Real Reason For US Deficit: GE Greed-$14.2B Profit, $0 Tax
For all the caterwauling from the right and, stupifyingly, from the Obama Administration and Blue Dog left as well, here is the real reason the United States has the sizable deficit issues it does (well, in addition to the fact we will not tax even rich individuals appropriately either) – our biggest corporations pay no tax. Even when they make unholy amounts of profit. From a sobering article just up at the New York Times:
General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.
Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bespectacled, bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.
Read the whole article and weep for your and your children’s future. And then take a moment to consider that a competent political class, that was honest about their representation of their constituents and oath to office, would have moved the country away from this reverse Robin Hood dystopia instead of moving ever further down the black hole of elite and corporate greed, robber barons and neo-feudalism.
everyone is supposed to be holding shares in GE and reaping the profit this way… your ponzi scheme at work… join along….
When I was young, probably around 1965-1966, I wanted a pair of walkie talkies. A powerful pair, that were expensive, maybe close to $150 or so, and made by GE. My mother said they were a stupid waste and offered to buy me $200 worth of GE stock instead if I would give up the idea of the walkie talkies. I wonder what that stock would be worth now if I still had it and had not have gotten the walkie talkies (like an idiot).
I don’t know why I did this, but the info was easier to come by than I expected. If I did the math right and given gross estimations, $200 of GE stock around 1965 was roughly 2.5 shares. Today you would have 240 shares worth about $4800, and have received a total of about $2400 in dividends over the years.
The walkie-talkies would have been lots more fun.
Interesting; were there no splits or anything??
Many splits, which is how my calc started with 2.5 shares and ended with 240.
Here’s a link for price:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=GE
for splits:
http://www.ge.com/investors/investing/faqs.html?q=Investors_11
Heh, thanks. Maybe the walkie talkies were not so foolish then. Had a good deal of fun with the walkie talkies, and they lasted many years – even used them deer hunting years later.
GE seeks tax aid to limit layoff
Shorter Jeff Immelt: That’s a nice middle class you have. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.
bmaz
Duke is getting creamed.
Go Cats!
bmaz
Ouch – Duke got creamed.
CATS!!!
Tangential– From ‘IMF Prepares For “Threat To International Monetary System”‘ (by Tyler Durden, Mar. 24, 2011, 19:20 -0400 ; the bold is my emphasis):
{ snip }
Would it be too churlish to suggest to Congress that it use its limited time revising the Swiss cheese that we call our tax code, and that it stop trying to cut a Social Security program that has no impact on the federal budget, but which provides essential social and economic benefits to tens of millions of Americans?
I don’t think so. But I fear it’s an aspiration as likely to come true as Mr. Obama remembering the constitutional law he once taught.
This is pretty stark. It is like a tax 9/11 moment. Something like this should “change everything”. Seriously.
It’s crossed my mind and that of all the burned out wage slave public accountants I’ve known. Right on Earl!
P.S. We’d do ourselves a huge service by abolishing the ratings agencies and credit bureaus.
Obama,Goldman Sachs, Geithner,Bernake,Greenspan, and many other crooks have destroyed this country along with the crazies.Follow the money. General Electric made 6 billion dollar profit and pay no taxes. They are even getting money back. They are all bought and sold. They only care about-welfare for the elite.Banana Republic America in 5 years could happen. A pox on all of them. We need a real champion of the people. I can see Paul Wellstone coming back to fight for us. Well I know… how about Bernie Sanders. The way people feel about both parties now, I thing that a third party candidate could beat Obama or any of the re-thugs greatest hits. No I did not vote for Ralph Nader nor would I ever, but it is all in the timing.
TPTB have been trying to overturn the income tax since it was first made permanent 98 years ago. Just as they’ve been working to undo Social Security since it was first established.
Business 101 has always maintained that whatever benefit an enterprise may produce, it’s always best to fund it with someone else’s money. That’s a tenet of Politics 101, too.
