Working Americans, for the most part, pay federal income taxes. Salaried workers have a portion of their pay withheld for federal income taxes every pay period. Small business owners and independent contractors are required to submit payments to the federal government throughout the year based on their projected income. Except for workers with low incomes, these federal taxes amount to a significant percentage of workers' earnings. In 2020, for example, the average American family paid
Just remembered as I check back in here 8 hours later, that my best friend in highschool would joke about a troublesome person,"they need a high colonic!" I didn't even know what that entailed but now know it's more thorough than an enema! [She was one of those who studied at Second City in Chicago, and became a paid Hollywood actress, mostly for comedy! Humor may be the highest virtue--it requires perspective!]
I studied improvisational acting at Second City too. Levels A thru E. I'm going back sometime.
"Hi Colonic" sounds like a martial-arts-themed fragrance from the seventies. But because it's "high," does that mean the colonic goes from the literal bottom to the literal top? Or at least throat level? Wait. Do I really want to know?
No. It's actually less messy...clear water flushed through the colon, and you don't see it come out because a practioner performs it. I have a feeling my friend's mother came up with that expression--she was a funny woman with a dry sense of humor.
Reagan cut that tax rate from 70% to 35% and Trump cut it to 21% and now claims we need it to only be 15%? Their only response to the yawning gap between expenses and revenue on the federal government‘a expense sheet is to say welp, we need to cut services even more!
No. While Biden was blocked from increasing taxes back to where they should be by Sinema and Manchin’s misplaced insistence on retaining the 60 votes filibuster cudgel that prevents a simple majority vote for almost everything in the Senate, we need to abolish the filibuster and fix so many things that need fixing, including tax rates and giving the IRS the funding it actually needs in order to hold corporations and rich people to account and make sure everyone pays their fair share.
We need to restore the government spreadsheet to where they were back in 1980, at a minimum. 45 years of starving society and starving the government is quite enough.
What's mystifying is how enraged people get at someone on welfare buying a steak while being A-OK with billionaires fleecing them by siphoning money from the Treasury into their pockets. I guess it's a melanin thing.
And buying one steak on welfare or SNAP isn’t even illegal! I would buy one flat of sushi and one single cupcake a month with my SNAP back in the days when I was eligible for $200 a month and had no other food money. I’m Disabled. That was my one treat for the month. And then the rest was the needfuls. It’s insane how poisioned people got from the Reaganite rhetoric. As designed, I suppose.
But you see, you were using "our hard earned taxpayer money" for something other than a metaphorical hair shirt. That's how these folks think. Even worse if you have dark skin
The sad part of changing the government is how many rePUGliCONs (& some dem’s) are in the government and we know what they want…stupid ppl who believe everything the tv says…or facebook…or twitter! Hey wait…putin is loving this reality…and it’s amazing how much big pharma is really pushing their drugs since ppl are not doing vaccines…geez did I mention the DEATH CULT want their constituents to die…have you seen the data…
Of course the aforementioned CEO's are effusive about their profits, gleeful about giving top level employees stock buybacks, and eager to lower their current tax rate! Meanwhile, the demands on our economy are constantly growing, and most of the demands are not negotiable--climate disasters, overflow of migrants who risk death to find their ways here because they are avoiding certain death in their native countries, and health emergencies (remember covid?) and outbreaks. Excessive wealth seems to always create heartlessness, indifference to others extreme suffering, and absence of generosity. For this reason alone, increasing the tax rate is appropriate. Thank you for the details about corporate taxation that help us to make clearer judgments and form wiser opinions.
I am not disagreeing with you, Valerie, but I think an Alternative Minimum Tax - just like us DNA-based people have, would be more effective. Set the normal rate as high as you wish, their accountants have already shown that to be meaningless. Set the AMT rate to 16% as a reward for their deviousness.
Our total frustration Valerie comes from this exact summation.
Where are the people who actually could make these changes. We can’t always put off until the next election. Tax and tax and tax and hire the people who know that this is the only fair answer. Hire well trained and honest employees.
Some days, like today, it's just overwhelming to see state governments turn down money for hungry children because it's charity. The same mindset looks at the tax breaks for wealthy corporations and billionaires and think they deserve a bigger tax cut, but that is just good business, not charity.
The divide between rich and poor widens in both money and heart.
