Your characterization aside, I don't see a problem. If a company doesn't want to sell their product to another or put conditions on the sale of that product, they should be free to do that. No one is compelled to accept those terms.
And yet you fail to see how companies in an unrestricted country would gain monopolies, where they could set prices at will without competitions.
If Apple is so 'innovative' in managing income tax, I don't know why they are not doing something about sales tax. If I buy a Mac or any other stuff in the US from Amazon, I do not get charged for sales tax but on Apple online store, I do.
What's your point? This has nothing to do with Apple or being "innovative." Amazon's operations are in Washington State. It is required to collect sales tax there. California is now requiring all online merchants to collect sales tax I believe (correct me if I'm wrong). Otherwise, out of state Amazon shoppers are not charged sales tax by Amazon. They are required by law to pay sales tax to their respective states, but no one does (obviously).
Apple has operations in all 50 states, hence they collect sales tax in all 50 states. It's not that hard to understand.
And yet you fail to see how companies in an unrestricted country would gain monopolies, where they could set prices at will without competitions.
They do that now. Ever heard of telecoms? Tell me that texting magically "deserved" to be raised in price simultaneously across all carriers. Tell me that the "only possible step" they could have taken was to simultaneously all move to "family data sharing" plans, removing all of their other plans.
Because the state provides the majority of education, law enforcement and healthcare in most civilised countries?
I think it's pretty shameful that large corporations do everything they can to avoid paying tax and then complain that they can't find educated staff. Maybe there's a link between the two?
Yes, it does.
It helps that there's a correlation between tax and happiness, and not in the direction that you'd think.
I'm not sure I agree that there's a correlation between tax and happiness in these countries. There are quite a few other factors that I'd consider before assuming people in these countries are happier because they pay higher taxes.
First, all of these countries are quite small population-wise. That makes it possible for government to offer more/better services. These countries are all pretty culturally homogenous too, not the melting pot that is the US. It's a lot easier to manage a small group of people who are pretty much on the same page than to effectively steer 300 million people with wildly different backgrounds, income levels, education levels, languages spoken, etc. in the same direction.
Most of the Europeans I know are happy to pay higher taxes because they actually get something tangible back. The problem in the US is that our tax money is wasted, wasted, wasted, and most of it goes down some black hole of military/NSA/CIA spending. We don't have top notch schools. Not even close. We don't have safe streets. Compared to ANY European city, our big cities are borderline war zones.
I'd be more than happy to pay higher taxes if that money was well spent and actually went towards improving our society. But it doesn't. So why feed the beast any more than absolutely required?
Apple should pay its taxes in the U.S. because it's incorporated here. Apple takes advantage of our roads, our courts. The majority of its employees are educated here. It is traded on NASDAQ. Apple enjoys access to the U.S. power grid, and to all the other infrastructure this country has built. Apple enjoys the protections of our military, and the security of our financial system.
If Apple wants to enjoy all these benefits, it should contribute taxes to pay for them.
And it does. But it's not taking advantage of our power grid, roads, infrastructure, etc. when it sells a product in France. So why should it pay taxes in the US on the sale of that product? The majority of Apple employees are not just educated here in the US, they live here. So they pay US taxes too. As does Apple on all of its profits here.
No one would stop you from "investing in your country." You just want to force everyone else to "invest" as well.
Not just that, he wants to force everyone to invest in the same terrible investment scheme, the government. And how is that working these days? Trillions in debt, one of the the worst education systems among "first world" countries, much higher crime rates than other "first world" countries...
But we can build more weapons and drop more bombs than anyone! We don't have money for our own people, but we're more than happy to take tax dollars and spread them around the world propping up regimes, meddling in others' affairs, and playing puppet master. Go USA!
This is one of the problem of our current tax code. (and u didn't know that ryan/mitt wants to do away w/ the territorial tax so that companies that outsource no longer has to pay taxes from those forgeign investments)
—Currently, most of the 1% and the corporations pay little to up to 12% on average. No where near the 35% that they always whine about. While the rest below pay on average at least 20-25%. Go figure that one out.
—And those that try to defend companies like Apple by saying why should they pay more. Are you kidding me? Do you even have a clue why we have the current tax code that favors the rich? You mean you never heard of LOBBYISTS?
You mean how companies like Apple fight tooth and nail to keep the loopholes and low tax rates for themselves? They have done so by making it sound like raising taxes is a bad thing!
It's the marginal tax rates folks that matters most!
And yes, a company that makes Billions only pay 1 to 12% is digusting. While someone that makes 30K is paying at least 20%.
No wonder Conservatives and GOP love the no new taxes mantra!
