But they EARNED it!

[FMBI]

Link

 

Wonderful, eh? All you have to do is lower tax rates, and they'll be happy to pay them! Yeah.. Oh well, someday people will figure out that the IRS routinely faces pressure to not go after corporations and the super-rich. Someday..

[Aileron]

Companies don't create wealth. They merely distribute it. One has to be careful taxing corporations, because when you tax a corporation all they do is increase the price of their product and you end up taxing the customers.

[FMBI]

Wow, Ail, how many times have we heard that one before?

 

The fact is, most multinats are paying zero taxes anywhere, and the conservative's best answer is to reduce the corporate tax, so they "won't mind paying" - of course, the question remains, if they aren't gonna pay less than 35%, why are they gonna pay 25%? Eventually you've got to stop sucking up and insist that they follow the laws like everyone else. You can't say "Ok, so the guy on the street is gonna pay, but a corporation with profits of several billion dollars doesn't have to," unless you want roughly the economic situation we've got right now.

 

Also, corporations don't "distribute" wealth - government or social organizations distribute wealth. Corporations ac!@#$%^&*ulate wealth, and eventually, through sheer inertia, become as inefficient (or more, through corruption) as government. Therefore, it's good to "help them" avoid that point.

 

Another thing is that corporations used to provide a much, much bigger share of the tax base in the US, allowing personal taxes to stay lower - I think people would prefer to pay 3% more if they're saving 15% on tax day. (Which, by the way, isn't much of an exaggeration - after all, old Ronald McDonald raised payroll taxes drastically over his term as President)

[NBVegita]

You know I finally read this and what I find funny is this is a quote from Finland in another post:

 

And Harvard.. give me a break, conservatives have been crying about it for decades. Yes, it's hopelessly corrupt, yes, it's idiotic. Who gives a !@#$%^&*? Harvard is an emblem of the "Best higher education in the world" standard of the US (though that's questionable nowadays), and its actual income is far lower than that of companies raking in hundreds of billions.

 

Pertaining to wanting to tax Harvard, because it's not right that they don't pay taxes.

 

I say tax all of the corporations and your educational ins!@#$%^&*utions. Taxing Harvards endowments of 34.9 Billion dollars would help. That would help take the tax burden off of us.

[FMBI]

In the case of Harvard, I didn't say we shouldn't tax it. I simply said that there's no reason to whine about that in every single post, on every single talk show, and on every TV appearance, when there are bigger fish to fry. Obviously Harvard shouldn't be getting away scot-free either, but crying about them while saying that we can't tax corporations is nothing but a convincing bait-and-switch. "Well, sure, corporations don't always pay taxes, but, hey, look at Harvard......" - great way to end a conversation and leave 50 million morons convinced.

[NBVegita]

I think harvard and the like, should be held just as responsible as any other corporation.

[FMBI]

Except no one holds corporations responsible, because every time they try to, someone pipes up about Harvard and derails the discussion.

[NBVegita]

How does that derail it?

 

Basically no law makers wants to tax companies cause it will lower their kickbacks. !@#$%^&* if they started taxing one side, they have no excuse to not tax the other.

 

The problem isn't pointing out other industries that also need to be taxed, its the fact that they won't tax any of them.

[FMBI]

It derails it, because 90% of the "debates" you see on TV consist of everyone trying to stuff as many sound bites in as possible, and end up with the last word. If you can jam something like that in the debate, then your opponent has to react to that, he can't carry on with a serious discussion, or else he'll look "stupid."

 

 

I agree about them not taxing anyone. But it's still quite galling when you hear people bragging about how they'll end the "death tax" that affects almost no one, or drop corporate tax rates to "encourage American ingenuity," and then you watch their polling numbers go up. It's beyond bizarre.

[NBVegita]

The problem with your argument is that debates on public television aren't where these things are decided.

[FMBI]

The problem with your argument is that debates on public television aren't where these things are decided.

 

Not true. A handful of corporations (often the same corporations that lobby the heaviest) have near-complete control of the news*, so whatever they choose to give airtime to will become a political issue. Witness offshore drilling - regardless of its long-term merits (and they are few indeed, unless the fields are nationalized), more than half of all Americans believed it would have an immediate effect on prices.

 

If you can have that many people believing something so obviously wrong, simply because it's a "populist issue" the media wants to throw around, then distracting people by pointing out the "book smart elitists" (as Ail would put it) at the expense of the debate about the billionaire corporations in question should be no problem at all. As, indeed, it has proven to be - I talk to people on SS who are actually cheering for these companies.

 

I read an interesting analysis of this situation once - basically, the major news networks can heavily influence public opinion, which is then used as an excuse by politicians to enact stupid policies, which are then justified by flawed studies bankrolled by various lobbyists and corporations. So ultimately, the public debates are where this kind of thing is decided. If you lose that link in the chain, then the entire stupid-mob scenario would be much harder to put into play.

 

 

*While international news is much better in this respect, the vast majority of Americans are perfectly happy to flip on ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox for half an hour each evening and believe whatever they hear. That's not going to change for quite a few years, either.

[NBVegita]

But your problem is yet again that the American people don't make and p!@#$%^&* laws. We elect people to do that for us. Those people are the ones who don't get their information from television politics. Television politics are really only good for elections. As you said, people are so easily convinced by the news that they are easily influenced to what you want. If you came out with a news article on every station that said smoking was good for your health, half the americans would eat it up without a second thought. Over half the people in this country couldn't even tell you the last law that was passed or what the details of that law were. In an ideal world people would make the laws, but as it stands laws are made by legislatures that are influenced more by private interests than they are by the people and democratic process they represent.

 

Even if you are trying to say that people really do p!@#$%^&* laws, adding more companies that should also be taxed should just increase the taxation.

 

If people are willing to tax companies, why should mentioning that we don't tax a different group, stop them from wanting to tax anything?

 

The only way your theory works is you have two groups.

 

Group A is getting kickbacks from Companies A.

Group B is getting kickbacks from Companies B.

Group B wants to tax Comanies A.

Group A says well then we need to tax Companies B.

Each group wants their kickbacks so no one gets taxed.

 

And even at that, the problem isn't saying to tax both sets of companies, it's that no one will for fear of losing their kickbacks.

[AstroProdigy]

All of this won't change unless you 1) Put a heavy limit on how big media outlets can be and 2) Make it illegal for congressmen and senators to work for corporations and lobbying firms after their terms. Instead you can put them on the government payroll which is a small price to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been thrown away because they're looking to their years after public service. If this discourages lots of people from looking for public office then who cares? There are lots and lots of people eager to take their place.