Big players in the debate have been pushing for this all along. Take, for example, the “Fix the Debt” campaign, which has recruited more than 90 CEOs as spokespeople and plastered web sites, newspapers, and even a Washington subway station with their ads. The campaign has identified a shift to a “territorial tax system,” which would permanently exempt U.S. corporations’ foreign income from U.S. taxes, as a “basic budget need.” Fedex CEO Fred Smith is one of the biggest fans of this particular corporate tax break. He enjoyed face time with President Obama during one of the umpteen rounds of deficit deal dialogues the White House has held with business leaders. (Pity the few Fortune 500 CEOs who haven’t yet received an invitation.) Smith later explained his idea for a compromise: accept tax increases for the rich in exchange for an offer to “lower corporate tax rates to a territorial tax system.”

Why would a wealthy guy like Smith be willing to barter away his personal tax breaks for this corporate perk? His argument is a patriotic one – that this reform would encourage corporations to bring their money back to America to invest and create jobs.

The trouble is, similar tax breaks on overseas earnings haven’t led to job creation in the past. In the two years after a 2004 “tax holiday” that offered a temporary discounted tax rate of 5.25 percent on repatriated overseas earnings, the Congressional Research Service found that 12 of the top recipients laid off more than 67,000 American workers.

What is certain is that a shift to a territorial system would be a boost to the bottom line of global companies like Fedex. According to their annual report, the company has accumulated $1 billion in offshore earnings.

Read the rest at The Hill.

Mr. Silvers is a member of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board Standing Advisory Group, the Financial Accounting Standards Board User Advisory Council, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Corporate Governance Task Force, the New York Stock Exchange’s Stock Options Voting Task Force and was a member of the Advisory Committee on Analyst Independence to the House Capital Markets Subcommittee. He is a member of the American Bar Association’s Subcommittee on International Corporate Governance. Mr. Silvers received his J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School. He received his M.B.A. with high honors from Harvard Business School and is a Baker Scholar. Mr. Silvers is a graduate of Harvard College, summa cum laude, and has studied history at Kings College, Cambridge University.

His 1989 book Market Volatility (MIT Press) is a mathematical and behavioral analysis of price fluctuations in speculative markets. His 1993 book Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society’s Largest Economic Risks (Oxford University Press) proposes a variety of new risk-management contracts, such as futures contracts in national incomes or securities based on real estate that would permit the management of risks to standards of living. His book Irrational Exuberance (Princeton 2000, Broadway Books 2001, 2nd edition Princeton 2005) is an analysis and explication of speculative bubbles, with special reference to the stock market and real estate. His book The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2003) is an analysis of an expanding role of finance, insurance, and public finance in our future. His book Subprime Solution: How the Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It, published in September 2008 by Princeton University Press, offers an analysis of the housing and economic crisis and a plan of action against it. He co-authored, with George A. Akerlof, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism published in March 2009 by Princeton University Press. He co-authored with Randall Kroszner Reforming U.S. Financial Markets: Reflections before and beyond Dodd-Frank published in March 2011 by MIT Press.

Dr. Roubini has extensive policy experience as well as broad academic credentials. From 1998 to 2000, he served as the senior economist for international affairs on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and then as the senior advisor to the undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, helping to resolve the Asian and global financial crises. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and numerous other prominent public and private institutions have drawn upon his consulting expertise.

He has published over 70 theoretical, empirical and policy papers on international macroeconomic issues and coauthored the books “Political Cycles: Theory and Evidence” (MIT Press, 1997) and “Bailouts or Bail-ins? Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets” (Institute for International Economics, 2004) and “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance” (Penguin Press, 2010).

Dr. Roubini’s views on global economic issues are widely cited by the media, and he is a frequent commentator on various business news programs. He has been the subject of extended profiles in the New York Times Magazine and other leading current-affairs publications. The Financial Times has provided extensive coverage of Dr. Roubini’s perspectives.

He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a co-founder of BaselineScenario.com (a much cited website on the global economy), a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers, and a member of the FDIC’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee.

Prof. Johnson is a weekly contributor to NYT.com’s Economix, is a regular Bloomberg columnist, has a monthly article with Project Syndicate that runs in publications around the world, and has published high impact opinion pieces recently in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Republic, BusinessWeek, and The Financial Times, among other places. In January 2010, he joined The Huffington Post as contributing business editor. Professor Johnson is the co-author, with James Kwak, of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown, a bestselling assessment of the dangers now posed by the US financial sector (published March 2010) and White House Burning:  The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt and Why it Matters to You (April 2012).

In his roles as a professor, research fellow and author, Johnson’s speaking engagements include paid appearances before various business groups, including financial institutions and other companies, as well before other groups that may have a political agenda. He is not on the board of any company, does not currently serve as a consultant to anyone, and does not work as an expert witness or conduct sponsored research. His investment portfolio comprises cash and broadly diversified mutual funds; he does not trade stocks, bonds, derivatives or other financial products actively.

From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Johnson was the International Monetary Fund’s Economic Counsellor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. He is a co-director of the NBER Africa Project, and works with non-profits and think tanks around the world.