The "welfare queens" or "kings" are the unspeakably rich. Yes, persons who work hard, take risks, sacrifice, develop products that improve out well being, demonstrate exceptional management skills, etc., do deserve ample compensation. They've EARNED IT. (Read: Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns, for example.) But beyond a certain point, the vast wealth simply is a massive market failure, as I think Adam Smith would agree. This distortion of market economics should be heavily taxed and invested in or returned to those whose contributions are the basis for the real economy and to help others who need the safety net for simple human decency and the benefits to all. BTW, I just read Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. I highly recommend it for her insights into why our country is as it is.
I think the distortion is worse than you imagine. If only rich people can afford to buy good stuff, then of course prices will have to rise in order to make a profit making good stuff. Selling to the masses of poor people requires having only the cheapest stuff and a larger profit margin. So everyone gets ripped off in the end, at the top and at the bottom. I wish rich people weren't so stupid.
In this case it’s economic policy, but notice how we’ve become so conditioned to reading pieces in which there is no consensus, let alone clear policy statements, to help voters determine Trump’s future actions. He has no principles or real policy ideas, of course—other than self-interest—but it’s just a given that voters don’t know what he’s going to do. And oracles like NYTimes, CNN, etc., pretty much OK with that.
When a politician doesn't have a publicly stated agenda, people make up what they want and imagine that's what the politician will do for them. Trump is a master at pretending to be everything for everyone when in fact he's just in it for himself _and_ he's not a good person that you can trust with that.
lol.... What difference does the tax rate matter if they NEVER pay taxes? None. The system isn't broken - it's rigged to the whopping sum of $50 trillion, and it's probably more than that! ------- "Beneath the surface of our financial system lies an unseen world worth trillions of dollars. Among today’s threats to democracy, it is one of the gravest and least acknowledged. A metastasizing culture of tax avoidance by corporations and the wealthy has weakened national values, institutions, and goals across the West while fueling inequality and empowering the enemies of democracy at home and abroad. Governments need to take dramatic action to close down this parallel financial system, criminalize its enablers, and reassert their sovereignty.
Only recently have headline-making insider leaks such as the Panama Papers (2016), Paradise Papers (2017), and Pandora Papers (2021) begun to lay bare the system’s workings. Millions of documents became available detailing the offshore dealings of companies such as Apple, Facebook, McDonald’s, and Walt Disney, as well as people such as British royals, former U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The totality of these revelations shows massive tax avoidance, the concealment of kleptocratic loot, and the systemic avoidance of the rule of law. These leaks have given us only a keyhole view into a much bigger industry, which the economist James Henry estimates at more than $50 trillion." ------- https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/13/capitalism-financial-secrecy-corruption-democracy/
What most American's "assume" is that Citizens United lets American corporations vote (i.e., llc's) - but is more insidious. The four Buckley walls are impenetrable and have allowed dictators, mob bosses, and heinous oligarchs to control American politics since 2014. They were definitely playing the long game and Justice John Robert is behind it ALL. ------ "The net result of the four Buckley walls was a strangely configured room where ideologically driven independents were privileged to spend as much campaign money as they wished, while candidates and political parties scrambled to raise contributions in relatively small amounts in order to deter “corruption.” The Buckley Court left some air in the room because the Court’s studiously vague definition of “corruption” or the “appearance of corruption” initially permitted the government to argue that allowing a hugely wealthy donor to exercise “undue influence” over elected officials based solely on campaign contributions not only eviscerated any concept of political equality, but it also resulted in both the reality and appearance of corrupting the very idea of representative government, by eroding the ability of elected officials to exercise genuinely independent judgment. That’s why aggregate limits on campaign contributions were upheld by the Buckley Court, and why aggregate contribution limits were assumed to be constitutional for forty years, until today.