[ We’d been discussing taxes on the air and the fact that Denmark has an average 52 percent income-tax rate. I asked him why people didn’t revolt at such high taxes, and he smiled and pointed out to me that the average Dane is very well paid, with a minimum wage that equals roughly $18 per hour. Moreover, what Danes get for their taxes (that we don’t) is a free college education and free health care, not to mention four weeks of paid vacation each year and notoriety as the happiest nation on earth, according to a major study done by the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.2
But it was once we were off the air that he made the comment that I found so enlightening.
“You Americans are such suckers,” he said. “You think that the rules for taxes that apply to rich people also apply to working people, but they don’t. When working peoples’ taxes go up, their pay goes up. When their taxes go down, their pay goes down. It may take a year or two or three to all even out, but it always works this way—look at any country in Europe. And that rule on taxes is the opposite of how it works for rich people!”
My Danish guest was right. So before we get into the larger consequences of tax increases or tax cuts for the nation’s economic health, let’s parse this business about what tax increases or cuts mean for the rich and for the not-so-rich. ] —Thom Hartmann
Google Roll Back The Reagan Tax Cuts by Thom Hartmann article
(I'm not advocating roll back the reagan tax cuts, but at least the before Bush!)
It simply explains how we got to the current tax system that favors the rich (emergence of conservative think tanks that spend millions to get the public to think paying taxes is bad)
And how we got to the outsourcing and hostile takeovers and such.
Here's how the US has been brainwashed to think that paying taxes is bad
[ How They Did It
So why is it that Americans have come to believe that tax cuts are good for everyone? The answer is that for decades now the überrich have relentlessly spent money to make Americans believe that lower taxes are the answer to all of America’s problems. They’ve done this partly through the media they own and partly through funding “think tanks” that legitimize their Great Tax Con.
Richard Mellon Scaife, a Pittsburgh native and heir to the Mellon family businesses, is a conservative billionaire who carries the title of publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the second-fiddle newspaper to that city’s larger daily, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Although daily newspapers generally have not been faring well lately, Scaife’s Tribune-Review is a ridiculously expensive enterprise, given its paltry circulation of 50,000.
According to a 2007 report in the Post-Gazette, based on Scaife’s divorce filings, his ex-wife contended that the Tribune-Review “should be considered a hobby or personal cause rather than a business investment because the paper has lost $20 million to $30 million annually since it began publishing in 1992.”4
His ex-wife had it right—the newspaper is a “personal cause” for Scaife.
If you do the math, you come up with more than $300 million that Scaife has lost on the newspaper. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) considers an activity a business (instead of a hobby) if there is “a reasonable expectation” of earning a profit and if it makes a profit in at least three of the past five years (although they’ve never gone after Scaife on this; as Leona Helmsley famously said, “Only the little people pay taxes”).
Scaife is not alone among billionaires flushing money down such news operations. As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kos diary in July 2009, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million per year on the New York Post, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million per year on the Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on the Washington Times.5
So why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding conservative media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to push it to the top of the bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their Web sites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year right-wing think tanks and training programs and lobbying organizations?
The answer is pretty straightforward: they do it because it buys them respectability and gets their con job out there. And one of their most important goals is lower taxes—for millionaires and billionaires like themselves.
Scaife, for instance, has used the various family foundations he oversees to fund conservative causes over the years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, including more than $20 million to just the Heritage Foundation. All you have to do to see how influential Heritage has been is to read its own propaganda. When President Reagan took office in 1981, Heritage dropped a 1,100-page tome titled Mandate for Leadership on his desk, which he promptly handed out to his entire cabinet. Among its achievements over the years, Heritage lists this under 1981: ] —Thom Hartmann
Your idea that corporation will self-reguate have been proven not to work. Leek at where we are. Look at the stock market. We are living the proof that corporations will destroy the planet and buy the country. I completely agree with the other poster.
I don't think you can say that self-regulation has been proven not to work. You might be right, of course, but we've never had a truly free market in which to test the concept. The problems we're dealing with now are the result of little or no regulation in some sectors, but if you're over-regulating some areas and under-regulating others, that's not a free market.
Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership called for “An across-theboard reduction in marginal personal income tax rates in each bracket of about 10 percent in 1981, with similar rate reductions in 1982 and 1983.” The Reagan administration not only followed Mandate’s lead, but it appointed Heritage’s Norman Ture, the Mandate author who penned the chapter on tax policy, as treasury secretary for tax and economic affairs—a new position suggested by Mandate. The tax cut that eventually passed—a marginal rate reduction of 25 percent over three years—wiped out America’s economic “malaise,” producing the biggest economic boom in U.S. history.6
This conveniently ignores the fact that the tax cuts also resulted in the tripling of the federal deficit during the Reagan years, among other things. In January 2005, Heritage issued a much shorter, 156-page Mandate for Leadership and had this to say about it:7
The original version, published in 1980, was written for a new administration just gaining widespread support for its ideas. Dubbed the “bible” of the Reagan White House by the Washington Post, it provided a step-by-step guide to how to transform conservative principles into government policy.