In 2009, she co-chaired a task force within Americans for Financial Reform that helped shape key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  In 2008, she served as the Deputy Policy Director in charge of Domestic and Economic Policy with the John Edwards for President campaign, helping craft that campaign’s agenda-setting policies to end poverty, halt global climate change, reform financial services, and other far-reaching aims.  She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law

Herbert has numerous awards, including the Meyer Berger Award for coverage of New York City, the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for distinguished newspaper writing, the David Nyhan Prize from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University for excellence in political reporting, and the Ridenhour Courage Prize for the “fearless articulation of unpopular truths.”

He serves as Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, as well as Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Health Policy and Management.  He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).

Professor Sachs is widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on economic development and the fight against poverty.  His work on ending poverty, promoting economic growth, fighting hunger and disease, and promoting sustainable environmental practices, has taken him to more than 125 countries with more than 90 percent of the world’s population.  For more than a quarter century he has advised dozens of heads of state and governments on economic strategy, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.  He also advised Pope John Paul II on the encyclical Centesimus Annus. He works closely with international organizations including the African Union, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Food Programme, UNAIDS, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, among others.

Professor Sachs’ work has been pivotal in many of the key junctures of globalization during the past thirty years.  In the 1980s he helped several Latin American countries including Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to end hyperinflations and renegotiate their external debts.  He was the leading academic advocate in the United States for reducing the debt overhang of the developing countries and his ideas were incorporated in the global debt-reduction plans undertaken from the mid-1980s onward, including the Brady Plan and the HIPC Program.

In 1989, Professor Sachs advised Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement and the first post-communist Government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki.  He wrote the first-ever comprehensive plan for the transition from central planning to a market democracy, which became incorporated into Poland’s highly successful reform program led by Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz.  Professor Sachs was the main architect of Poland’s successful debt reduction operation.  The Government of Poland awarded Sachs with one of its highest honors in 1999, the Commanders Cross of the Order of Merit.  He also received an honorary doctorate from the Cracow University of Economics.

Sachs’s ideas and methods of transition from central planning were successfully adopted throughout the transition economies.  He helped Slovenia (1991) and Estonia (1992) to introduce new stable and convertible currencies.  Based on Poland’s success, he was invited first by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and then by Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the transition to a market economy.  He served as advisor to Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and Finance Minister Boris Federov during 1991-93 on macroeconomic policies.  He received the Leontief Medal of the Leontief Centre, St. Petersburg, for his contributions to Russia’s economic reforms.

From the mid-1990s till today, Prof. Sachs has been involved with economic reforms in many parts of Asia, including India and China.  He has been a senior advisor to the Indian Government, most recently on the scaling up of primary health care in rural areas (the National Rural Health Mission), a policy that he recommended and helped to promote through the Indian Commission on Macroeconomics and Health.  For his broad-based support of India’s economic reforms he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, one of India’s highest honors. He has similarly engaged with the Chinese Government on many issues of sustainable development, and during 2001-3 worked with senior government officials on China’s Western Development Strategy.  He has authored many scholarly and policy papers on India’s and China’s economic reforms.  Sachs has also worked in other parts of Asia on a number of development and research projects, including in Malaysia, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and others. He actively supports Bhutan’s innovative strategy of Gross National Happiness. He works with the Government of Jordan on a national program of poverty reduction and with the Government of Qatar on education and ICT initiatives throughout the Arab region.

Since 1995, Professor Sachs has been deeply engaged in Africa’s escape from poverty.  He has worked in more than two-dozen African countries, and has advised the African leadership at several African Union summits.  In the mid-1990s he worked with senior officials of the Clinton Administration to develop the concept of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).  He has engaged with dozens of African leaders to promote smallholder agriculture and to fight high disease burdens through strengthened primary health systems.  His pioneering ideas on investing in health to break the poverty trap have been widely applied throughout the continent.  He currently serves as an advisor to several African governments, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda, among others.

The Millennium Villages Project, which he directs, operates in more than one dozen African countries, and covers more than 500,000 people. The MVP has achieved notable successes in raising agricultural production, reducing children’s stunting, and cutting child mortality rates, with the results described in several peer-reviewed publications. Its key concepts of integrated rural development to achieve the MDGs are now being applied at national scale in Nigeria and Mali, and are being used by many other countries to help support national anti-poverty programs. He works very closely with the Islamic Development Bank to scale up programs of integrated rural development and sustainable agriculture among the Bank’s member countries. One such project supports pastoralist communities in the Horn of Africa, with six participating nations: Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan.

Since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, Professor Sachs has been the leading academic scholar and practitioner on the MDGs.  He chaired the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (2000-1), which played a pivotal role in scaling up the financing of health care and disease control in the low-income countries to support MDGs 4, 5, and 6.  He worked with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000-1 to design and launch the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.  He worked closely with senior officials of the administration of George W. Bush to develop the PEPFAR program to fight HIV/AIDS, and the PMI to fight malaria. On behalf of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, from 2002-2006 he chaired the UN Millennium Project, which was tasked with developing a concrete action plan to achieve the MDGs.  The UN General Assembly adopted the key recommendations of the UN Millennium Project at a special session in September 2005. The recommendations for rural Africa are currently being implemented and documented in the Millennium Villages, and in several national scale-up efforts such as in Nigeria.