Several Justices then set about trying to pump out that little bit of air, misreading Buckley by insisting that the only form of “corruption” that could justify contribution limits is quid pro quo corruption, already illegal as bribery or extortion. As Justice Breyer’s dissent in McCutcheon demonstrates, they failed for almost forty years, until they were successful in slipping a narrow definition of “corruption” into Citizens United as dictum. In McCutcheon, the Roberts plurality pivots on that dictum to seal up the last air hole. Under the plurality’s governing test (which is governing because the Thomas approach rejects even the risk of quid pro quo corruption as a justification for limiting contributions), prevention of narrowly defined quid pro quo corruption is the sole possible basis for limiting the size of campaign contributions, with independent expenditures continuing to be treated as wholly exempt from regulation because, in the eyes of five Justices, independent expenditures pose no risk of quid pro quo “corruption.” Once the government became trapped in that airless box, it proved impossible to persuade the plurality that aggregate contribution limits play a real role in preventing quid pro quo corruption, as long as the base limit on each individual contribution is adhered to. The argument is a simple one. If the base contribution limit defines the point at which a risk of quid pro quo corruption is present, adhering to that base limit should take care of the corruption risk, no matter how many base contributions are made, rendering the aggregate limits unnecessary. Watching the government twist in that airless room trying to build Rube Goldberg scenarios explaining how a $3.2 million aggregate contribution can seep down to individual candidates or entities in amounts that exceed the base limit would have been funny, if so much weren’t at stake. You knew that five Justices, dead set against the regulations, would reject the government’s scary stories as either unlikely, or subject to other forms of regulation. And that’s just what the McCutcheon plurality does, insisting that the real-world prospect of a single donor cutting a check for millions of dollars to an umbrella entity poses little or no risk that any of the money would find its way to constituent entities in ways that threaten quid pro quo corruption. After all, if you don’t believe that massive independent expenditures on behalf of a candidate pose a risk of electoral corruption, why would you be concerned that even unequal distribution of aggregate contributions poses a risk of quid pro quo corruption of any given recipient? Even on its own terms, the Roberts plurality simply ignores the fact that political decisions are not always, or even usually, the result of atomistic decisions by individual legislators. That was the initial vision of the Founders. All agree that the Founders’ vision did not survive the election of 1800, and that today’s politics take place in the shadow of collective decision-making by political parties, or other less formal political groupings. To the extent the Roberts plurality has a technical flaw, it is the failure to address the risk of quid pro quo corruption in the context of a deal with a group. But I’m afraid that train has left the station.
When the dust from the McCutcheon demolition settles, all that’s left are base contribution limits in a larger campaign finance system where America’s oligarchs can choose between unlimited independent expenditures and unlimited aggregate contributions to buy all the political influence they will ever need. The one good thing you can say about the opinion is that maybe it will re-direct some of the money now being expended as independent expenditures to the major political parties in the form of large aggregate contributions, giving candidates and parties a chance to regain some control of the electoral agenda. In that sense, McCutcheon improves the configuration of Buckley’s airless room, but leaves American democracy trapped at “one dollar, one vote.” There is no ignoring the fact that American democracy is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oligarchs, Inc."
Wow! Your comment was a sweeping indictment of Roberts and his influence. You also filled in knowledge gaps that I was unaware of having. I am in your debt. I'll check the link later. I work from home and right now I am earning my corn.
So....here's the thing -- John Roberts is not what America thinks he is. And, mainstream media will make sure we stay misinformed. "Fake Media" is all about protecting Trump and 30 years of rigging the system. Get ready for 135 pages of pop corn and juju bees fun! This is why we have Citizens United, a dysfunctional underfunded IRS, and more corporations in Delaware than there are legitimate residents. ------------------- "An Emblematic Ruling Illustrates The Long Con -
When Chief Justice John Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court almost two
decades ago, he was billed as the “go-to lawyer for the business community.” His
appointment was enthusiastically endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce, an
organization he had represented as a corporate attorney.
Since then, Roberts, his fellow conservative justices, and business interests have
been playing a long game to try to shield corporations from accountability — and
one of this week’s rulings illustrates how that game has unfolded.
Thirty years ago, casino magnate Donald Trump helped create a dangerous legal
precedent that made it far harder for investors to sue Wall Street firms when
those firms use fine print to mislead them with rosy financial projections and
promises. In that case — which revolved around assurances that Trump’s
company made to investors before they lost their money — Trump secured a
landmark ruling from future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
Two decades later, Goldman Sachs was telling clients in investment documents
that it has “extensive procedures and controls that are designed to identify and
address conflicts of interest.” But then the firm was exposed for betting against
the mortgage investments it was selling its clients. During a congressional
hearing on the topic, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) grilled a top Goldman executive
about the fact that he had pushed investments on clients that he had referred to
in an email to a colleague as a “shitty deal.”
