The effective corporate tax rate used to be just above 20% for profitable companies at the end of the last millenium (if you throw in the negative incomes for airlines and automakers you might come up with a 10% combined tax rate for the fortune 500). With the recent corporate tax breaks, I would bet that corporations are running an effective corporate tax rate of under 20%.
Lower corporate taxes wouldn’t bother me so much if we were going to tax that income to the shareholder at some point but too much of that income is shipped overseas to foreign investors and even people inthis country pay ridiculously low rates on capital gains and qwualified dividends
How did I prove your point. I may not have proven that “corporations” are monolithic but they are a modern day oligarchy.
The American people built this country, built this economy and they don’t have a seat at the table. Heck, the people at the table don’t even like to ackowledge that someone else made the frikking pie.
By your logic, when the corporate tax rate dropped we should have seen a drop in prices across the board right? Oddly enough those tax savings were not passed on to consumers. Of course in the end you are right, those tax savings did get passed on to people, the stockholders. So it seems to me that the stockholders and not the consumers bear the burden of lower profits (after all tax rates don’t matter at all if you are not profitable). So can you please provide a cite that tax increases hurt consumers more than shareholders?
This isn’t new. This has been around since multinational corporations first came into existence. The problem now is that the IRS is the red headed stepchild of the government (more than it ever was before) and enforcement is somewhat discouraged. The audit rate is low; agents are pressured to wrap up their audits of companies with tax returns that could fill 10 filing cabinets in a relatively short period of time; noone really wants to fund the IRS (there is not a single politician that has gotten elected by championing the IRS, a few have gotten elected by bashing them).
Heck they fired half the estate tax examiners after they couldn’t get the estate tax repealed. Whaddya think that did to the audit rate for estates?
Starve the beast works about as well as supply side eoncomics, it depends on the existence of unicorns and pixiedust. Cutting taxes just leads to deficits. if you want to cut spending then CUT SPENDING, don’t try to back door it and “starve the beast”
People like Grover Norquist will ruin this country.
Its political posturing and it appeals to people like you who do not realize the facts of corporate greed.
Much of the evasion of taxes has been going on since reagan. It has continued admin after admin. I missed where I claimed it was owned by any admin. It has peaked in the Bushy times howevfer. These neocons are like many members of this board. They are Libertarians that are to ignorant to see what a lack of oversight has allowed. The S&L fiasco did not teach you people anything. This Mortgage debacle would have been avoided by regulation. All rules and regulation were tossed and loans were aggressively marketed to people who could not afford them. They also sold a bunch of mortgages which went up in rates after awhile. Do you not think the executives knew the dangers in what they were doing. They went for fast easy money ,like they will every damn time. We have to prevent them from doing that again. It requires regulation and oversight to protect the economy from these thieves.
If corporations did not ultimately serve the purpose of improving our lives, why should we keep them around? What makes the indifferent undulations of the free market any better for us than a bunch of technocrats (remember there were several days of hearings with economists before they crafted this stimulus package, they just didn’t listen to the eoncomists and put in things like bonus depreciation and left out food stamps)? Seriously, sometimes you sound like you think people are little more than units of labor production. That is exactly how the free market sees us, we are no more important than a plot of arable land or a peice of machinery. The free market values us for our productive capacity and little more.
If we let the market have its way, there is an argument (based on theory) that societal wealth will increase more than under any other system (at least over the long term, because as we can all see things are kinda sucky right now).
Of course industry needs to be regulated. Of course the markets need to be regulated. Unregulated markets ALWAYS lead to bad things eventually.
You think that the subprime mess was a problem wait until the credit default swap market starts developing problems. There are over 40 trillion dollars of credit default swaps floating around these days, our entire country is worth about 50 trillion (BTW, if this country wanted to fully fund medicare, medicaid, social security and reapy our national debt, we would have to come up with 75 trillion dollars (or we could reform health care and come up with some smaller number)). These swaps are standardized and traded over the counter but they have been fashioned to avoid regulation by the SEC or the CFTC. If they ever explode, they will take the country with them.
Friedman was a small ‘l’ libertarian because he was socially liberal.
Charter schools are rooted in the idea of privatization and competition. They are publicly funded institutions run by the private sector. It is a compromise between the free market and government (state) control. Friedman advocated voucher use for any school, including the already established public schools. He thought of students as consumers. He believed in funding the students not the school and held strongly to the idea of private efficiency.
New Orleans had over 100 public schools before Katrina, now it has four *public *schools and 31 charter schools Link -Link
The 401k tax code was never intended to shift pension responsibility, cost and risk, away from the employer to the employee. It was initially intended for high earning executives. Legislation in 2006 made it much easier for companies to shift all pensions into private investments.
This means nothing. Economic theories and policies, like education, are trendy and not always sound or in the publics best interest. There have been plenty of debunked social theories throughout history. The unrestrained global free market/pure capitalism is one more.