Well I protest that grifter, socio-psychopathic TPTB thinking.
“The Yes Men – Exxon Hoax: Vivoleum” (Gas and Oil Expo, Calgary, Canada, 2007)
with the very greatest respect (i hope you know i mean that sincerely), and complete agreement regarding our effed up taxing and spending priorities, the reason we have a large deficit is because of the great recession: tax receipts go down and spending goes up via automatic stabilizers (unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc).
also, i think it needs to be said that for the federal gov, as the monopoly issuer of our currency, deficit spending is both a very very good thing and there is no issue, contra our president, of running out of money. we need more deficit spending now and we will need it for the foreseeable future.
on the other hand, deficits at the state and local level are a big problem because, like households and other currency users (and unlike the fed gov), they need revenues inorder to spend. this is entirely solvable (economically, apparently the politics are another issue) via a federal per capita revenue sharing plan.
……
the fundamental premise that fed gov deficit spending (the quantity, not the quality – which, again, i agree is totally effed) is a problem or needs to be curtailed by any kind of austerity (increasing taxes or decreasing spending) is either 1) a shiny object or 2) based on false neoliberal assumptions about money or 3) some other delusion and/or misinformation campaign.
drives me nuts.
see this recent thread for a bit of background (the links esp).
Thank you, selise.
Much more truth and many more facts need to see the light of day.
A sovereign government CHOOSES what it will “support”; the public interest or the “interests” of select “private” parties …
Oh, and as you know, selise, the federal budget is NOT like your household budget.
However, the learning “curve” is very, very slow … and most economists are NOT into honestly enlightening hoi paloi.
DW
howdy dw!
hmmmm…. looks like someone has been doing their homework? A+!
seems paradigm changes are that way. especially when there are strong institutional forces still wanting us to believe the earth is flat.
Ah, selise, once upon a time I told you that you were a genuine leader.
A true leader honestly and courageously ventures into “unknown” territory and returns to share his or her understanding of what they have discovered … in the hopes that other human beings might, just might, find the “understanding” useful and verifiable …
Truly, selise, you are such a one … and it is appreciated.
What do you suppose might be the reaction of those Americans who pay their fair share of (and more) taxes, unlike “corporate” and obscenely wealthy individuals, were the taxpaying ones to learn what actually happens to the “tax” monies they send to the federal government?
Do you suppose the average person would “believe” that those monies are simply destroyed, burned, in fact …?
One wonders.
DW
Does it maybe occur to you that the reason they’re moving their money off shore is because corporate tax rates are so high?
We’ve got a ridiculously complicated tax code that charges really high rates and ALLOWS companies like this to do stuff like this. And the fix is not to somehow try to force them to pay more in taxes. You can’t do it. The fix is to lower and simplify the corporate rate.
GE’s $5.1 billion attributed to the U.S., if it weren’t offset by the subsidies and credits they get, would be taxed at 35%. And since they want to keep as much money here as they can, you can assume that any dollar of the remaining $7.1 billion that they kept off-shore would be taxed at that rate.
So call that $5.1 billion a wash. That’s the amount they can offset.
They are keeping that $7.1 billion out of the country to avoid paying 35% on it, and so we get nothing. If instead, however, the tax rate were 10%, they might move some back in. Even if they only moved half back into the states, that would be an addition $355 million in federal revenues.
But your solution is to make the bastards pay, instead, right? Grow up and learn some economics.
Any American earning money abroad must still file a US Federal tax form and pay US taxes if they earn income beyond a preset limit. At least that is the law, if not the practice.
From the IRS website:
Maybe US Corporations, unlike US citizes, are exempted from this requirement?
The tax rules for individuals and corporations are quite a bit different.
In brief, US tax-resident individuals pay tax on their worldwide income. They can claim as a credit against US tax owed the income, not other taxes, actually paid to foreign tax authorities. If you live offshore, you pay US tax only on income above the first XX dollars, an amount which varies.
