Gonzo, feel free to be specific. For the record, my usual sources for such statistics are the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the IRS, the Congressional Research Service, the CBO, and the White House Budget Office.
I encourage you to check up on them any time you wish, but any criticisms of my ‘inaccuracy’ will be met by me with a demand for a cite. If you can’t provide one, then you have no business commenting.
Squeegee: That is indeed a good cite, but it’s also 7 years old. Much has changed since then. For example, in 2002 the OECD average corporate tax rate for all non-US countries was about 36%. This year, it’s 30%. By 2012, it will be about 28%. The U.S. corporate tax rate has been flat throughout that time.
Besides, Obama wants to do away with the tax havens and loopholes that keep corporate taxes low, but he doesn’t want to lower the corporate tax rate. I could actually get behind a program that eliminated subsidies, tax breaks, and other corporate loopholes, so long as such a program was revenue-neutral and resulted in equivalent cuts to the corporate tax rate. But Obama wants to just go after the tax breaks. That means he will be increasing the effective corporate tax rate, at a time when other countries are lowering theirs.
Um, wouldn’t this also extend to you, Sam? Your only cite in this thread has been to some chicken-little story in the Guardian. Why do you have any business commenting in this thread?
Given what I just said above, I’m through googling shit to attest to your reliability. I don’t usually do this, but you’ve made yourself a special case: Cite??. Give me some links that prove anything you said, thanks.
Blah blah blah “Obama wants to do this or that”. Sorry, please cite what Obama wants to do. I frankly am skeptical, but maybe that’s all true. But that’s all on you now – cite to stories about what Obama wants to do, including cites from Obama and his administration, and not including cites from some hack saying what he thinks Obama might do. k? thx.
I still live in hope that the left wingers will get voted in next year. Historically the right always gets a chance every so often, nobody likes them and then the left gets voted back in. The right’s coalition has had its ups and downs. They are doing OK now but a year ago they were in all sorts of trouble. I expect to hear a lo9t from the left reminding us as to why the right was unpopular in the run up to the election.
Oh and Norway just voted in a centre-left coalition.
Well perhaps. But Sam forgot the perhaps most telling example. The June 2009 EU parliament election, where the conservative group once again won the majority and expanded their lead. And that this is happening in an environment of an economic downturn and rising unemployment, which really ought to have been a great benefit for left leaning parties.
But it is possible that there is no overall trend to it all, just a lot of individual cases that happen to point in the same general direction.
To speak of ‘socialism’ in the context of North American politics and political actors is either to be disingenuous or to be ignorant.
Social Democracy in Europe is experiencing something of a crisis but in large part that is due, paradoxically, to its success. Much of the agenda of building up a welfare state, which is the big project that social democrats set out for after the Second World War, has been carried out. Together with conservatives/Christian Democrats, a welfare state was erected that is by now pretty firmly entrenched for the most part (although it is my view that it has been eroding since the 1990s) so the main slogan that social democrats could rally around and woo voters with is gone - all there’s to do now is guard the achievements.
With this issue largely gone from the political agenda, other issues have managed to pop up and I would say that across Europe, the most important and most contested issue is that of immigration and integration. All of Western Europe right now is deeply divided over this issue and the right is very successful in criticizing what has been called ‘a multicultural drama’. At the same time social democrats have a very hard time wrapping their heads around this issue and they are losing voters on account of it.
For the long term though I am very confident that some form of social democracy redux will arrive on the scene and that the main social democratic parties will rebrand themselves and regain their place at the center of the political stage.
As to the OP, social democracy (which is probably the best way to describe these parties even when they themselves do still call themselves socialist, just to avoid confusion with 1) Soviet socialism as it existed in Eastern Europe and 2) more left-wing parties that also call themselves socialist, and actually base their ideology much more firmly in traditional (i.e. Marxist) socialism than social democratic parties do) is not on the way out, it’s experiencing some trouble but that is not reflective of the failing of the welfare state that social democrats and conservatives/Christian democrats have erected since the second World War. Also, it has very few implications for whether the plans of the Obama administration will succeed or not, since these plans have nothing whatsoever to do with socialism or social democracy. As I’ve said, I strongly feel that to claim otherwise is to be ignorant or disingenuous.
Yeah, no problem. Here’s an Excel File straight from the OECD. These numbers are slightly different than mine, which I have on file locally, but the trends are the same. It could be that this data is newer and has been adjusted, or that they’ve changed the methodology for calculating it.
For those who don’t have Excel, here’s what it shows:
In 2002, the average corporate income tax rate among 29 OECD countries not including the US was 30.9%. The U.S. was 39.3
In 2008, the average tax rate was 26% - the U.S. is 39.25. That’s an almost 5% gap that has opened up between the U.S. and the rest of the OECD. The spreadsheet also shows which countries target corporate tax breaks - all but 12 of them do.