Redistribution of wealth usually prevents the inevitable peasant revolt.
Admittedly, we **are **talking about staggering wealth, not middle class charity. The wealth amassed by corporate executives is beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of Americans. If this is the country you want to live in and send men and women to defend, exercise your right to vote to keep the gravy train flowing to corporate conglomerates, provide subsidies, and abolish all oversight. Hey, when the U.S. no longer stands proud in the world and you have to break out that credit card packing thirty percent interest, usury, to pay for health care, maybe you can take up a collection from the other poor people who were also deceived by this class driven global market.
Corporations are not creating jobs. They are eliminating them. GM just announced a cut of 64,000 more in an article saying they are rebuilding the industry. Sorry, they are tearing it down. They are shipping it to China for cheap labor and no environmental restrictions. The public welfare and health of the American economy does not factor into corporate planning.
And there you have put your finger on the fundamental difference between you and I in this debate. Corporations aren’t designed nor should they be used for the ‘purpose of improving out lives’. We ‘keep them around’ because of the economic prosperity they have allowed in our society…the most economically prosperous time period (for Western Civilization at least) in human history. We ‘keep them around’ because the alternative, despite the well meaning of those who are just doing it for The People™ has been a series of economic disasters while the system they have attempted to ‘fix’ or destroy is still chugging along in it’s various forms (from the US brand of capitalism to the modernized social-capitalism of Europe to the more free wheeling brand in many of the pacific rim countries)…and providing the greatest number of citizens with high levels of prosperity.
:dubious: Obviously I disagree. Redistribution of wealth is a ticket either to slowing down or melting down your economic system.
The rest is the standard Evil Rich™ rant so I won’t comment on it here (again). It is mind boggling how peoples perception of things have been captured by this idea that there is a wealthy class out there that does nothing but suck up profits and that the little guy is getting screwed by the system.
All economics have one thing in common. They don’t work. Free trade without equal access to markets is not free trade. Equal worker protection and environmental rules would help make free trade. But, we are moving our work to China for one thing… money. It is not an exercise in economic theory. It is a chance to make a lot of profits in a short time. Eventually it will fail. When Chinese workers get tired of working for free and the Chinese get feed up with pollution ,it will change. But executives do not think past the next round of multi million dollar bonuses. Our system fails from no long term planning what soever.We can not see into the future. Exploitation of foriegn nations for money has driven us into potential conflicts. Corporations are our international trade relations . it does not bode well for the future.
If corporations create a lot of wealth and gives it all to the top 0.01% of the population then what the heck is the point? We were (at least in part) talking about corporate taxes (and the taxation of the people who accrete all that wealth generated by corporations), if corporations aren’t going to pay their fair share of taxes then (other than the ability to concentrate capital in amounts necessary for capitalism to work), why even have them?
I dunno, the economic system in relatively socialist countries like France, germany and well, most of the EU seem to be doing pretty well compared to the system we got with this admisntration.
I am a bit of a tax policy wonk and that means I have to be a bit of an economics wonk as well and economics comes in all shapes and sizes. Market forces are like water, if you try to stop them, they will either build up and eventually breach whatever barrier you have set up or find some way to circumvent your barrier entirely. The trick is to guide that river so that you can irrigate all the farms and everyone can eat (harder and smarter workers might eat better than most but noone who works all day would starve). The problem with the system we have now allows great concentrations of wealth while a significant percentage of the population can work full time jobs (even two full time jobs) and still need things like food stamps to get by.
Well sure. If space aliens invade tomorrow it would suck. If monkeys fly out of my butt it would hurt. If all or even a major portion of all or most of the companies in the US gave their wealth to the top .01% of the people then…well, the system would probably completely collapse and we’d go back to being hunters and gatherers.
Good thing this isn’t the real situation, ehe? We really dodged a bullet there.
Well, a couple of things. First off what evidence do you have that countries like France and Germany are doing better than the US economic system. Currently? Or over what time scales? By what measure? I’m asking this as a serious question as I don’t really know…just my impression is that most of the countries in the EU (with a few notable exceptions like IIRC Ireland lately) not performing anywhere close to even the US as we are today. Of course, they have different priorities there…economic performance being a bit down on the list compared to other things.
Secondly I find it ironic that you would mention this as a lot of those ‘socialist’ Euro nations have moved the bar on their capitalism up a few notches to make their own system work. Privatizing businesses and taking some of the pressure off their businesses. I don’t think there are a lot of full blown socialist nations (i.e. with all the businesses nationalized, etc) still out there in the EU (I could be wrong about that, this is from memory). I’m sure several Europeans will be by to bust my chops about that any time…but I think their social programs have stifled their own economies for quite some time now.
Even if this is true how is it a bad thing? What exactly are those rich people doing with that money? Are they burying it in the back yard or under mattresses or something? Is all their wealth going offshore? How much of it do you suppose is out of the economy…and how much of that wealth is actually driving the economy?