The nation’s richest are trying to sell us on yet another shell game to keep from paying their fair share of taxes. Their lobbyists are pushing a so-called repatriation tax holiday—a huge cut in the tax rate on money companies are holding outside of the country.

The trick here is that we tried this before and it didn’t work out so well for taxpayers, so of course they want to do it again.

Dave Johnson , writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, spells out how this shell game works: companies manufacture a product in China or some other low-wage country and then sell and resell it through another shell company in a tax haven like the Cayman Islands. That shell then sells it to the U.S. company at a high price. So the profit is in the Caymans, where the cost was low and the sell price was high. And the U.S. company, which made a little profit, pays a low tax. Researchers say this shell game costs taxpayers $100 billion a year.

As long as the actual money isn’t brought into the United States, the company’s owners–the very rich (see chart above) don’t pay U.S. taxes on it. So after years of this scheme, a ton of cash—about $1 trillion– is sitting in these tax-haven countries. But the rich can’t use the cash to buy mansions, yachts and whatever else in the United States, if it’s sitting in a bank in the Caymans, but they don’t want to taxes on it.

So their lobbyists are trying to get Congress to pass a “repatriation tax holiday” on the profits they are holding outside of the country. They claim bringing the money home at a reduced tax rate would create jobs. But we’ve been burned once by that scheme. In 2004 Congress let corporations bring profits back to the U.S. at a tax rate of 5.25 percent, instead of the top corporate rate of 35 percent.

And the companies that got the money kept on cutting jobs and used the money to repurchase stock or pay dividends — and to send more jobs overseas according to the Congressional Research Service.

So, rather than trying to balance the budget by cutting services, Congress should look at figuring out way to put that $100 billion to work for ordinary Americans and not the very wealthy.

Click here to read Johnson’s full column, “Lobbyists Admit Corporate Tax ‘Holiday’ Didn’t Work, But Demand It Again.”