They’re doing a massive media and lobbying blitz, portraying themselves as the reasonable ones, because they’re calling for both raising revenues and cutting spending. But if you look at the details of their tax plan, you see that they are really just a Trojan horse. They’re pushing for the same old tax breaks for corporations that they’ve been pushing for for about a decade.

And we looked at one of them, which is they want a permanent exemption from U.S. taxes for all of their foreign earnings. And we calculated that the companies in this campaign stand to gain a windfall of as much as $134 billion, if they get this corporate tax break through. And so, people should be very wary of this big ad campaign that they’re about to see in their newspapers across the country. This is just one more corporate attack on our fair taxation system.

It’s just crazy to be talking about, as he said, "shoring up the entitlement programs." That’s just Washington speak for reducing the cost of these programs and limiting access. To think that we need to shift the burden onto the backs of the poor and elderly is crazy, when we’re in one of the richest countries—the richest country in the world. Our problem is that our resources have been misallocated. And the approach to the debt should be to look at the ways that we could raise revenues through fair taxation, including taxing financial transactions, which could rein in Wall Street; number two, environmental reforms like cutting fossil fuel subsidies and using carbon taxes; and three, cutting military spending, especially all these military bases we have around the world that are obsolete. That kind of combination could raise trillions of dollars over the next decade. And that’s how we should be addressing the debt, not through these, you know, tax shenanigans that are just about giving more breaks to corporations and the wealthy, and cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

There are numerous budget plans by Senator Sanders, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and others that would get us on the right track.

The Fix the Debt coalition is using the so-called “fiscal cliff” as an opportunity to push the same old corporate agenda of more tax breaks while shifting the burden on to the middle class and the poor. If America’s CEOs really want to Fix the Debt, they should first commit to eliminating the loopholes that have allowed them to avoid paying their fair share of the cost of government, including investments necessary to keep our families and our communities strong and secure.