You remember Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, right? Co-chairs of the National Fiscal Commission bearing their name? The austerity freaks who want to eviscerate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and every other New Deal or Great Society program designed to keep people out of poverty or from falling further into it? They're also the co-founders of the Fix the Debt operation financed by billionaire Pete Peterson, who launched the private equity firm Blackstone Group in 1985 with Stephen Schwarzman (who three years ago compared raising taxes to “when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939”). Peterson knows about fixing debt out of experience because that's what so many private equity firms do, load up the companies they buy with debt and then loot them.

While they keep pushing their plans to hack away at lifelines for Americans in the lower income tiers with debt scare-mongering, they've also got a plan to shift the nation to a territorial corporate tax plan. Under that plan, according to a new study, 59 of the 93 companies partnered with Fix the Debt holding hundreds of billions of profits in overseas accounts would harvest as much as an additional $173 billion. That's so because those profits would go untaxed.

The report, authored by Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger and Javier Rojo at the leftist Institute for Policy Studies, is appropriately titled Corporate Pirates of the Caribbean. The pirates' objective: Bigger safety nets for corporations-are-people built on the shreds of the safety net for real people.

The IPS study is untrue, according to one of the principals at Fix the Debt:



Maya MacGuineas, a spokeswoman for the initiative and a budget expert who has worked with both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, called the IPS report “nothing more than lies and mudslinging” in an email statement to HuffPost. Wednesday’s report was the latest in a series from IPS accusing Fix the Debt of pushing for reforms that benefit its members. “In reality, the Fix the Debt campaign takes no position on how foreign income should be taxed and has repeatedly called for reducing, not expanding, corporate and individual tax breaks in the context of a broader deficit reduction deal,” she wrote.

While Fix the Debt conveniently does not formally endorse specific plans for anything, characterizing the territorial tax proposal as "mudslinging" when the co-chairs of the Simpsons-Bowles Commission are also co-founders of Fix the Debt operation is pretty danged hilarious. If only they could shield their objectives as well the partner corporations can shield their profits, they wouldn't have to put up with the irksome naysayers.Below the fold are some proposed solutions.