Tax laws favor corporations over small businesses

Tax Day is the perfect time to highlight the different sets of rules that apply to small business and big business in our country.

While most small business owners (and most citizens) have to file and pay their taxes every April 15 (April 18 this year), our tax system has been rigged so American multinational corporations don't. In fact, American corporations are holding $2.4 trillion in profits offshore.

For these large corporations, April 15 is just another day because they can defer paying U.S. taxes on these offshore profits as long as they wish. It's a tax loophole that small businesses can't - and wouldn't - exploit.

Across the nation, millions of small-business owners get up every morning to open their retail storefronts, their offices, their factories or their distribution centers, and commit to a full day's work providing the goods and services that make this economy move on a daily basis.

This honest, hardworking behavior is a far cry from what multinational corporations like Pfizer, Apple Computer, Oracle, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and a host of other blue-chip U.S. corporations do at the end of their tax year. They also provide the goods and services, they add it all up, run through the numbers, and make their profits.

That is fundamentally unfair to the millions of small-business owners who faithfully serve their local communities on a daily basis. It is time to pay close attention to the smoke-and-mirror chicanery that masquerades as virtuous tax policy, and use that spotlight to fix a system that unfairly burdens small businesses across the country.

Tax Day should mean something to big corporations, too.

David Borris

Northbrook