We Need to Invest in Transportation Across Massachusetts, and It’s Time for Large, Profitable Corporations to Pay Their Fair Share!

After years of underinvestment, Massachusetts’ transportation systems are at a crisis point. Because of the failures of our transportation systems, many working families in Massachusetts are struggling with lengthy commutes, high transportation costs, and a lack of opportunity. In order to build the modern, reliable transportation systems we need all across the Commonwealth, we need significant new revenue for investment in transportation.

At the same time, far too many large, profitable corporations that do business in Massachusetts pay only minimal taxes here by exploiting loopholes, tax breaks, and offshore tax havens.

These same corporations move their goods on our publicly-funded roads and bridges and bring their employees to work on our public transportation systems. They have a shared responsibility to help fund continued investments in transportation. We need major investments in transportation, but not one that’s depending on making working people pay.

Large, profitable corporations move their goods on publicly funded roads and bridges and bring their employees to work on our public transportation system. Corporations have a vested interest and shared responsibility to help fund investments in our transportation system.

Rather than only asking working people to pay more, it is long overdue that our elected officials ensure corporations pay their fair share – and our Corporate Fair Share campaign does exactly that. It consists of:

  1. GILTI (Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income) – Multinational corporations who do business in MA use the federal tax code to shift their US profits to offshore tax havens. A state GILTI tax would mirror federal law and tax a portion of those offshore profits.
  2. Tiered Corporate Minimum – Corporations who do business in MA use tax breaks and loopholes to pay only the corporate minimum tax of $456 per year (if they even pay that). A tiered corporate minimum tax would ensure that larger corporations pay a minimum in proportion to the size of their business, while small businesses continue paying the current minimum.
  3. Corporate Disclosure – Research and advocacy around closing corporate loopholes is difficult because of the lack of available information about how much taxes specific corporations pay. Adequate corporate disclosure laws would help identify bad actors and allow us to measure the effects of loopholes in our existing corporate tax rules.