Political Quotes

“Mr. President, today I am introducing a bill with my colleague, Senator Sherrod Brown, to eliminate the federal tax break that gives special tax treatment to corporations that pay their executives with stock options. The bill is called the Ending Excessive Corporate Deductions for Stock Options Act, and it has been endorsed by the AFL-CIO, Citizens for Tax Justice, Consumer Federation of America, OMB Watch, and Tax Justice Network-USA. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, eliminating this corporate tax break would bring in almost $25 billion over 10 years. The existing special treatment of corporate stock options forces ordinary taxpayers to subsidize the salaries of corporate executives. The subsidy is a consequence of the current mismatch between U.S. accounting rules and tax rules for stock options, which have developed along divergent paths and are now out of kilter. Today, U.S. accounting rules require corporations to report stock option expenses on their books when those stock options are granted, while federal tax rules provide that they use another method to claim a different--and typically much higher--deduction on their tax returns when the stock options are exercised. The result is that corporations can claim larger tax deductions for stock options on their tax returns than the actual expense they show on their books, creating a tax windfall for those corporations.…”