I did that, actually. Or did you decide to drop the whole discussion of negative externalities and the state’s role in making companies pay for them?
A million bucks in campaign contributions isn’t exactly the same as a smoking gun, granted. I suppose it’s possible that it’s meaningless.
As an aside, he campaigned on “no new taxes” in general. Which is fine. It’s the combination of “no severance tax” AND the adjustments to DEP/Commerce departmental policy that combine to cause the negative effects. With no tax and DEP protections for pollution remaining in place, I’d continue to be as happy about Corbett as I was when I goddamn voted for him. If he’d’ve campaigned on anything that resembles what he’s actually doing, he wouldn’t be facing a 35% approval rating two months in.
Which other guy did I mention, by the way? It’d help if you confined your bullshit to the statements I made, not the ones that the voices in your head claim I’m making. I removed your rampant bullshit about popularity, Hitler, evil and whatnot for that reason, as I have not asserted any of those things.
Right, whether or not Gov Corbett is in someone’s pocket is completely irrelevant to the issue, in the following statement:
This goes along with all the other bullshit ad hominem attacks:
Obama is a secret Muslim Kenyan
Al Gore is a hypocrite because he has a large house
Darwin raped and killed a small boy in the Philippines
Fiscal conservatives are serving their corporate overlords
Hitler was a socialist
What do all those have in common? It’s what people say when they run out of real arguments. If Corbett is taking bribes he should be impeached and removed from office. But that doesn’t change the taxation debate. Discrediting him doesn’t make the waste water and more toxic any more than proving Al Gore is a hypocrite won’t impact AGW.
The point of the OP was highlighting the latest attempt to discredit fiscal conservatives, in the hope that it changes the realities of fiscal policy. It’s the new Goodwin.
If the shale project is bad for the environment, and/or if a severance tax is feasible, Corbett is irrelevant. You don’t need to discredit him to make the point.
Well, I’d feel bad about derailing Rand’s amazing thread, but…
Haven’t made the time yet, and they’re about to change the standards on me. Oh well, I’m going to move to another age bracket in a year anyway, so I’ll actually get five extra minutes to work with!
You are an idiot. Corbett’s only relevance to this thread is that he claims fiscal conservatism, when it is clear based on his policies that he doesn’t match Rand’s definition of same. Part of this is exemplified by the apparent motivations behind his policies regarding Marcellus shale exploitation.
That is, whether or not it’s good is irrelevant to the thread. The fact that Corbett takes political contributions from a company, and then appears to act in ways that are contrary to the interests of the state at large and yet are in favor of that one particular company’s business model, while claiming fiscal conservatism, is the point. Between you devil’s advocating irrelevancies, and Rand’s inability to describe how one is to determine when someone is a “fiscal conservative” vs. “actually in the pocket of a corporation and merely claiming fiscal conservatism”, this thread is officially pointless.
If it’s legal, who the fuck cares? Would it matter if it was from unions?
I’m still trying to find a breakdown of his campaign funding, but the oil companies weren’t the only donors. Which is still besides the point, he ran on that platform, got elected, and did what he promised. Notice that the companies don’t get a vote, it was the 54.5% of voters that got him into office.
Whether or not you agree with his policies, the man is as fiscally conservative as you get.
He is refusing to add a specific state tax on a select group of companies, with his stated purpose to bring development to Pennsylvania. Set aside the environmental factors for a second and consider whether or not bringing more industry to state with 8% unemployment would be a good overall move for the population.
Bringing back the environmental factors, he’s not unaware, or opposed to dealing with the negative impact. Nor is he against allowing individual municipalities from levying their own fees to combat local issues.
And without the tax increases he presented a balanced budget full of cut backs.
That’s fiscally conservative. But you consider him a liar, so it doesn’t really matter. That seems to be your point through all this.
And as far as I can tell, Scott Conklin received oil money as well.
Not necessarily by Rand Rover’s definition of “fiscal conservatism”, which was my actual point for joining the thread. When Rand says “fiscal conservative”, he ONLY means “person who believes government is limited in the scope of areas they can be involved in”. He expressly does NOT believe it says anything about budget balance or taxation or anything.
My entire point of coming into the thread was to point out there are plenty of politicians who claim “I’m a fiscal conservative” and don’t mean “Rand’s idiosyncratic definition of fiscal conservative.”
And I’ll point out yet again the “fiscal conservative” does not mean “fiscally responsible.” I made the mistake of thinking they both mean the same thing and that generally speaking is incorrect.
Corporations aren’t necessary evils. They are fundamental elements of any capitalistic system to facilitate capital accumulation otherwise you would be left with really welathy families and partnerships of really wealthy individuals to supply the capital for larger projects. I don’t think the suggestion is that we get rid of them and replace them with communes or anything like that. I think the complaint is that people have put the interests of corporations per se ahead of the interests of the society that created them as tools to facilitate capital accumulation. What’s good for corporations are no longer well aligned with what is good for America or Americans.
I don’t know if we can ever realign the interests of America’s corporations with the interests of America until the day when corporations realize that they are slowly killing their golden goose but if we are ever going to realign corporate interests with America’s interests, we are going to have to recognize that laissez faire isn’t going to get us there.
Marcelus shale is not about to become unprofitable any time soon. Lowering the tax on gas extraction isn’t going to create more jobs or make them pay the people a penny more. The market value of gas is public information. You just have to let them extract the gas profitably on a risk adjusted basis and you can take the rest in the form of taxes. What people are objecting to is giving the oil and gas companies MORe than they need to run profitably 9at the expense of Pennsylvania taxpayers).
