How does a decision to outsource depend in any way on his personal tax burden?
When a friend has lost blood and you need to find someone to donate more, do you commonly approach stones?
Plus, this is the first time I’ve heard the rich getting an increasing share of the income called progressive. Progressivity is a function of marginal tax rates, not the absolute amount paid.
Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
I presume you to mean this in the sense of “that’s where the money is”. But technically speaking, though the wealthy make more money than most people, they’re a sufficiently small percentage of the population that it’s the middle class who ends up paying the bulk of (non-corporate) taxes.
When the OP proved not to be familiar with the Willie Sutton quote, I added this post to clarify – I refer you to the first paragraph. Whether or not it’s true, the common perception is that the rich collectively have much more disposable income – i.e., that not needed for survival and rudimentary comfort – than either the poor or the middle class. Just as a given high-end restaurant or department store may actually have more cash on hand than a typical bank branch, perception may not equate to reality. But the common public view is that Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rob Walton and his siblings, the Rockefeller cousins, etc., have a plethora of potentially taxable income between them – whether or not this is true.
It’s not about current corporate profit levels. It’s about returns on future investment. Every investor wants to make a satisfactory return on their investments. Given the alternative of investing in country A with a stable tax and regulatory environment the investor can reasonably expect to earn a risk adjusted return of 15%. Sounds good. Now his other alternative is investing in country B with a volatile tax environment, unknown regulatory environment that is constantly changing. In country B his risk adjusted return may be as high as 15%, but if taxes increase and regulatory costs increase, his return could fall to 8%. Which future investment is the corporation likely to make for their shareholdes? Probably in country A. Country B is the US. Without further corporate investments in the US, employment levels will not rise to where we would like them.
Oh, they should go to a really stable country - like Egypt, say? Or China, with rampant piracy, a housing bubble, and a government who can change the rules at any time? Or Greece? Europe has far more regulations than we do. Companies don’t move for stability, they move for labor costs.
As for the US, raising taxes on the wealthy back to 1990s levels is hardly unstable, and companies have lived with changes in regulations for the entire last century. Any instability we see is totally due to Republicans willing to push us to the brink for their extremist anti-tax views. If Republicans really cared about stability, they’d vote for the debt ceiling increase today.
Welfare creates demand since people on the bottom of the economic scale spend their money. I can’t find the study but a study done a few years ago found wealth redistribution downwards does more for job creation and GDP growth than supply side tax cuts. Right now, from what I know in my amateur knowledge of economics, the big issues holding back the global economy are lack of security/stability and lack of demand. Supply side tax cuts will do nothing to promote either.
I think the contemporary GOP has re-entered the philosophy of social darwinism and believes that the rich are morally superior to everyone else. Plus the wealthy are big financial backers of the GOP and GOP think tanks (to be fair democrats and liberals have wealthy backers too). So combine all of that and you have a political movement devoted to empowering the wealthy.
For the most part when the GOP says anything about economics what they are really saying it ‘this policy will directly and immediately benefit the wealthy and powerful which is the real intention, but in order to win popular support from voters and the public, the majority of whom are not and never will be wealthy, I’m going to try to frame this policy so it sounds like it’ll benefit the working class indirectly’. So supply side tax cuts create jobs, environmental regulations destroy them. etc. Its all smoke and mirrors.
The dems are better, but not perfect.
My impression was that interest rates were at all time lows. So saving money isn’t really doing much to grow it.
Then again during the worst of the recession was probably a great time to invest in stocks, raw materials and housing since most of those have gotten better (except housing). I believe that is what China did, when the worst was happening they were buying up raw materials on the cheap and making long term trade deals since they had short term cash and nobody else did.
The rich are sitting on about 3 trillion dollars that investment bankers would love to get their hands on. The bankers are thieves but they would invest in businesses and innovations to get on the potential gravy trains.
World's Wealthy Sitting On $10 Trillion In Investable Assets | HuffPost Impact Across the globe it is 10 trillion.