QUESTION FOR DAVID PERDUE: When You Outsourced Hundreds Of American Jobs, Did Your Company Get A Tax Break?

QUESTION FOR DAVID PERDUE: When You Outsourced Hundreds Of American Jobs, Did Your Company Get A Tax Break?

In Today’s AJC, Perdue Unveils Support For Tax Breaks For Companies That Ship Jobs Overseas While Raising Cash From Party Leaders In DC

As A Corporate Executive, Perdue Led Efforts To Outsource 1,700 Jobs & Hand American Workers Pink Slips

DPG: “Georgians deserve to know if Perdue and the firm he worked for got a tax break for laying off American workers.”

ATLANTA, GA — Georgians are reading in this morning’s Atlanta Journal Constitution how David Perdue announced his opposition to eliminating tax breaks for firms that ship jobs overseas while raising money with national party leaders in Washington, D.C. His announcement shouldn’t come as a surprise to Georgians — as a corporate executive, David Perdue led efforts to fire hundreds of workers and ship their jobs overseas.

Perdue’s announcement begs the question, posed by Michael Smith of the Democratic Party of Georgia:

“While orchestrating the layoffs of hundreds of American workers and shipping their jobs overseas, did David Perdue and his firm get a tax break — the same tax breaks he endorsed yesterday?  Georgians deserve to know whether Perdue and his firm prospered from the tax break he now supports.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Perdue’s announcement this morning:

Perdue’s visit to Washington came amid a flurry of activity as Congress prepares to leave town for August, including a failed vote in the Senate on a bill that would have prevented companies from deducting from their taxes expenses related to moving operations overseas. Republicans blocked the bill, calling it an election-year gimmick.

…

Perdue said he was not familiar with the Senate bill, but he would tackle the issue by overhauling the tax code and reducing federal regulations.

“Rather than penalizing people for going offshore, we’ve got to make ourselves more competitive,” Perdue said. 

It’s been widely reported how David Perdue was literally THE executive in charge of moving 1,700 jobs overseas at a Texas manufacturing firm. MSNBC wrote earlier this year:

As senior vice president, Perdue was in charge of international operations at Haggar and later domestic operations as well. Under [Perdue’s] watch, the company did what so many clothing manufacturers did at the time: closed down factory lines in America and outsourced production overseas where labor was cheap and regulations were less restrictive.

That meant cutting hundreds of jobs at South Texas facilities in Weslaco, Edinburg, and Brownsville and producing clothes in countries like Mexico, where the average manufacturing employee earned about $1.50 an hour in wages and benefits.

For his part, Perdue even boasted in that report how skilled he was at outsourcing, saying:

“To politicians who have never been in a free enterprise system this sounds really easy,” Perdue said. “It is anything but easy. It’s very messy.”

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