Now, let’s assume that the tax incentive structure hasn’t changed. If all of these countries have maintained roughly the same level of corporate tax breaks and incentives, then it’s still the case that a 5% gap has opened up between the U.S. and the OECD in the past six years. That affects U.S. competitiveness.
Now let’s look to the future. The Obama administration wants to start rolling back those corporate tax breaks. So the effective tax rate for U.S. corporations will go up. In the meantime, the trend for the rest of the OECD is still down. 2009 average taxes will be 25.8%, and they are going to go down even further, as many OECD countries have plans to continue reducing corporate tax rates. In Canada, for example, our federal corporate tax rate is scheduled to come down from 19% today to 12% in 2012.
Compare Canada to the U.S - in 2000, Canada had an overall corporate tax rate of 42.57%. The U.S.'s was 39.3%. In 2009, Canada’s corporate tax rate is 31.32% (19% federal, the rest in provincial corporate taxes), and the U.S.'s is largely unchanged. By 2012, Canada’s corporate tax rate will be 24%, and the U.S.'s will be unchanged, except that if Obama gets his way corporations will pay even more in tax.
Now, let’s grant that U.S. corporations get more breaks than Canadian corporations have. All that means is that in 2000, American corporations had a huge advantage over Canadian corporations, and that by 2012 that advantage will be cut dramatically or eliminated (Canada has corporate tax breaks as well).
Finally, putting a tax rate of 40% on a corporation and then forcing them to jump through government hoops to get tax breaks is a horribly inefficient way to run an economy. You’re creating an awful lot of deadweight loss through all the tax avoidance activity. Of course, every one of those tax breaks has a champion - both Republican and Democrat. Democrats love the tax breaks for environmental investment, for example. Both parties love tax breaks that push corporations into setting up in certain states. Both parties love big agriculture and shower it with tax breaks. And so it goes. Liberals love to go on about how horrible it is that businesses get tax breaks in the abstract, but when you look at the specifics, they’re just as responsible for pushing them as are the Republicans.
In any event, the bottom line is that the U.S. is losing ground to the rest of the OECD on corporate tax policy. It’s going to bite you.
and here’s the effective rate on foreign earnings of US corporations :
[ul]
[li]In 2004, the most recent year for which data is available, U.S. multinational corporations paid about $16 billion of U.S. tax on approximately $700 billion of foreign active earnings – an effective U.S. tax rate of about 2.3%.[/li][li]A January 2009 GAO report found that of the 100 largest U.S. corporations, 83 have subsidiaries in tax havens.[/li][li]In the Cayman Islands, one address alone houses 18,857 corporations, very few of which have a physical presence in the islands.[/li][/ul]
And Obama is going to do little or nothing about this although he should, as it would have fuck all effect on the US economy except to drastically improve the revenue situation and help remove some of the overall tax burden on the US consumer, consumer spending being 70% of US GDP.
I already addressed this. Those tax breaks were there in 2002, and there’re still there now. Nothing has really changed in the U.S. But the rest of the OECD has been lowering its corporate tax rates, and it continues to do so. That means the competitive position of the U.S.with respect to the OECD countries is getting worse.
That shows overall taxes, not corporate taxes. It has nothing to with this discussion.
First of all, that just large multinationals. But it actually makes my point - a tax system which has high marginal rates is a bad thing, because it causes companies to focus more of their activity on tax sheltering. It would be far better to cut the corporate tax rate and close the loopholes to make up the difference.
Here’s an article from Media Mattters, which cites the GAO in saying that the U.S. effective tax rate is 25.2%. Also, look at Figure 2.7, taken from a World Bank report. It shows the U.S. effective corporate tax rate as already being higher than France and the UK. Germany and Canada both have plans to cut their effective corporate tax rates in the next three years, which means the U.S. effective corporate tax rate will be higher than all of its major OECD partners. And of course the raw tax rate will be MUCH higher, meaning corporations in the U.S. have to engage in all of this tax avoidance activity just to prevent themselves from being taxed higher than any corporations in the world, and even with all that effort, they’ll still pay higher rates than their major OECD partners do.
If he does it and doesn’t also lower overall tax rates to compensate, it would be very destructive. Like it or not, the ability of corporations to pack up and leave is much greater now than it was in the past.
One way to think about those foreign subsidiaries and tax havens - they may be the only thing keeping ANY part of the corporation in America. Eliminate the ability of a corporation to lower its tax burden while keeping corporate rates at 40%, and you’ve just set up a situation where corporations will simply pack up and leave the United States entirely. Why wouldn’t they just move to Canada, where the corporate rate will be half? Or if they stay in the U.S., how do you think their products will be able to compete with ours, or with products from other major trading partners?