“Today, those principles are well established in Washington, well accepted by American voters and well understood everywhere in terms of how they translate into policy,” [President Edwin] Feulner said.
Heritage is but one example of the ways that the rich succeed in influencing public policy, especially tax policy. One hears a constant drumbeat emanating from Heritage and other conservative think tanks to keep taxes low. And the conservative media that these same funders—billionaires like Scaife, Murdoch, Anschutz—own and finance are echoing those messages.
Even though William Kristol’s publication, the Weekly Standard, is a money-losing joke (with only 85,000 subscribers), his association with the publication is enough to get him on TV talk shows whenever he wants and even a column with the New York Times for a year. Similarly, the money-losing Washington Times catapulted Tony Blankley to TV stardom. And of course, Murdoch’s Fox “News” blares the anti-income-tax message 24/7.
One way in which the think tanks and the conservative media con the American public is to conflate income taxes for the rich with income taxes for everyone else. And this is the crux of the con job. When Bill Clinton proposed tax increases in 1993, think tanks like Heritage and Cato immediately opposed them with their myths about the negative consequences of tax increases. Here’s what a Heritage “analyst” wrote then:8
Proponents of raising taxes argue that the federal budget cannot be balanced without a tax hike. They argue, too, that tax increases will make the tax code fairer. Some even claim that tax increases will encourage economic growth by reducing the need for federal borrowing.
Raising taxes, however, would be a political and economic mistake, regardless of who pays and what taxes are increased. If history is any guide, higher taxes will fuel additional federal spending....
Higher taxes will shrink the tax base and reduce tax revenues.... In each case, proponents of the hike claimed that the deficit would decline. But in each case, the deficit rose the following year.
That “analysis” failed to point out that the federal budget has pretty much grown every year since the founding of the republic and that between the growth of both our population and our economy, and the effect of inflation, government expenditures go up every year regardless of tax policy.
Weeks later the Cato Institute, also funded heavily by wealthy right-wing supporters, echoed the opposition to the Clinton tax increases in a piece by Bruce Bartlett, titled “The Futility of Raising Tax Rates,” making a special effort to connect taxes for the rich with taxes for everyone else:9
The Clinton plan, therefore, is based on false premises and is unlikely to achieve the goal of increasing the tax burden on the wealthy. It will probably lead, instead, to higher taxes on the poor and the middle class, as higher revenues from the rich fail to materialize. In the end, the burden of higher taxes must fall largely on the middle class because that is where the bulk of income is. Thus, maintaining a low top tax rate is the best way to ensure that tax rates remain reasonable for those with low and moderate incomes.
These anti-tax messages have been delivered by clever language crafted by right-wing message experts like Frank Luntz and others so that terms like tax relief and tax burden have become household words. In the end, low tax rates, as we saw earlier, only keep the superwealthy—Moon and Murdoch and Scaife and Anschutz (and others)—richer than you or I could ever even imagine being. For these rich right-wing funders, the cash spent on money-losing media enterprises really is a “personal cause”—an investment that pays back by saving them millions in taxes each year.
It’s time we roll back the Reagan tax cuts that slashed the top 74 percent rate on millionaires and billionaires down into the low 30s. Let’s increase the top marginal tax rate and eliminate stock options as a form of executive compensation. This will go a long way toward stabilizing our economy and improving wages for lowerand middle-income Americans.
Taxing the very rich (who use only a small percentage of their income to “buy” things, stashing most of it in Swiss bank accounts) also supports working people in getting decent wages. When income above $3 million per year (from all sources) is taxed at 74 percent, as it was from 1964 to 1983, or at 91 percent, as it was from 1931 to 1964, CEO pay tends to drop down to around 30 times the pay of a company’s most lowly paid employees (as it was in the United States from 1932 until the mid-1980s and as it is in virtually every other nation of the world with similarly high top marginal tax rates). Worker wages are healthy, and a landed gentry superwealth class doesn’t emerge to threaten democratic institutions and mess with politics in ways that purely advantage only themselves. In other words, roll back the Reagan tax cuts. ] —Thom Hartmann
If government didn't exist, someone or something else would fill that vacuum of power. Personally, I'd prefer the semblance of representation we have now in the US rather than corporations that are run by unelected CEOs who choose their own successors and only look out for their profits. At least with representative government, the people choose for better or worse their own leaders. It's not a prefect process, nothing is, but it is far better than allowing people that were born into privilege to control everything while the rest of the population has no veto or impeachment power against them.