US corporations pay tax only on income that is deemed to have been returned to the US. If it stays offshore, it’s not subject to US tax. It is subject to tax in the jurisdiction(s) where it was earned or where it earns interest. The games that can be played with subsidiaries, pass through shells, tax havens, offshore holding companies and the like keep some of the best minds busy for years.
That arrangement was the excuse for the “tax holidays” the US recently and so helpfully extended. Those allowed the repatriation of foreign earned income at a derisory rate rather than the normal rate. It was supposed to help the economy. It helped the corporations and the politicians who arranged that holiday. The US Treasury lost billions.
For comparison, in Hong Kong, generally regarded as a tax haven, individuals and companies pay tax only on amounts earned in Hong Kong; they pay none on income earned offshore.
It’s not the tax rates. They are no higher than any other industrialized country, certainly none with as supportive a government and as large an internal market. They put their money offshore because current laws permit it. Companies that do move their formal HQ’s offshore largely set up mail drops; they keep their execs and the vast majority of their business in the US. That is, where they aren’t looking for a country that has no extradition treaty with the US.
They also do it because enforcement of those is incredibly lax. Accountants used to say the difference between tax planning and tax avoidance was 5-10 in the federal pen. Now, it’s the difference between making partner or not. More than one big firm used to sell “tax planning” techniques in a paper bag. That is, the techniques were so “productive” it cost a cool $1 million to look inside it. That’s a shakedown, not a business model. A little more rigor on the part of accounting oversight bodies, the SEC and the DoJ might undo that difference.
The laws and their enforcement need to be improved. The situs of where profit is “made”, for example, as malleable a fact as any, should be irrelevant. Something else that would contribute to narrowing permitted tax avoidance schemes is tying tax status to government contracts, the policing of which is even worse than tax compliance of large companies.
If Congress were really keen on managing deficits, they would cast a hard eye toward tax reform and enforcement, as well as raising revenue (it’s what monopolistic companies always do), not just on cutting social programs the right has hated since the income tax was first made permanent in 1913.
Reforms are unlikely given the Beltway’s obeisance to the corporate cash that comes trundling down K Street. The wheel barrows got bigger after Citizens United.
As others are pointing out, your basic ‘facts’ are illusionary chimeras. I am not intending to pile on, but …
This is just wishful thinking, nothing more.
Here are some real facts for you, those things based in reality, not hand waving.
1. “Congress cut the top corporate tax rates from 52.8 percent in 1969 to 46 percent in 1979”.
2. “In the 1940s and early 1950s, the corporate income tax provided about a third of federal revenues, and as recently as 1966, the proportion was 23 percent.” … “By 2003 they had declined to 7.4 percent.”
One could have a good ‘ol economic fun time correlating the rise of deficits and unemployment levels with the fall of corporate tax levels.
footnotes: 1. and 2.: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/CorporateTaxation.html
Thanks. I guess only grown ups read that stuff.
It’s an interesting parlor game guessing whether some commentators are committed corporatists, uninformed, trolls or HBGary-like s/w.
There does seem to be a lot more of the HBGary-like s/w hanging around lately not to mention those Koch fiends.
Perhaps they are thinking that if they take out the lion early on, the rest of the jungle will fall in line.
Nice comment.
In case you missed Naked Capitalism’s post on this topic today, you may want to add it to your reading list.
bmaz, d’ya know if Bev has scheduled Shaxson for an FDL Book Salon on “Treasure Islands” yet? (Available in US bookstores April 11th, about global tax shelters; available for preorder at iBooks right now, you’ll get the download on April 12th.)
My copy of Shaxson’s book is already ordered.
Talk about piracy!!
G.E. = corporate piracy.
I was thinking as I read Yves’ Smith’s NC post earlier that I need a list of GE products so I know what **not** to buy.
We need a national boycott of GE products.
