MEDIA, Pa – After two days spent trying to hide his position on eliminating taxes for Wall Street banks and Big Oil, Congressman Toomey will not deny his support for zero corporate taxes, even at the expense of Pennsylvania’s working families. After approaching the Toomey campaign directly about the issue yesterday, PolitiFact reported, “We gave the Toomey camp the opportunity to say the candidate opposes zero corporate taxation, but the campaign did not do so.”

The Toomey campaign is willing to go to such lengths to disguise his record that it calls Congressman Toomey’s own plan — which he has argued for on national televisionand in his own book — “impractical” and “an intellectual exercise.” They must realize how much harm his proposal would do to the middle class to benefit his special-interest friends.

If corporate tax rates were to be eliminated altogether, it would add more than $225 billion to the debt every year, over $9 billion annually from Pennsylvania alone. Corporations already dodge their full tax liability through loopholes, credits and tax havens.

• Exxon Mobil, GE and Bank of America made $52 billion combined in pre-tax income last year but did not pay a single penny in corporate income tax to the U.S. government.
• In fact, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office reported that 61 percent of U.S. corporations reported tax liabilities of less than 5 percent of their total income in 2000 though the official corporate income tax rate is 35 percent.
• There has been a steep decline in the amount of tax that is actually paid by corporations. The rate fell from a high of 39.8 percent in 1943 to a low of 7.4 percent in 2003.
• Though Chevron and Ford made a combined $21.5 billion, they paid their taxes at a rate of only 1 percent.

“We need to ensure that our American businesses stay competitive, but we cannot allow large multinational corporations that reap billions in profits to shortchange the middle class and small businesses trying to stay competitive,” said Joe. “Congressman Toomey’s conclusion that America has the second-highest corporate tax rate in the world is based on the faulty premise that they pay anything near that. If he claims to be on the side of working families, he should think about their interests over corporate interests.”

“Last week, Congressman Toomey was trying to disguise his position on privatizing Social Security even though he was on record 36 times supporting it,” said Sestak campaign spokesman Jonathon Dworkin. “Now, he is trying to hide his position on eliminating taxes for big banks and oil companies at the expense of the middle class. Somehow, Congressman Toomey believes he can run a campaign of deception and does not think Pennsylvanians will hold him accountable for what he has said and done.”

Joe Sestak was elected to Congress in 2006 after a distinguished 31-year career in the United States Navy, and he is honored to represent the Southeastern Pennsylvania district where he was born and raised. He is a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania.  During his Navy career, Joe attained the rank of 3-star Admiral, served in the White House as Director for Defense Policy on President Clinton’s National Security Council, served in the Pentagon as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, and led a series of operational commands at sea, culminating in command of the USS George Washington Aircraft Carrier Battle Group (30 ships, 100 aircraft, and 15,000 sailors/marines/aviators/SEALs) during combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In our nation’s time of crisis in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Navy turned to Joe Sestak to serve as the first Director of “Deep Blue,” the Navy anti-terrorism unit formed in response to the attacks. Joe is the highest-ranking former military officer ever elected to either branch of Congress. He graduated second in his class from the U.S. Naval Academy and holds a Master’s in Public Administration and a PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University. Joe lives in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Susan, and daughter, Alex, and proudly represents the 7th District, where his mother and many of his seven siblings still reside.