MJ1970, what is a corporation if not a monarchy? Corporations are a form of government if you really think about it, except their only purpose is to increase profit. So all this anarchy-capitalist stuff is just bunk. True anarchy is living as a caveman, raping your "wives", and scraping by on what animals and plants you can get in your hands to shove in your mouth. Capitalism can't exist in anarchy. If government disappeared, a new government would take it's place. It's as simple as that.
MJ1970, what is a corporation if not a monarchy? Corporations are a form of government if you really think about it, except their only purpose is to increase profit.
Yes, but in a free market, they do not have any right to use force on anyone. That's a critical difference.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silverpraxis
So all this anarchy-capitalist stuff is just bunk.
Well thanks for sharing your opinion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silverpraxis
True anarchy is living as a caveman, raping your "wives", and scraping by on what animals and plants you can get in your hands to shove in your mouth. Capitalism can't exist in anarchy.
Well why don't you just come right out and admit that you don't know what you're talking about?
They do that now. Ever heard of telecoms? Tell me that texting magically "deserved" to be raised in price simultaneously across all carriers. Tell me that the "only possible step" they could have taken was to simultaneously all move to "family data sharing" plans, removing all of their other plans.
I am quite aware of that. It's actually not a monopoly, but closer to a cartel, which is just as bad.
It's ML1970 who doesn't seem to see that but that's fine. It seems that he advocates anarchy because he is afraid of the possibility that a government may use force against it's own people, not necessarily the governance part. But he'll quickly correct me if I misunderstood him. I just have a hard time seeing that how can you guarantee any protection against violence or excessive greed without governance (thus taxes). If that makes me narrow-minded, then so be it.
Out of curiosity (and laziness of checking it out) what is the total price of sending and receiving a single SMS in the US these days? Here it's roughly 10 cents if you don't have a package.
MJ1970, what is a corporation if not a monarchy? Corporations are a form of government if you really think about it, except their only purpose is to increase profit.
Yes, but in a free market, they do not have any right to use force on anyone. That's a critical difference.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silverpraxis
So all this anarchy-capitalist stuff is just bunk.
Well thanks for sharing your opinion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silverpraxis
True anarchy is living as a caveman, raping your "wives", and scraping by on what animals and plants you can get in your hands to shove in your mouth. Capitalism can't exist in anarchy.
Well why don't you just come right out and admit that you don't know what you're talking about?
In a truly free market, there is no regulation. That means corporations would have to self-regulate, for which they have a poor historical record. We have laws created by lawmakers we elected to represent us for the most part as a reaction to wrongs previously done. Why do you think we have a minimum wage? Why is slavery outlawed? Why are their antidiscriminatory regulations? Why are their anti-monopoly laws? Why were work unions originally organized (regardless of what you feel about them currently)? Also see anti-collusion laws? All because the heads of business acted contrary to the general welfare of the population for an increase in profit. Markets have to be scrutinized and regulated to some degree. Only the degree to which is debatable. A truly free market favors companies consolidating and streamlining into a single profit generating machine, eroding competition and creating monopolies in markets. And those that don't combine would collude to their mutual benefit and the detriment of the consumer.
Currently, corporations are buying our officials in government, corrupting it, and you think removing the government would fix the problem? Yes, lets get government out of the way so the corporations can enact what they please directly on us. We need a government truly representative of the populous. As much as I hate using political cliches, we need to get money out of politics. Government isn't the problem. It's who influences the government against the will of the people that's the problem.
I am quite aware of that. It's actually not a monopoly, but closer to a cartel, which is just as bad.
And a government-protected one! That's my point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jahonen
It's ML1970 who doesn't seem to see that but that's fine.
I see it very clearly. You seem to be the one pointing to examples of government-supported and protected crony capitalism and offering these as proof that the free market is bad and government is necessary. I find that odd.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jahonen
It seems that he advocates anarchy because he is afraid of the possibility that a government may use force against it's own people, not necessarily the governance part.
It's not that I'm afraid that will happen...it's what does happen and is happening. It's what the State does.
Now, if we could find some way to limit the State to the role of protecting the basic rights of life, liberty and property (and the logical derivative rights from these) of every citizen (and the vanishingly small amount of taxes that would necessary to pay for that) then I wouldn't have a problem with it. The issue is that it never stays within that boundary and quickly becomes a chief culprit in infringing on these rights in one way or another and becomes a tool for doing this at the behest of special interests. It's just that lots of people agree with some of these infringements or don't see them as infringements at all because some person or group is doing something they just don't like.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by MJ1970
Your characterization aside, I don't see a problem. If a company doesn't want to sell their product to another or put conditions on the sale of that product, they should be free to do that. No one is compelled to accept those terms.
And yet you fail to see how companies in an unrestricted country would gain monopolies, where they could set prices at will without competitions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jahonen
And yet you fail to see how companies in an unrestricted country would gain monopolies, where they could set prices at will without competitions.
Yes. I do. And you have failed to prove that this would happen. So there we go.
