This is addressed by the Hobby Lobby SCOTUS decision, which has been brought up a few times already.
Did the Founding Fathers dent any relationship between the human conscience and their work to establish a new country?
The NYT link embedded in coach’s cite returns the following error:
"This site is not secure
This might mean that someone’s trying to fool you or steal any info you send to the server. You should close this site immediately."
Do you have better link to that part of the Hobby Lobby decision?
Better yet, I’ll quote even more of the decision, written by conservative hero Justice Alito:
So, Justice Alito, who is no ivory tower academic, has laid bare your error in asserting that there is a legal duty of corporations to maximize profit.
If you want to read even more of the decision, I suggest googling “hobby lobby decision” and then using control-F to execute a word search.
I return to my Founding Fathers question.
That you would ask that question demonstrates that you do not know anyone that owns a business, else you would have very well known the answer.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do try to make my profit margin as small as possible. I reinvest every dollar that I can into growing my business, rather than taking it for myself. The more that I remove for my personal use, the slower my business grows. If I take a dollar today, that could be worth nearly $4 in a few years if I keep up my current growth.
I see this very directly, so it is my responsibility to manage the working capital of my business in such a way as to maintain growth, but when you have multiple investors, you end up with a tragedy of the commons type situation. If I have 8 investors, then that dollar taken today will be worth $4 in a few years, but only $0.50 to an individual investor, so it is in their interests to take more now, upfront, rather than to turn it back into capital to be invested in growth.
Last year I took about $30k for myself. If I had decided to not buy some tables and scissors and tubs and HVDs or hire and train new employees and give employees raises, I probably could have taken $60k, easy. But, then my sales this upcoming year wouldn’t be any better than last.
In the future, when I am doing millions of dollars a year, I may decide to take a larger cut for myself, after 5 years of 80+ hour weeks, I think I probably would deserve it. But I still won’t take more than the company can afford to give. I won’t eat my seed corn.
This is what is happening in many businesses around. Quality is going to shit as the owners cut corners and lower wages of employees in order to siphon more money into their own pockets. Employees don’t care about their products or services when they are treated and paid poorly.
The end result is that you have inferior goods and services on the market for a higher price, and that the owners of the means of production get the benefit, not the consumer, not the employee.
This is why the tax structure should be set up in such a way to encourage more owners to leave their money in their companies. Right now it is set up in such a way to encourage the owners to scrape it to the bone and remove any excess wealth generated, rather than to use that to make a better business. In the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, the taxes were set up in that way. The “loophole” was that you only got taxed on money that you put into your own pocket, not on money that you used to grow your business, so in order to reduce their tax burden while still increasing their wealth, that’s what they did.
From the How to Cherry-Pick Desk:
During the 50 years from 1961 to 2010 (when the cited record stops), there are 132 overturning decisions, an average of 2.64 per year. The number of overturned decisions is even greater, of course: the two overturnings in 2010 overturned five decision. (In D’Anconia’s defense, only one overturning prior to 1830 is listed. I suppose the early court had less to overturn.)
Having gone this far I took a look at some of the recent overturnings:
The “activist” court’s 2010 decision in McDonald v. Chicago overturned United States v. Cruikshank, Presser v. Illinois, Miller v. Texas. The same year Citizens United v. FEC overturned Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce, and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission. ***I put “activist” in quotes since the most recent overturnings are all 5-4 decisions by the right-wingers so loved as “constructionists.” *** 
It would be too disheartening to synopsize all these overturnings by the activists, but among the five overturned cases just mentioned were a landmark 1875 decision written by the Chief Justice in favor of states’ rights, and the same court’s recent 5-4 decision affirming the McCain–Feingold Act. … Well, not quite the same court: the distinguished Reagan appointee and first female Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had been replaced by right-wing scumbag Samuel Alito. So much for the “conservative” bench following established precedent.
In 2007 the same 5-4 majority allowed a private school to practice segregation when it overturned School Comm. of Boston v. Bd. of Education. In 2009, once again with the exact same 5-4 split, the Supreme Court overturned its own precedent to allow a coerced confession without a lawyer present to be admitted as evidence.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
… And conservatives complain when we call them misinformed. 
You skipped over the bolded part. Absent owner approval, they must maximize shareholder wealth.
It’s your business, and you can run it however you like.
However, a smart businessman doesn’t invest in projects where the ROI is greater than the cost of capital.
Sometimes, returning value to shareholders via dividends or buybacks (which some people call evil) is absolutely the best value for the money.
Oh please. Owners decide what to do with the company. There’s no autopilot on which owners step away from the company and it gets run a certain way to maximize shareholder wealth. Which is the reason Alito wrote: “While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so.”