I think most of us understand it has been not an economic issue but a financial terrorist takeover of the US government that has resulted in corporate taxes falling from over 30 percent of Federal revenues in the 50s to 6 percent today.
Where is the justice in a wage earner paying at a 45 percent marginal tax rate to Federal, State and City while GE pays nothing and Google pays 2 percent?
don’t know. but i do think we Americans have a right to know and to choose for ourselves, as informed citizens, what action we think best. personally, i’m outraged.
(thanks for the undeserved but very kind words. it’s just that i’m cursed with a sometimes obsessive curiosity and blessed by finding people who want to share what they know.)
(True leaders, selise, find nothing at all remarkable in what they do … they simply do it, and not, ever, for the dubious pleasure of mere, strutting ego … it simply must be done.)
;~DW
Pure TREASON!
OT. or not: Congressional Budget Would Defund Open Gov Data
“… consider that a competent political class …”
Ah yes, America’s ruling classes HAVE been behaving rather badly, haven’t they?
And … for quite a long time … many decades, in fact.
Or, to put it in currently “popular” context and perspective: “Who could have imagined …?”
(definitely “not” OT, selise … somehow all these “things”, the “outrages”, are connecticated. It is a social disease, you know, allowing the sociopathic few to run things, but the larger infirmity, perhaps terminal, is that the rest of us put up with it … history is the record, for those who would seek evidence that things are a wee bit amiss … “looking forward”, to touch upon another widely and wildly popular and sentimental favorite … um, American sensibility.)
DW
O.M.G.
The lawsuit of bmaz’s dreams.
Where’s the tip jar for me to start donating to fund legal action if those morons fail to fund open government stats?!
That is PUBLIC information.
I can’t wait till they defund the census.
Every builder, realtor, city official, school district, transportation district, etc, etc, etc uses census data.
Morons.
Next, they’ll defund air and water.
For a government that wants a nonending war, it should be easy enough to change the Overton window: Taxes help to pay for our troops. GE is not paying taxes. Why is GE so unpatriotic?!
Institute a top ten list of tax payers, and change the list monthly, or weekly (like the top 10 box office hits that are announced breathlessly by newsreaders each weekend). Have the wealthy compete to make it on the list. Have a list of the worst tax cheats and have the wealthy compete to get off that list.
Even if all the corporations pay an absurd amount of money to the IRS, it will do nothing to ease the current debt. To see the real problem, you only have to look at the federal budget. Medicare and Social Security are money vampires that are sucking this country dry. We all know Social Security is going to run out of money, but nobody has a solution. I have one: privatize the damn thing. Make people responsible for their own well-being during retirement. It was never meant to be any person’s sole source of income anyway.
As for Medicare, cut that too. I’ve never seen a more abused system in my life. Some of these people will go to the doctor for a stuffy nose. That’s tax payer’s money down the drain. Go get some health insurance. Even the worst plan is better than no plan.
Those are some real whoppers you have submitted there. They remind me of Mark Twain’s take: ‘The remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.’
Are you practicing to take over Dennis Miller or Victoria Jackson’s right wing comedy routines?
Better trolls would know that S.S. is not a budgetary issue…
Oxymoron.
Depends on how one defines better, eCAHN …
Batman Begins 2005
Pretty soon corps will be the only U.S. citizens, regardless of where their employees are & where they earn their profits. And U.S. peeps will be decitizenized altogether, but will have to pay 90% income tax rates* (except for the top 0.1%, of course, who the rest of us will have to bow & curtsy before).
*In addition to 25% VAT.
Such extraordinary aggression in avoiding taxes goes beyond any corporate mandate. It is nothing less than corrupt and ANTI-AMERICAN.