Quote:
Originally Posted by arch
If Apple is so 'innovative' in managing income tax, I don't know why they are not doing something about sales tax. If I buy a Mac or any other stuff in the US from Amazon, I do not get charged for sales tax but on Apple online store, I do.
What's your point? This has nothing to do with Apple or being "innovative." Amazon's operations are in Washington State. It is required to collect sales tax there. California is now requiring all online merchants to collect sales tax I believe (correct me if I'm wrong). Otherwise, out of state Amazon shoppers are not charged sales tax by Amazon. They are required by law to pay sales tax to their respective states, but no one does (obviously).
Apple has operations in all 50 states, hence they collect sales tax in all 50 states. It's not that hard to understand.
Originally Posted by jahonen
And yet you fail to see how companies in an unrestricted country would gain monopolies, where they could set prices at will without competitions.
They do that now. Ever heard of telecoms? Tell me that texting magically "deserved" to be raised in price simultaneously across all carriers. Tell me that the "only possible step" they could have taken was to simultaneously all move to "family data sharing" plans, removing all of their other plans.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RichL
Because the state provides the majority of education, law enforcement and healthcare in most civilised countries?
I think it's pretty shameful that large corporations do everything they can to avoid paying tax and then complain that they can't find educated staff. Maybe there's a link between the two?
Yes, it does.
It helps that there's a correlation between tax and happiness, and not in the direction that you'd think.
I'm not sure I agree that there's a correlation between tax and happiness in these countries. There are quite a few other factors that I'd consider before assuming people in these countries are happier because they pay higher taxes.
First, all of these countries are quite small population-wise. That makes it possible for government to offer more/better services. These countries are all pretty culturally homogenous too, not the melting pot that is the US. It's a lot easier to manage a small group of people who are pretty much on the same page than to effectively steer 300 million people with wildly different backgrounds, income levels, education levels, languages spoken, etc. in the same direction.
Most of the Europeans I know are happy to pay higher taxes because they actually get something tangible back. The problem in the US is that our tax money is wasted, wasted, wasted, and most of it goes down some black hole of military/NSA/CIA spending. We don't have top notch schools. Not even close. We don't have safe streets. Compared to ANY European city, our big cities are borderline war zones.
I'd be more than happy to pay higher taxes if that money was well spent and actually went towards improving our society. But it doesn't. So why feed the beast any more than absolutely required?
Quote:
Originally Posted by macsimcon
Apple should pay its taxes in the U.S. because it's incorporated here. Apple takes advantage of our roads, our courts. The majority of its employees are educated here. It is traded on NASDAQ. Apple enjoys access to the U.S. power grid, and to all the other infrastructure this country has built. Apple enjoys the protections of our military, and the security of our financial system.
If Apple wants to enjoy all these benefits, it should contribute taxes to pay for them.
And it does. But it's not taking advantage of our power grid, roads, infrastructure, etc. when it sells a product in France. So why should it pay taxes in the US on the sale of that product? The majority of Apple employees are not just educated here in the US, they live here. So they pay US taxes too. As does Apple on all of its profits here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MJ1970
No one would stop you from "investing in your country." You just want to force everyone else to "invest" as well.
Not just that, he wants to force everyone to invest in the same terrible investment scheme, the government. And how is that working these days? Trillions in debt, one of the the worst education systems among "first world" countries, much higher crime rates than other "first world" countries...
But we can build more weapons and drop more bombs than anyone! We don't have money for our own people, but we're more than happy to take tax dollars and spread them around the world propping up regimes, meddling in others' affairs, and playing puppet master. Go USA!
This is one of the problem of our current tax code. (and u didn't know that ryan/mitt wants to do away w/ the territorial tax so that companies that outsource no longer has to pay taxes from those forgeign investments)
—Currently, most of the 1% and the corporations pay little to up to 12% on average. No where near the 35% that they always whine about. While the rest below pay on average at least 20-25%. Go figure that one out.
—And those that try to defend companies like Apple by saying why should they pay more. Are you kidding me? Do you even have a clue why we have the current tax code that favors the rich? You mean you never heard of LOBBYISTS?
You mean how companies like Apple fight tooth and nail to keep the loopholes and low tax rates for themselves? They have done so by making it sound like raising taxes is a bad thing!
It's the marginal tax rates folks that matters most!
And yes, a company that makes Billions only pay 1 to 12% is digusting. While someone that makes 30K is paying at least 20%.
No wonder Conservatives and GOP love the no new taxes mantra!
[ We’d been discussing taxes on the air and the fact that Denmark has an average 52 percent income-tax rate. I asked him why people didn’t revolt at such high taxes, and he smiled and pointed out to me that the average Dane is very well paid, with a minimum wage that equals roughly $18 per hour. Moreover, what Danes get for their taxes (that we don’t) is a free college education and free health care, not to mention four weeks of paid vacation each year and notoriety as the happiest nation on earth, according to a major study done by the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.2
But it was once we were off the air that he made the comment that I found so enlightening.
