Op-Ed Columnist: The Halliburton Shuffle By BOB HERBERT, NYTimes
[Halliburton] adamantly denies that its offshore subsidiaries are used to shift income out of the U.S. But it’s indisputable that somebody is doing a dandy job of limiting Halliburton’s tax liability. When I asked how much Halliburton paid in federal income taxes last year, a company spokeswoman, Wendy Hall, said, “After foreign tax credit utilization, we paid just over $15 million to the I.R.S. for our 2002 tax liability.”
That is effectively no money at all to an empire like Halliburton. Less than pocket change. Dick Cheney must be having a good laugh over the way his old company, following his road map, is taking the U.S. for such a ride.
In the early 90’s, when Mr. Cheney was defense secretary under the first President Bush, he hired the Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to determine what military functions could be outsourced to private profit-making companies. Brown & Root came up with myriad ideas in a classified study and was handed a lucrative contract to implement its own plan.
Mr. Cheney took over as chief executive of Halliburton in 1995, and the defense contracts just kept on coming. When he returned to government as vice president in 2001, no firm was better positioned than Halliburton to cash in on the billions of dollars in contracts that resulted from the war on terror and the conflict in Iraq.
I think that since Bush thinks outsourcing is
so dandy, I think he should be dumped and tried for treason.
I also think that Mankiw and Fiorina and their ilk should follow their
own advice and be immediately outsourced themselves. If they are true to this idea, they should be more than happy to oblige. Especially
with Fiorina, think of all the money HP would save and she should not have one penny in retirement,no health care, no severance or any
kind of golden parachute whatsover.
She can make do just like of the rest of us. That applies to the others that think this is such a
grand idea as well.
As far as India being stung by our anger, maybe someone in Russia or where ever would be delighted to take their
jobs and if that happens, we shall see how happy they will be about it. After all, India has also said, “This was good for us” along
with our chorus of U.S. companies, Bush and Mankiw.
Before I go, I think this situation is so bad. We were told to re-educate
ourselves when manufaturing was leaving and we were told “This was good for us.” We did just that and this is what happened. Did we
deserve that?
We can also re-educate ourselves again, but with this corporate and government attitude, that will do no good, because
at the rate this is going now, we can be even better educated, but they’re still going to be looking at cheaper labor.
So, we’re
right back to Square 1.