Goldman investors led by Arkansas’ teachers pension fund sued — and this week,
the Supreme Court effectively solidified the original Trump doctrine. In an
opinion written by Justice Barrett, the high court tossed out the class action
lawsuit that aimed to hold Goldman accountable.
“The plaintiffs said that when they bought Goldman shares they relied upon the
bank's statements about its ethical principles and internal controls against
conflicts of interest, and its pledge that its ‘clients' interests always come first,’”
Reuters reported. “Goldman argued that these ‘aspirational’ statements were too
vague and general to have had any impact on the stock price.”
The Supreme Court agreed to send the case back to a lower court — delivering a
huge victory to Goldman and Wall Street firms aiming to limit their exposure to
shareholder lawsuits.
The ruling was the latest in a series of decisions that don’t merely side with the
Chamber of Commerce, but that deny basic standing to plaintiffs that bring cases
against big companies. Rather than rule on the issues at hand, the high court has
often either ruled that cases cannot move forward, or that lower courts must
impose higher thresholds on plaintiffs that seek redress from big companies.
As the Constitutional Accountability Center put it: “Chief Justice Roberts’s legacy
when it comes to access-to-courts issues will be one of closing the courthouse
Yeah.... it just keeps getting better and better. ---- "‘Pandora’s box’
In December 2018, the Bahamas enacted legislation requiring companies and certain trusts to declare their real owners to a government registry. The island nation was under pressure from larger countries, including the U.S., to do more to block tax dodgers and criminals from the financial system.
Some Bahamian politicians opposed the move. They complained the register would discourage Latin American clients from doing business in the Caribbean. “The winners of these new double standards are the U.S. states of Delaware, Alaska and South Dakota,” one local attorney said.
Months later, a confidential document indicated that the family of the Dominican Republic’s former Vice President Carlos Morales Troncoso had abandoned the Bahamas as a go-to sanctuary for their wealth.
For their new refuge, they chose a place 1,600 miles away: Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
The family set up South Dakota trusts, leaked records show, to lay away various assets, including shares they’d held in a Dominican sugar company. The family did not respond to questions about the assets moved from the Bahamas to South Dakota.
The Pandora Papers provide details about tens of millions of dollars moved from offshore havens in the Caribbean and Europe into South Dakota, a sparsely populated American state that has become a major destination for foreign assets."
I wonder if King Abdullah II (aka: "You know who") did any shopping after his photo op with President Biden today? Greed is the incurable disease and power is the asymptomatic carrier. It must be a maddening frustration for the journalists at ICIJ.
The fact remains that the very people (voters) who need to hear and accept this as the truth are so far removed from reality, thanks to their affinity to a dictator-wannabe and his cult, that this is like spitting into the wind in a hurricane. THAT is the real problem.
So, basically, Citizens United anointed corporations as individuals for the purpose of campaign contributions. But these corporations don’t have to pay taxes - even without the loopholes, at the same rate as individuals. I wonder if individuals can incorporate themselves and get in on that action?
I'm guessing most of the imbalance is due to tax-loss carryforwards. The correct approach would be setting some minimum tax rate that limits how quickly tax-loss carryforwards can be used.
I don't think corporations should be paying high taxes. The left hates to hear it, but corporations DO employ people. We should encourage corporate investment with low tax rates. The problem is that corporations don't use tax savings to grow/improve their business. The problem is personal enrichment, and the expectation that shareholders should see 20% Y/Y returns. We want to encourage corporate investment, while discouraging efforts to siphon money into personal bank and brokerage accounts.
It is possible to encourage investment AND discourage grift: reinstate the ban on stock buybacks, peg executive compensation to some multiple of the lowest-paid employee (e.g. 40:1, incl. the par value of stock options), force boards to seat 50% mid- and low-level employees on a rotating basis, trim LLC protections for mismanaged companies, etc. As long as corporate investments are invested, instead of stolen, the capital is more productive in the private sector than it is routed through DC.
Define "high" corporate tax rates. Depending on how you do, we may not need for corporations to be paying high taxes, but we certainly need them to be paying _higher_ taxes.
As for your claim that "the capital is more productive in the private sector than it is routed through DC," it flies in the face of research on everything from public services to homelessness.
