimum amount in taxes.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also said this week that the administration’s corporate tax ideas would include lowering rates and eliminating tax preferences — an idea embraced by key lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, though not by some liberal groups such as CTJ.

But as many other Washington observers have, Geithner also suggested that an agreement on tax reform might not be coming soon.

“We took a run at trying to negotiate a framework like that with the Republican leadership in the House over the course of the summer,” he said. “We found no basis for agreement on even the broad framework.”

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