Let’s see, didn’t Obama just appont Jeff Immelt (former GE CEO in 2010) to his Board of Economic Advisors and won’t this guy be advising Obama on corporate taxes????? Any Obama psychophants out there still think this guy cares about anything other his own re-election. Here is a clear tax dodger, and Obama appoints him to head his Board of Economic Advisors. Anyone out there still defending Obama as a person who’s just being treated badly by the mean ole right. Unfortunately, Obama and the right see too many things the same, in my book. Which means the rest of us are screwed. I’ve said this a million times and I’ll say it again, I wish I were so wrong about Obama, but unfortunately for liberals and progressives, almost each and every move he makes proves me right!
oh yeah, of course you’re right.
I have totally given up. The president is just a lesser republican evil,
the worst vote I ever cast.
What is truly annoying is that none of this is illegal. It is the smart interpretation of thousands of lines of tax code. Every attempt to prompt the private economy to grow, or add jobs, or invest in blighted neighborhoods, or any one of thousands of good ideas results in fewer tax receipts.
The tax code need to be simplified in the extreme and not allow politicians to muddle it up for the benefit of their buddies. Could a VAT tax be worse?
I’m no expert on those aspects of the tax code, but would guess they don’t amount to a shithill of beans, just like earmarks are penny ante.
The big corp tax breaks lie in specific pieces of legislation that are direct gimmes to corps bc corps own the USG. Also the ability to shift profits to low tax rate parts of the globe owing to completely corrupt internal shadow pricing of multinationals. USG could put an end to that by serious auditing. (Bwahahahahahahaha. That’ll happen right after USG regulators start taking their jobs seriously.)
A friend of mine is a GE executive in Europe. He said that their entire business plan is tax avoidance. He was not kidding.
47% percent of Americans effectively pay no federal income tax through credits and givebacks.
Didn’t they design the Fukushima nuclear plant, among their other accomplishments?
In the Frankenstein movies, this is when the peasants would get their torches and pitchforks.
The USA is currently in a new post-industrial phase, which includes the government assisting US corporations to outsource not only factory jobs but also administrative ones, and maximize their profits via tax avoidance.
The major economic growth is taking place in Asia particularly, and soon in Africa, and so Americans had better re-invent themselves and find something to do that doesn’t depend in any way upon manufacturing.
Sorry:
But for those who got took by Obama during the primary, you were not paying attention to who he associated with, where he got his money, and how many high-powered lobbyists were backing him. I remember having drag down arguments with some on the left about where the big money was coming from. Everyone kept saying that a bunch of college students were handing over their Starbucks money and people who had never gotten involved in the political process before were motivated with wonder to hand over a weekly $50. Bull! No junior Senator coming off one national speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention amasses a war chest that rivals Clinton’s and McCain’s. It is because they (the power elite) all knew what many here refused to acknowledge during the campaign. The man is a Reagan Republican. He talked up Reagan, which no self-respecting Democrat would ever do. He didn’t want to be “labled” and claimed that people found it easy to “project” their own wants and views onto him. He never claimed to hold them himself. He surrounded himself with men like James Halpert; lobbyist for the telecom industry and then voted to give the industry retro-active immunity while still Senator; and all the while I had to listen to bullshit about 11th dimensionsal chess games and how he (Obama) is only doing this right now to win. He doesn’t really mean it!
The power elite knew that the only way to get a corporatist republican into the White House was not to throw their money behind someone running as a Republican but rather a guy who wanted adulation, ego-stroking, and the good-feeling that electing him seemed to bring to a segment of the voting public who refused to look at the content of his character, but rather decided to instead focus on the color of his skin!!
You are absolutely right. We who voted for him were stupid…and now we are paying for it. So the question now is what do we do? I wouldn’t vote for this guy for re-election for any amount of money… so do we just sit it out and try to live through one of those lunatics the Republicans are running, give up our citizenship and move out of the country (which is on the mind of many) ……what do we do. The Democratic Party is getting worse each year.
Where do we go??