“You Americans are such suckers,” he said. “You think that the rules for taxes that apply to rich people also apply to working people, but they don’t. When working peoples’ taxes go up, their pay goes up. When their taxes go down, their pay goes down. It may take a year or two or three to all even out, but it always works this way—look at any country in Europe. And that rule on taxes is the opposite of how it works for rich people!”
My Danish guest was right. So before we get into the larger consequences of tax increases or tax cuts for the nation’s economic health, let’s parse this business about what tax increases or cuts mean for the rich and for the not-so-rich. ] —Thom Hartmann
Google Roll Back The Reagan Tax Cuts by Thom Hartmann article
(I'm not advocating roll back the reagan tax cuts, but at least the before Bush!)
It simply explains how we got to the current tax system that favors the rich (emergence of conservative think tanks that spend millions to get the public to think paying taxes is bad)
And how we got to the outsourcing and hostile takeovers and such.
Here's how the US has been brainwashed to think that paying taxes is bad
[ How They Did It
So why is it that Americans have come to believe that tax cuts are good for everyone? The answer is that for decades now the überrich have relentlessly spent money to make Americans believe that lower taxes are the answer to all of America’s problems. They’ve done this partly through the media they own and partly through funding “think tanks” that legitimize their Great Tax Con.
Richard Mellon Scaife, a Pittsburgh native and heir to the Mellon family businesses, is a conservative billionaire who carries the title of publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the second-fiddle newspaper to that city’s larger daily, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Although daily newspapers generally have not been faring well lately, Scaife’s Tribune-Review is a ridiculously expensive enterprise, given its paltry circulation of 50,000.
According to a 2007 report in the Post-Gazette, based on Scaife’s divorce filings, his ex-wife contended that the Tribune-Review “should be considered a hobby or personal cause rather than a business investment because the paper has lost $20 million to $30 million annually since it began publishing in 1992.”4
His ex-wife had it right—the newspaper is a “personal cause” for Scaife.
If you do the math, you come up with more than $300 million that Scaife has lost on the newspaper. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) considers an activity a business (instead of a hobby) if there is “a reasonable expectation” of earning a profit and if it makes a profit in at least three of the past five years (although they’ve never gone after Scaife on this; as Leona Helmsley famously said, “Only the little people pay taxes”).
Scaife is not alone among billionaires flushing money down such news operations. As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kos diary in July 2009, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million per year on the New York Post, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million per year on the Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on the Washington Times.5
So why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding conservative media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to push it to the top of the bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their Web sites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year right-wing think tanks and training programs and lobbying organizations?
The answer is pretty straightforward: they do it because it buys them respectability and gets their con job out there. And one of their most important goals is lower taxes—for millionaires and billionaires like themselves.
Scaife, for instance, has used the various family foundations he oversees to fund conservative causes over the years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, including more than $20 million to just the Heritage Foundation. All you have to do to see how influential Heritage has been is to read its own propaganda. When President Reagan took office in 1981, Heritage dropped a 1,100-page tome titled Mandate for Leadership on his desk, which he promptly handed out to his entire cabinet. Among its achievements over the years, Heritage lists this under 1981: ] —Thom Hartmann
Quote:
Originally Posted by frankie
Your idea that corporation will self-reguate have been proven not to work. Leek at where we are. Look at the stock market. We are living the proof that corporations will destroy the planet and buy the country. I completely agree with the other poster.
I don't think you can say that self-regulation has been proven not to work. You might be right, of course, but we've never had a truly free market in which to test the concept. The problems we're dealing with now are the result of little or no regulation in some sectors, but if you're over-regulating some areas and under-regulating others, that's not a free market.
[ A tax cut revolution.
Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership called for “An across-theboard reduction in marginal personal income tax rates in each bracket of about 10 percent in 1981, with similar rate reductions in 1982 and 1983.” The Reagan administration not only followed Mandate’s lead, but it appointed Heritage’s Norman Ture, the Mandate author who penned the chapter on tax policy, as treasury secretary for tax and economic affairs—a new position suggested by Mandate. The tax cut that eventually passed—a marginal rate reduction of 25 percent over three years—wiped out America’s economic “malaise,” producing the biggest economic boom in U.S. history.6
This conveniently ignores the fact that the tax cuts also resulted in the tripling of the federal deficit during the Reagan years, among other things. In January 2005, Heritage issued a much shorter, 156-page Mandate for Leadership and had this to say about it:7
The original version, published in 1980, was written for a new administration just gaining widespread support for its ideas. Dubbed the “bible” of the Reagan White House by the Washington Post, it provided a step-by-step guide to how to transform conservative principles into government policy.
