Some of our nation’s biggest corporations are planning a tax holiday, and they want you to pick up the tab.

You already pay for their routine tax avoidance through the use of tax havens in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. These accounting acrobatics cost the U.S. Treasury $100 billion a year. Now they want Congress to pass a special tax holiday for money they “repatriate” back to the United States.

There’s nothing patriotic about this repatriation being pushed by Google, Cisco Systems, Pfizer and other companies in the Win America campaign. They claim it will produce a burst of jobs and investment. Congress passed a “one-time-only” tax holiday in 2004 following similar promises. Instead, it produced a burst of shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, which goosed the pay of CEOs.

Corporations then laid off workers and shifted even more income and investment offshore.

A favorite accounting trick is transferring a patent from a U.S. parent company to a subsidiary in a tax haven.

Profits from the patent go largely untaxed offshore while the costs of development, marketing and management remain in the United States, where they are taken as tax deductions by the corporate parent.

Pfizer was the largest beneficiary of the last tax holiday, bringing $37 billion back to the United States and paying just $1.7 billion in federal corporate income taxes. It laid off 10,000 American workers in the following months. The United States is the world’s most profitable drug market, and yet over the last three years, Pfizer has reported $7.9 billion in U.S. losses while claiming $37.8 billion in profits in the rest of the world. Pfizer, like the rest of Big Pharma, is heavily subsidized by taxpayer-funded research at the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere. It should not be rewarded with another tax holiday.

Increasingly, U.S. multinational corporations want to benefit from government spending on education, infrastructure, research, health care and so on without paying for it. Today, large corporations pay, on average, 18 percent of their profits in federal income taxes and as a group contribute just 9 percent toward federal government bills – down from 32 percent in 1952.

A dozen national and state business organizations led by Business for Shared Prosperity recently wrote members of Congress urging them to oppose the tax holiday. The letter said, “When powerful large U.S. corporations avoid their fair share of taxes, they undermine U.S.

competitiveness, contribute to the national debt and shift more of the

tax burden to domestic businesses, especially small businesses that create most of the new jobs.”

A tax holiday would be even worse this time around, as corporations would redouble their efforts to shift profits overseas in anticipation of the next one. Congress should close the tax loopholes that reward companies for transferring U.S. profits, jobs and investment abroad – not encourage them.

Real patriots pay their fair share of taxes.

Scott Klinger is director of tax policy and Holly Sklar is executive director of Business for Shared Prosperity.