WE must vote against the two party sham no matter how they are censored and no matter how we are intimidated into believing that we must pick the lesser of two evils. The lesser of two evils is really just as evil, they just get in by pretending to care like the world’s greatest Impostor, Obama. People say McCain would be worse. yeah right, Obama has followed Bush’s lead on everything and he is every bit the war monger, corporate serving, banker/criminal protector any GOP could ever be. DEM and REPUB is NO CHOICE at all, so lets elect a human being and put our energy exclusively into accurate vote counts and voter accessibility.
My solution is simple, because Corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them and pass the taxes onto their customers.:
1. Reduce all corporate taxes to zero.
2. Increase marginal rates back to the Carter tax Code.
3. Eliminate “Passive Income” and “Capital gains” from the tax code. All income become ether earned income or portfolio income, and is taxed at the same rates.
4. Eliminate the 1031 and 1035 exchange rules.
5. redefine “person” as “natural person”
6. Adopt the German principle of holding Executives as liable for the corporations action as the corporation.
7. Hold executives personally liable for corporations’ fines and penalties, not shareholders.
All of that was dismantled during the Reagan years and the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the same rights and privileges as the single individual. Oh, and there was the repeal of Glass-Stegall which took place under Clinton, but his own party told him they would override his veto of its’ repeal. That would have included so-called Democrats like Chris Dodd (now the head of the American Motion-Picture Association and the guy who got sweet-heart deals to refinance his mortages) and Chuck Schumar current senior Senator from NY who when told to turn off his Blackberry before a flight called the flight attendant a bitch!!
These people have forgotten where they come from, and until they are all removed from office (R and D alike) and we stop voting our “favorites” in and only elect people who say they are for limits on lobbying after leaving office and only being able to run with Federal funding, and no use of personal wealth, this is what we will continue to be left with!!
Keep talking eurogirl70….well said,almost of these bastards,Dems & GOP, are in office for ’emselves.
The bribes/kickbacks/lobbying GE pays to influence politicians in the form of campaign donations should be treated as a tax. Once a tax, then avoiding it will become their goal, and public financing of elections may take hold.
Put this link up on dakine01’s column too, but it’s appropriate here as well. These bastards are asking for a tax break, too. Remember the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004? The ultimate ship jobs to China Act? Well, they’re sitting on a trillion in offshore assets and they want another tax break. That’s right, a tax break, while they are forcing the governments, from federal down to local, to lay off.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/03/24/pm-companies-press-to-repatriate-overseas-profits/
And all this time, I thought it was the greedy teachers!/
People better wake up. What has happened with the banking industry and the corporate power is a planned take down. These people know exactly what they are doing and that is impoverishing and consolidating. They have systematically taken more and more power and they are completely liquidating America.
This is not an unfortunate event. The lead into war was something industry wanted. Everybody knows it. They wanted it and Cheney held back Norad during 9/11. I don’t care how stupid people are, this could not be a one time opportunity that these rag tag people being blamed just managed to take advantage of. Cheney would never be in a position to hold down Norad in a normal situation. Im not saying he wouldn’t have the power. He just wouldn’t in a million years be doing this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AikIALXwSmI&feature=channel_video_title
Now they have their zillionaire making wars and they have transferred the wealth like they are hoarding for the end of the world or something. Something has been going on for a while. These elite have been in Locust Mode for a while now ravenously devouring resources like they are taking off for another planet or something. They have moved passed pretending to be law abiding, waging wars purely for profit, and killing people in droves through documented unforgivable sociopath behavior like the story of the women who was a victim of Radiation by a so called civilized American government in a society where she was poisoned like an unwanted bug using a no-pretense-of-any-humanity term: “A Low Use Segment of the Population”. (see page two)
http://www.alternet.org/environment/150321/what_it%27s_like_living_in_our_nuclear_sacrifice_zone%3A_one_woman%27s_story_about_radiation_exposure_in_the_us/
These Reptilian like elite have pushed us further and further like some kind of stress test to see how much abuse, killing, and robbing we will submit to and they have found the good people of this country to be so very agreeable and easily preyed upon due to their good nature that they only see as a weakness to exploit. The proof is out there in everything you read. Throwing millions into the streets using an illegal automated formula that our elected, president, the world’s greatest Impostor, is a party to by looking the other way as these people run the economy and the WH. Having the unmitigated gall to have the very people doing this declaring they didn’t do anything wrong. WTF???