So, ahem, Founding Fathers?
ROI over what period of time? I can think of no business that has had a one year ROI that was greater than the investment, and there are very few that would get you that return in less than 5 years.
And sometimes it is not.
Oh please, yourself. If a corporation wants to contribute to social causes or spend money on “green energy”, it’s with owner approval, otherwise it’s a breach of duty.
Over the expected life of the project. This is basic finance.
I never said otherwise. But one couldn’t tell by listening to the likes of Schumer, Sanders, and Warren.
Let’s say I own stock in some company that gives money to a social cause – let’s say pro-life charities. Can I, as a shareholder, sue the company that it violated its fiduciary duty by not giving that money to me?
Also, answer my question about the Founding Fathers re: conscience.
My point was that (at least on one occasion) Trump said he wanted tax cuts for everyone, which my interpretation of Trump-speak means an across-the-board tax cut.
To answer your questions in order: no, no, and I see it as more Trump imprecision and hyperbole. He made the statement in September, before the details of the tax bill had even been worked out.
Yeah, it is a tough call. In January 2001 our public debt stood at $5.7T. By January 2009, it was $10.6T. On January 2017, it had grown to $19.9T. Estimates prior to the tax bill becoming law were that it would continue to grow to $30T by 2027. With the tax law, I suppose that number is now around $31.5T. Trying to weigh the harm of that number being $47T by 2028 vs the benefit of Americans’ tax bills getting cut roughly in half, I’d probably come down in favor of the latter. Call me an unhappy ‘yes’, I think.
Sure, you can sue the company for anything you’d like. That doesn’t mean you’ll be successful.
Badgering posters, in a large bold font typeface, is hardly helping your “argument”.
Sometimes you seem to read only certain parts of posts in this thread. I have to get your attention somehow.
I take it by your non-response that you concede that the Founding Fathers saw the creation of the United States as a political expression of the conscience of Americans?
I guess we come back to a fundamental question of what constitutes a lie. When Obama said “you can keep your health plan if you like it,” many conservatives have called that a lie. (I’m not sure if you have.) I think that’s probably a pretty fair criticism.
But when Trump makes statements that exhibit “imprecision and hyperbole,” I question how we should not judge them to be lies. I’m generally inclined to say that people can say things in error and yet they are not lies, since lies should generally be considered an intention to mislead. Using “imprecision and hyperbole” for the purpose of generating excitement and currying favor with an audience (i.e., you!) ought to fit the definition of “intention to mislead,” even if we exclude the most restrictive definition of a lie as being an utterance that the speaker conclusively knows to be contrary to the truth. (Since Trump probably knows almost nothing about the tax bill, probably nothing he says can actually be a lie by that standard.)
Ok, so if $15 trillion in additional debt is probably a soft yes from you on the basis that it is tax cuts, what’s your thought on the increase in debt because of spending?
Like for example, the main reasons the deficit rose during the early years of Obama was that tax revenues took a hit during the Great Recession, and more people qualified for various entitlement programs. For example, the amount spent on food stamps basically doubled, adding roughly $250 billion in debt during a ten-year window. Are you okay with an additional $250 billion in deficits to prevent starvation among Americans?
I think this is excellent analysis. Trump knew even less
I’d prefer that the debt not increase, either because of tax cuts or spending. I probably accept it more readily with tax cuts than spending increases due to my conservative proclivities.
I’d be fine with $250 billion in deficits to prevent starvation among Americans. I suspect your statement is a bit too grandiose for the food stamps program (meaning I doubt it’s really “prevent[ing] starvation” for the vast majority of its participants), but at the point where we’re playing with trillions / tens of trillions of dollars in debt and it all kind of feels like monopoly money at this point anyways, I have a hard time getting too animated about a mere $250B (even though I suspect it serves, at least in a lot of cases, just to make sure that the participants have enough cash left over at the end of the month to afford their smokes and alcohol, rather than literally the difference-maker between starvation and survival).
ETA: I suspect that food stamps does have some marginal benefit in better nutrition for some of the participants. That’s a good thing, and probably even a good-enough thing that I’d concede that it’s not worth cutting to save ~$25B out of a $4T budget that is already many hundreds of billions in the red. If it was the last $25B before we were deficit-free, I might feel differently.
Or we could just end the war that has our military fighting in 8 different countries, and is the primary driver of that debt. And decrease the military budget from being 10X larger than any other country.
How did you conclude that war is “the primary driver of that debt”?
I think your views are pretty representative of fiscal conservatism. Most people think, “I am a fiscal conservative, because I am against deficits!”
In reality, fiscal conservatism does not have balanced budgets as its top priority. Tax cuts are number one, and if that means increasing debt to do so, well… thems the breaks.