More significant than they are now. Emacknight made the statement that our tax system was never based on corporate income taxes; they started with tariffs and then moved to income taxes. This statement was made in the interests of “clarification”
WellI just wanted to clarify the point a bit further and point out that the original statement that Emack was responding to:
while sprinkled liberally with opinion about fiscal conservative motives and intent is not inaccurate in that once corporate taxes accounted for over 1/3 of federal revenues and now account for very little of it.
So if a fiscal conservative does the same things that someone who lurves the corporations would do, then what is the differece? Is it really enough of a difference to say "well, the fiscal conservatives don’t love corporations, they just love the same things that people who love corporations love.
What you are pointing out is a difference without a distinction. Because the fiscal consrrvative’s motive don’t arise from their love of corporations, you think its fair to say that fiscal conservatives love corporations.
Well, would you say there is no difference between a father and a pedophile? Both have a love of children.
I love steak, but that doesn’t mean I have any particular love of cows. It does mean I’ll do things that are good for cows, so that I can later have a tasty steak. Improving the conditions of the cow’s life will, up to a point, improve my steak. I want a better steak, so I also want happy cows. My interests line up with the interests of the cow, but not because I love the cow.
If improving the conditions that a corporation functions in will ultimately improve quality of life for “labour” who is it that we actually love?
Obviously, it costs more to protect extensive assets than to protect an average house; it costs more to run a legal system that handles major business deals than it costs to write up Joe Blow’s house deed and will, etc. So, yes, in fact it costs different amounts to provide the basic nightwatchman-state functions of even a barebones libertarian government.
This goes back to page 1, so bear with me. I know I’m slow about getting psots off these days.
The plai fact is that for a great many industries, corporations allow sufficient capital formation to promote much more growth and effiency, and that’s a very good thing. We allow and promote corporations to the extent that. However, you’ll find that fiscal coservatives favor a pretty level playing field. If this helps small businesses more, so be it. If it helps corporations more, so be it. If it helps ninja mercenaries more, so be it. In fact, this is a strong trend throughout the “conservative” wing going back to the early years of the Republic. Despite some moderate protectionism during the early-mid American years, the basic goal is a neutral, fair system which prevent anyone from taking illegal advantage. Neyond that it’s up to the market. And the market favors large or small business as technolgy and society suggest.
I should point out, too, that liberals are heavily invested in laws which favor corporations strongly. In fact, complicated regulations put massive restrictions on startups and prevent competition - one reason big companies are often so sweetly glad to have big new regulations. it does make them less competitive, but it makes them much more secure. And also why we tend to worry that liberal regulation inevitably attracts more and more corporations interfering and lobbying. Corporations, after all, have money, time, and endless incentive as long as the government is regulating them significantly/.
The problem is that you have to consider the non-obvious. Handing “more people more money” may look good in the short run. But what happens if the
No. He’s saying that society tends to advance by allowing people to make lots of profit. Profit IS value. And value cannot be held no matter what you do. Put it in the bank? Sweet! You’ve just increased capital availability for investors, which means more jobs. Spend it? Sweet! More wealth flowing through the system. Hide it under the matress? Sweet! You’ve in effect made everyone else’s money worth more. No matter what the rich do, they’re helping the rest of us.
This is why most fiscal conservatives don’t worry too much about wealth concentration or inequality. The mathematical fact is that inequality will increase absolutely as wealth increases (basically, 'cuz there’s a floor but no ceiling). Second, while you can use wealth redistribution to flatten inequality, it has hisoricaly come at a significant long-run economic cost. So inequality also tends to increase relatively as time goes by. Every so often something occurs which changes that.
So you really have to consider before you throw off a quick answer as to which is more desirable: “Which one benefits society more?” And the answer to me is that I’m overjoyed for Bob having an extra ten thou if I’m ultimately getting an extra hundred. And despite what you may thinkg, we have no problem with more flowing into the tax coffers, but balance that against the fact that taxes are not as efficient as wealth in people’s hands.
This is the problem. You’re viewing our program through your lens. You see things in a (frankly, weird) utilitarian and zero-sum sense. We do not. In fact, that’s totally alien. We’re looking at how everyone collectively can benefit the most. Smithean economics are all about the zero-sum-game being wrong. Wesley Clark, for example, is so invested in his worldview that he thinks that wealth redistribution (“downwards”) is a completely natural and normal state of affairs. Think about it: the man just described cutting hugely expensive social programs as wealth reditrisbution - Upwards! As if people had some innate right to other people’s money. We may have good reasons or not for a certain program. That does not mean the program is some kind of intrinsic right. Likewise, liberals have long castigated any tax reduction as “tax cuts for the rich!” But it more or less impossible now to have ANY tax cut which doesn’t in one sense favor the rich*.
*Tax cuts, as the Bush cuts did, can infact grant more of a payout to the middle classes and lower. But they will also mathematically reduce total tax burdens for the rich, more or less because the poor now don’t really pay any tax whatsoever.
I have differences with emacknight, but he got is absolutely right by saying, “Lowering taxes on the rich isn’t redistributing upwards, it’s simply less redistribution.”
But consider that this problem arose not because of some weird fiscal conservative taxt scheme, but because of the numerous loopholes and complications successive Congresses interposed into the system. Buffet can pay about as much or litle as he wants, though there’s a breakeven point where he’s best off with some tax. But he can do this because of the ludicrously complicated tax scheme put into place AT LEAST as much by Democratic congresses as Republican, ironically starting about the same time as the Great Society program. At this point, many comlpicated tax returns have no legal result. In fact, the tax code is probably legally unenforceable, but no judge is going to cripple the entire government tax system.