How far will Americans allow themselves to be destroyed, murdered, and robbed?? There will be no limit to the deaths and abuses as long as we are thinking we can beg, vote, or defend our way out of it. The longer we behave like children begging to be considered “deserving” the longer they will abuse us till we are dead.
stupefyingly
Time for an alternate minimum corporate tax on profits over 10%? No loopholes, no tax breaks for profits over 10%
Yeah and who is gonna make them do it. The corporate serving and corporate owning Repubs or the corporate serving and corporate owning Dems? If people keep falling for this NONchoice “two” party system like small children that never catch on, we are doomed to be exterminated like bugs because the elite see us as undesirable in *Their* universe and genocide is REAL.
What are people gonna do when they are drug out of their houses and shoved into train cars like cattle. Demand they have rights??? We’re getting close guys, you wanna wait till it goes that far and continue to play along with this absurdly toddler level obvious sham that the elite don’t control both parties and the inhumane things they are doing are okay because , well, they said so????????????
BOYCOTT G.E.!
Thanks, EOH.
It would be good, nonetheless, for the corporations to document on their tax returns how much of their profits are out of reach of the IRS and why. Or are US corporations, unlike US citizens, not required to lay it all out and show their work?
in reply to dustbunny44 @62:
I agree. Carpe diem.
Plus the practice of two-way communication may have honed bmaz’ courtroom skills.
Maybe FDL’s online store could sell FDL=badged walkie-talkies, potential gifts to the pre-typing young crowd.
If corporations aren’t people, then they shouldn’t be taxed at all.
All people should be taxed at the same rates, but everyone should be given some kind of deduction(s) so their cost of living isn’t taxed too.
Mortgage interest deductions for second homes (non-residence homes) shouldn’t be allowed. If we’re promoting home ownership for people to live in then investment homes shouldn’t be covered.
Tax deductions allow the gov’t to make it easier on some kinds of business, but really no business taxes (and naturally no deductions) should exist. Then any business worth it’s salt will get investment (as nuclear energy plants do NOT).
Advantages for some and not others should be minimal or nonexistent, so subsidies to oil & gas drillers or lower tax rates for ‘capital gains’ or for hedge fund managers should be abhorrent and nonexistent.
We should tax at whatever rates helps us pay the bills and the rich shouldn’t get out of it just because they think they don’t benefit from a lot of what gov’t does. A lot of non-rich people can say the same. If we’re all in this together as a nation, then it has to be unbiased as to gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, wealth and anything else. Equal treatment under the law should be upheld.
Subsidies for agricultural things should probably go too, but I hesitate to bring that into the discussion because the almost-socialist pricing system for agricultural goods is working fairly well. Messing with things that already work is risky.
I think the reason the US is in such a bad way is caused by the US federal reserve.It is a Private company owned by a few very greedy families. All money issued is issued with interest owed from day one.You would have to think that a federal reserve should be owned by the people or at least the government.
GE’s responsibilities are to its customers, employees and shareholders. We should not be upset at GE for hiring the best tax team and using legal methods to lower its tax rate. By doing so, they have lowered the prices of our light bulbs, paid higher wages and given jobs to our friends/family and have been able to earn more and pay higher dividends to the underfunded defined benefit pension plans that will provide retirement to our school teachers, police officers and State employees. If anything, the NYTimes article showed all the reasons to eliminate the US corporate income tax entirely so all US companies could have the same benefits that GE gives its customers, employees and shareholders.
Let’s fix the US economy and kill the corporate income tax at the State and Federal level. http://www.EliminateCorporateIncomeTax.com
This is going to end well.