“Today, those principles are well established in Washington, well accepted by American voters and well understood everywhere in terms of how they translate into policy,” [President Edwin] Feulner said.
Heritage is but one example of the ways that the rich succeed in influencing public policy, especially tax policy. One hears a constant drumbeat emanating from Heritage and other conservative think tanks to keep taxes low. And the conservative media that these same funders—billionaires like Scaife, Murdoch, Anschutz—own and finance are echoing those messages.
Even though William Kristol’s publication, the Weekly Standard, is a money-losing joke (with only 85,000 subscribers), his association with the publication is enough to get him on TV talk shows whenever he wants and even a column with the New York Times for a year. Similarly, the money-losing Washington Times catapulted Tony Blankley to TV stardom. And of course, Murdoch’s Fox “News” blares the anti-income-tax message 24/7.
One way in which the think tanks and the conservative media con the American public is to conflate income taxes for the rich with income taxes for everyone else. And this is the crux of the con job. When Bill Clinton proposed tax increases in 1993, think tanks like Heritage and Cato immediately opposed them with their myths about the negative consequences of tax increases. Here’s what a Heritage “analyst” wrote then:8
Proponents of raising taxes argue that the federal budget cannot be balanced without a tax hike. They argue, too, that tax increases will make the tax code fairer. Some even claim that tax increases will encourage economic growth by reducing the need for federal borrowing.
Raising taxes, however, would be a political and economic mistake, regardless of who pays and what taxes are increased. If history is any guide, higher taxes will fuel additional federal spending....
Higher taxes will shrink the tax base and reduce tax revenues.... In each case, proponents of the hike claimed that the deficit would decline. But in each case, the deficit rose the following year.
That “analysis” failed to point out that the federal budget has pretty much grown every year since the founding of the republic and that between the growth of both our population and our economy, and the effect of inflation, government expenditures go up every year regardless of tax policy.
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Weeks later the Cato Institute, also funded heavily by wealthy right-wing supporters, echoed the opposition to the Clinton tax increases in a piece by Bruce Bartlett, titled “The Futility of Raising Tax Rates,” making a special effort to connect taxes for the rich with taxes for everyone else:9
The Clinton plan, therefore, is based on false premises and is unlikely to achieve the goal of increasing the tax burden on the wealthy. It will probably lead, instead, to higher taxes on the poor and the middle class, as higher revenues from the rich fail to materialize. In the end, the burden of higher taxes must fall largely on the middle class because that is where the bulk of income is. Thus, maintaining a low top tax rate is the best way to ensure that tax rates remain reasonable for those with low and moderate incomes.
These anti-tax messages have been delivered by clever language crafted by right-wing message experts like Frank Luntz and others so that terms like tax relief and tax burden have become household words. In the end, low tax rates, as we saw earlier, only keep the superwealthy—Moon and Murdoch and Scaife and Anschutz (and others)—richer than you or I could ever even imagine being. For these rich right-wing funders, the cash spent on money-losing media enterprises really is a “personal cause”—an investment that pays back by saving them millions in taxes each year.
It’s time we roll back the Reagan tax cuts that slashed the top 74 percent rate on millionaires and billionaires down into the low 30s. Let’s increase the top marginal tax rate and eliminate stock options as a form of executive compensation. This will go a long way toward stabilizing our economy and improving wages for lowerand middle-income Americans.
Taxing the very rich (who use only a small percentage of their income to “buy” things, stashing most of it in Swiss bank accounts) also supports working people in getting decent wages. When income above $3 million per year (from all sources) is taxed at 74 percent, as it was from 1964 to 1983, or at 91 percent, as it was from 1931 to 1964, CEO pay tends to drop down to around 30 times the pay of a company’s most lowly paid employees (as it was in the United States from 1932 until the mid-1980s and as it is in virtually every other nation of the world with similarly high top marginal tax rates). Worker wages are healthy, and a landed gentry superwealth class doesn’t emerge to threaten democratic institutions and mess with politics in ways that purely advantage only themselves. In other words, roll back the Reagan tax cuts. ] —Thom Hartmann
Not sure where u get ur data. But most Western European corporate tax is around 20-25%.
Most average that US Corporations pay is between 0 to 12%!
Not sure where u get ur data. But most Western European corporate tax is around 20-25%.
Most average that US Corporations pay is between 0 to 12%!
If government didn't exist, someone or something else would fill that vacuum of power. Personally, I'd prefer the semblance of representation we have now in the US rather than corporations that are run by unelected CEOs who choose their own successors and only look out for their profits. At least with representative government, the people choose for better or worse their own leaders. It's not a prefect process, nothing is, but it is far better than allowing people that were born into privilege to control everything while the rest of the population has no veto or impeachment power against them.