Professor Sachs has been the Director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University since 2002.  In that capacity, he leads a university-wide organization of more than 850 professionals from natural-science and social-science disciplines, in support of sustainable development.  Sachs has consistently advocated for the expansion of University education on sustainable development, and helped to introduce the PhD in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, one of the first PhD programs of its kind in the U.S.  He championed the new Masters of Development Practice (MDP), which has led to a consortium of major universities around the world offering the new degree.  The Earth Institute has also guided the adoption of sustainable development as a new major at Columbia College.  The Earth Institute is home to cutting-edge research on all aspects of earth systems and sustainable development.

Sachs is the recipient of many awards and honors, including membership in the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Society of Fellows, and the Fellows of the World Econometric Society.  He has received more than 20 honorary degrees, and many awards and honors around the world. His syndicated newspaper column appears in more than 80 countries around the world, and he is a frequent contributor to major publications such as the Financial Times of London, the International Herald Tribune, Scientific American, and Time magazine.

Sachs’ policy and academic works span the challenges of globalization, and include: the relationship of trade and economic growth; the resource curse and extractive industries; public health and economic development; economic geography; strategies of economic reform; international financial markets; macroeconomic policy; global competitiveness; climate change; and the end of poverty. He has authored or co-authored hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, including three bestsellers and a textbook on macroeconomics that is widely used around the world.

Prior to his arrival at Columbia University in July 2002, Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development and the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade.

Sachs was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954. He received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Harvard College in 1976, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978 and 1980 respectively. He joined the Harvard faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1980, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1982 and Full Professor in the fall of 1983, at the age of 28.

As I watch public interest efforts — from taxation to government waste; from environment to health care reform — I’m stunned that every single person working on these and so many other issues are not working exclusively on combatting the undue influence of money in politics. Because it’s all about the money.

Why do guys like Mitt Romney still pay a lower tax rate than you while the Pew Research Center reported last week: “America’s middle class has endured its worst decade in modern history.” Just look at the big money orgy happening in Tampa; the real-time subversion of the American middle class in favor of moneyed interests.

Read more at: The Huffington Post

Now, Mitt Romney is applying that same notion to his campaign for the presidency. He’s offering Americans a gated candidate, with whole areas of his record walled off to keep “you people” from knowing about them.

The scope of information gated off is striking and unprecedented in modern presidential politics. Romney insured that records on his stint as Governor and as CEO of the Olympics were scrubbed. He walls off access to his history at Bain, the company he led. Romney refuses to reveal his tax returns. He walls off information about the bundlers who are raising the money for the campaign to whom he will be deeply indebted. Not surprisingly, he stayed mum as Republican Senators torpedoed the legislation to require disclosure of corporate and individual contributors who give more than $10,000 to non-profits now poisoning the airwaves with attack ads.

He is as Maureen Dowd concludes, “hiding in plain sight.”

This isn’t a partisan concern. Joining a growing roster of Republican leaders, even the reactionary Manchester Union Leader editorialists call on him to reveal his tax returns, saying “maintaining the secrecy creates the impression, justly or not, thatthere is something to hide.” Surely, the editorial goes on to say, Romney “could not have arrogantly believed that he could withstand any storm that developed by bluffing his way through?”

Read more at The Huffington Post.

Robert is the author of eight books, including the recent New York Times bestseller, Obama’s Challenge: American’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, (Chelsea Green, 2008). Robert’s last book, The Squandering of America, explores political roots of America’s narrowing prosperity and the systemic risks facing the U.S. economy. He has just begun work on a new book on the challenge of regulating global capitalism.

Bob’s best-known earlier book is Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets (1997). The book received a page one review in the New York Times Book Review. Of it, the late economist Robert Heilbroner wrote, “I have never seen the market system better described, more intelligently appreciated, or more trenchantly criticized than in Everything for Sale.”

Bob’s other previous books on economics and politics include: The End of Laissez-Faire (1991); The Life of the Party (1987); The Economic Illusion (1984); and Revolt of the Haves (1980). Bob’s magazine writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and the Sunday Book Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Dissent, Columbia Journalism Review, and Harvard Business Review.

For four decades, Bob’s intellectual and political project has been to revive the politics and economics of harnessing capitalism to serve a broad public interest. He has pursued this ideal as a writer, editor, teacher, lecturer, commentator and public official.

Before joining the New America Foundation, Mr. Schmitt was Director of Policy and Research at the Open Society Institute, and served for seven years in the U.S. Senate as a speechwriter and later as Policy Director for Sen. Bill Bradley. He was a senior policy advisor on Bradley’s 2000 presidential campaign. Schmitt serves on the boards of the Center for Policy Alternatives and the Proteus Fund.

As a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Mr. Schmitt works on developing new approaches to finding the balance between money and expression in the political process, as well as on tax and budget policy. He is working on a book on the emergence of strong political parties in the United States.