The better phrasing is Why are vested moneyed interests gaining in Europe? And the answer is that as elections moved from door to door get out the vote campaigns to TV smear campaigns, money became everything. Rich people buy politicians.
vested moneyed interests are not gaining in Europe;
by and large, politicians are not bought in Europe. Campaigns have not changed into ‘smear campaigns’; obviously TV and the internet are playing a bigger role but it’s certainly not everything. Similarly, campaign financing in most European countries is NOTHING like it is in the states.
All in all, I would say that your post has absolutely no pertinence to European Politics whatsoever.
Henrichek, do you have to pay for health care in Sweden? Do you have to pay a dentist? Do you have to pay to put your mother in a place to care for her when she is very old? Do you have to pay the hospital when your wife has a baby? How much vacation time do you get every year?
What do you mean about personal integrity in Sweden? What do you think is causing that to decline? Sweden has a good reputation in the world.
Unfortunately I am not the best person to explain this as I have been minimally involved, as I am quite healthy, though I will attempt some short answers. They are not as simple as ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The specifics are not really relevant to the thread, but since you asked I will try to provide answers. Numbers are just examples as they might vary somewhat from region to region, but should give a general idea.
In general you don’t pay for health care here, but you have to pay for medicine that is not part of the procedure, though there is some mechanism to prevent those costs from getting out of hand, I think by decreasing the share paid by the patient based on the total costs incurred over a year. So you pay 100% of your prescription costs up to a point, then the share decreases until you hit a cost ceiling, after which the rest of the years’ costs are free. I also believe you have small daily fees in the case of longer hospital stays, covering food. There are also small fees for general examination and emergency visits (few tens of dollars).
All dentist costs are covered up until you are 19 or 20, I don’t remember which. After that some expensive procedures are still covered, but I think most things you have to pay for yourself. Hm, seems like you pay 100% until $450, then the government pays 50% of the rest up until $2200, and 85% after that, so it’s still not particularly cheap.
Elder care is mostly done in the person’s home, as long as that is possible, by getting visits for food, cleaning, hygiene, etc, depending on what services you need. When the health situation gets bad enough that you can’t be taken care of properly at home, there are retirement homes and I think some intermediate options. For these things you generally have to pay for yourself up until certain monthly limits, and also based on income, such that you will at least have a specific amount of money left after all care is paid for.
I think childbirth is free too, except the previously mentioned daily costs for a hospital stay. I think nowadays people go home rather quickly after delivering anyway, so the costs are minimal, pretty much the food costs you’d have to pay anyway if you weren’t there.
5 weeks vacation.
About deteriorating personal integrity I meant things like allowing surveillance of internet communications that pass the border, retention of communication details like who calls who, when, from where (in case of mobile phones), SMS, E-mail, and so on. Maybe I should have used the word privacy instead. I suppose the reasons they give are for security, and law enforcement. Actually, it would be wrong of me to blame all those things on the right wing alliance, as the social democrats have been involved too and certainly share the blame.
Ah, fuck it.
I’ve been meaning to say this for quite some time, and since this thread is still being updated, I might as well speak : OP, and the rest of you 'Merikuns : for fook’s sake, when will you realize there’s no such thing as “Europe” ?
We are not a singular entity. We are not even a federal entity. What goes on in Great Britain has absolutely no relation whatsoever with what happens in Sweden, or France, or Spain, or Poland.
Hell, for that matter, the average citizen of Spain has no idea what the political system of Great Britain is. I (French, apolitical) have no fucking idea who the president of Sweden is (if they do have a president. Could be a king, or a prime minister, or a Sultan for all I know). I have no idea what the political system of Greece is. I have no idea what the different political parties of Germany are. In short : we are different countries, with wildly different cultures, different languages, political views and histories and most of all no relations to each other. We’re all operating in a vacuum.
The only thing European countries have in common is antagonism : we all hate each other. With a passion. We all fought each other at some point, we all resent European codes and laws and standards ; and when we do acknowledge the benefits of a single currency, open borders etc… it’s only grudgingly. It’s what makes Europe work - our one and only common ground.
So please, please stop acting and rhetoricizing (here’s a neologism for ya) like Europe is some kind of united block, some kind of belated United States Light where Portugal is Kansas and Denmark is North Dakota. It’s not like that. Portugal is Kansas. Denmark is Ghana. Get it ? Got it ? Good.
Strange but all these countries are Capitalistic. There are no Socialist countries. Every country is a mixture heavily effected by corporate power ,financially and politically . The disaster of the last few years that the financial markets visited upon the entire globe has made countries uncomfortable with the " highly educated experts". Who can trust them? There has to be a backlash . Why there aren’t a bunch of them in jail. I don’t know.
I suppose Socialism is spending some money on the welfare of the common people. Improving the security of the citizens is not a bad idea, unless you live in America.
