Poor Obama doesn't have a lot of friends these days, and as we know from last week, he just managed to piss off every accountant in the country by implying it's the accountants' fault businesses are using legal avenues to avoid corporate taxes.
New York State Society of CPAs president Scott Adair had something to say about Obama's finger waving and, oddly enough, his comments were almost exactly what we said last week:
As President of the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants, I believe President Obama should be aware that U.S. corporations hire accountants for their distinct ability and expertise in seeing that clients fulfill their tax obligations as required by the laws adopted by Congress. In fact, it is a CPAs’ unique ability to legally navigate an extraordinarily complex tax code that makes CPAs’ services so valuable to their individual and corporate clients.
If President Obama wants to point fingers, perhaps he should point them at Congress for creating the very loopholes he vilifies. Sustainable corporate tax reform is the elephant in this room. President Obama’s goals would be best served by looking to his fellow lawmakers if he wants a solution to this problem. The accounting profession stands ready to help.
TAKE THAT, dude. Or, as we said last week, if you have a problem with companies making the most of our complicated, ridiculous tax code, then holla at your boys (and girls) in Congress to CHANGE THE LAW. Problem solved.
In his statement, Obama said "Well, it’s not fair. It’s not right." You know what's not fair? Blaming the wrong group of people for an issue so messed up that a reasonable person might assume the tax code is complicated as a feature, not a bug.
As Adair mentioned, I'm sure the accountants would love to help the president out on this once Obama can figure out to which group he should be wagging his blame finger.
[I]f we are going to make real progress, we can’t fixate on every overhyped, half-baked tax slogan that comes along. Sooner or later we must get back to basics. Here’s the main question: Should taxes be cut, raised, or reformed without changing overall revenue? The answer is that taxes should be cut in the short term, raised after we are clearly out of our cyclical downturn, and then reformed only after we have settled on the magnitude of tax increases needed for deficit reduction. [
The most noteworthy and damning moment of the GOP debate in Iowa Thursday was when the moderators asked the candidates to raise their hands if they would walk away from a deal that cut ten dollars from the deficit for every one dollar in tax increases. Every last person on stage said they’d reject that deal. [