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January 30, 2004

KRUGMAN AND HERBERT

Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert deliver a one-two punch this morning. Krugman wants to know: "Where's The Apology?" He doesn't see any: "George Bush promised to bring honor and integrity back to the White House. Instead, he got rid of accountability." Two key grafs:

As far as I can tell, nobody in the Bush administration has ever paid a price for being wrong. Instead, people are severely punished for telling inconvenient truths. And administration officials have consistently sought to freeze out, undermine or intimidate anyone who might try to check up on their performance.

If you're with them, you pay no penalty for being wrong. If you don't tell them what they want to hear, you're an enemy, and being right is no excuse.

In "The Halliburton Shuffle," Herbert reminds us of that megacompany's scandalous avoidance of corporate income taxes by establishing off-shore tax shelters in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Panama, Liechtenstein, and Vanadu.

Herbert writes: "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.'"

Compare that amount to the billions of dollars Halliburton is earning from U.S. government contracts in Iraq alone. And what a nice corporate phrase for a tax dodge: "foreign tax credit utilization." Give that woman a language transplant. The dodge is legal, of course, but how about Halliburton's "foreign bribe and overcharge utilization?"

Posted by at January 30, 2004 07:41 AM

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