MJ1970, what is a corporation if not a monarchy? Corporations are a form of government if you really think about it, except their only purpose is to increase profit. So all this anarchy-capitalist stuff is just bunk. True anarchy is living as a caveman, raping your "wives", and scraping by on what animals and plants you can get in your hands to shove in your mouth. Capitalism can't exist in anarchy. If government disappeared, a new government would take it's place. It's as simple as that.
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Originally Posted by silverpraxis
MJ1970, what is a corporation if not a monarchy? Corporations are a form of government if you really think about it, except their only purpose is to increase profit.
Yes, but in a free market, they do not have any right to use force on anyone. That's a critical difference.
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Originally Posted by silverpraxis
So all this anarchy-capitalist stuff is just bunk.
Well thanks for sharing your opinion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silverpraxis
True anarchy is living as a caveman, raping your "wives", and scraping by on what animals and plants you can get in your hands to shove in your mouth. Capitalism can't exist in anarchy.
Well why don't you just come right out and admit that you don't know what you're talking about?
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Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
They do that now. Ever heard of telecoms? Tell me that texting magically "deserved" to be raised in price simultaneously across all carriers. Tell me that the "only possible step" they could have taken was to simultaneously all move to "family data sharing" plans, removing all of their other plans.
I am quite aware of that. It's actually not a monopoly, but closer to a cartel, which is just as bad.
It's ML1970 who doesn't seem to see that but that's fine. It seems that he advocates anarchy because he is afraid of the possibility that a government may use force against it's own people, not necessarily the governance part. But he'll quickly correct me if I misunderstood him. I just have a hard time seeing that how can you guarantee any protection against violence or excessive greed without governance (thus taxes). If that makes me narrow-minded, then so be it.
Out of curiosity (and laziness of checking it out) what is the total price of sending and receiving a single SMS in the US these days? Here it's roughly 10 cents if you don't have a package.
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Originally Posted by MJ1970
Quote:
Originally Posted by silverpraxis
MJ1970, what is a corporation if not a monarchy? Corporations are a form of government if you really think about it, except their only purpose is to increase profit.
Yes, but in a free market, they do not have any right to use force on anyone. That's a critical difference.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silverpraxis
So all this anarchy-capitalist stuff is just bunk.
Well thanks for sharing your opinion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by silverpraxis
True anarchy is living as a caveman, raping your "wives", and scraping by on what animals and plants you can get in your hands to shove in your mouth. Capitalism can't exist in anarchy.
Well why don't you just come right out and admit that you don't know what you're talking about?
In a truly free market, there is no regulation. That means corporations would have to self-regulate, for which they have a poor historical record. We have laws created by lawmakers we elected to represent us for the most part as a reaction to wrongs previously done. Why do you think we have a minimum wage? Why is slavery outlawed? Why are their antidiscriminatory regulations? Why are their anti-monopoly laws? Why were work unions originally organized (regardless of what you feel about them currently)? Also see anti-collusion laws? All because the heads of business acted contrary to the general welfare of the population for an increase in profit. Markets have to be scrutinized and regulated to some degree. Only the degree to which is debatable. A truly free market favors companies consolidating and streamlining into a single profit generating machine, eroding competition and creating monopolies in markets. And those that don't combine would collude to their mutual benefit and the detriment of the consumer.
Currently, corporations are buying our officials in government, corrupting it, and you think removing the government would fix the problem? Yes, lets get government out of the way so the corporations can enact what they please directly on us. We need a government truly representative of the populous. As much as I hate using political cliches, we need to get money out of politics. Government isn't the problem. It's who influences the government against the will of the people that's the problem.
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Originally Posted by jahonen
I am quite aware of that. It's actually not a monopoly, but closer to a cartel, which is just as bad.
And a government-protected one! That's my point.
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Originally Posted by jahonen
It's ML1970 who doesn't seem to see that but that's fine.
I see it very clearly. You seem to be the one pointing to examples of government-supported and protected crony capitalism and offering these as proof that the free market is bad and government is necessary. I find that odd.
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Originally Posted by jahonen
It seems that he advocates anarchy because he is afraid of the possibility that a government may use force against it's own people, not necessarily the governance part.
It's not that I'm afraid that will happen...it's what does happen and is happening. It's what the State does.
Now, if we could find some way to limit the State to the role of protecting the basic rights of life, liberty and property (and the logical derivative rights from these) of every citizen (and the vanishingly small amount of taxes that would necessary to pay for that) then I wouldn't have a problem with it. The issue is that it never stays within that boundary and quickly becomes a chief culprit in infringing on these rights in one way or another and becomes a tool for doing this at the behest of special interests. It's just that lots of people agree with some of these infringements or don't see them as infringements at all because some person or group is doing something they just don't like.