It depends. If it's high enough to incentivize executives to establish complex offshore tax evasion schemes, it's too high. If it's high enough to discourage investment in the core business, thereby incentivizing stock buybacks and executive bonuses, it's too high... in other words, it's generally too high. IMO, corporate taxes should be progressive, starting at single-digit percentages for small businesses, up to perhaps 10% for a large corporation (flat, no loopholes).
My plan basically boils down to: don't tax the business. Tax individuals for taking money out of the business, for themselves.
Re: Research says public spending > private sector financial flows
It sure does, but this entire body of research depends on deeply flawed assumptions. It's not gospel; it's only true in a specific context. IF corporations do not use tax savings to grow their core business, then yes, that money is better in the hands of the government. Unfortunately, that is our reality, so in our current context I agree with the research.
However, if we structure incentives such that growing the core business is always the best use of capital, it is much better to grow the private sector than the government. We want corporations paying living wages, not taxes. The taxes are a band-aid, to compensate for the fact that our incentive structures make paying a living wage less appealing than stock buybacks. To be clear, high corporate tax rates *are one of those bad incentives.* If shareholders want to grow the business, hire more, raise wages, etc. *we should let them.* We should make those choices easier. Instead we discourage them by extracting tax revenue from corporate investments (among other poor policy choices).
We need executives to think, "let's hire a thousand new employees and raise wages" with surplus capital, rather than thinking, "let's buy back our stock and harvest the higher valuations for ourselves." ... If shareholders want to grow the business, hire more, raise wages, etc. *we should let them.*
Let's be very clear: Nothing, NOTHING is stopping executives from doing those things now -- not even marginal corporate income-tax rates. Instead, executives have eaten more at the trough every year, regardless of how their companies or the overall markets perform, such that the ratio of a CEO's pay to a company's lowest paid worker, which averaged about 40:1 40 or so years ago, is up over 300:1 today. Executives do not respond to incentives not to gorge themselves; if they did, they'd have done it by now.
You're missing the point. Nothing is stopping executives from putting revenues back into the business, but nothing is stopping them from distributing it to a small group of shareholders either. Therefore, you need better incentive structures.
Did my comment make it sound like I believed companies would self-regulate? Because that is insane, and I would never say that. The state must play a role. The question is, which role?
You are making my point for me here: "The ratio of CEO pay has gone up from 40:1 to 300:1"
Yes. Those are the kinds of incentives we need to change: the ones that enrich individual executives at the expense of investments in labor, quality, safety, sustainability, expansion, etc.
The state can play a few different roles to address this concern, all of them coercive. The left more-or-less coalesces around the opinion that the best option is for the state to force companies to pay more taxes so the wealth can be filtered back to the working class through middlemen bureaucracies. I believe that the state should (among other things), make it illegal for executives to earn more than 40:1 their lowest-paid employee, and force them to bring low-level employees onto corporate boards, so companies distribute their wealth to the working class and their communities by default.
The last 40+ years of Neoliberal ideas and Neoliberal propaganda have tricked us in our society. The numbers are in and can be compared to the prior 40 years. Robert Reich and Thom Hartmann write wonderful economic substacks about how and what has happened.
Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut together with Trump’s inept, incompetent, arrogant handling of Covid and corporate greed are the primary causes of the massive inflation we experienced right after President Biden was elected our President.
I’m sorry but if ppl can’t figure why the rich whiny white rePUGliCONs want this and they control the media…DUH AND WATCHING NEWS, EVEN MSNBC IS MAKING ME FAST FORWARD THRU THE ORANGE CHEETO…SO IM NOT LISTENING…how many other ppl are doing the same. It feels like the democratic party doesn’t care because it will benefit black ppl. Melbar did a graph on wealth and white ppl got more wealth, ppl of Latin America made more than black ppl…seriously man this is such a joke!
Make no mistake, republicans and democrats are opposite sides of the same coin. Yes, I am aware of one party trying to enslave us, but the duopoly of the two parties is a huge problem.
It is in effect a coalition government, many interests focused into two parties, one that leans left and one that veers toward the black hole of fascism. If you had four or five parties 'coalescing', the result would be the same. The point is to save the democracy and tax those with the money before it's too late. All it takes is for the people to understand that all profits and savings throughout the system are taxes paid by all of us but not yet remitted to the government.
1). Why do corporations have more rights than people?
2). Why do these mope advisors refer to tfg as "the president?"
3). Does this country need an enema. Y/N?
Y
Noted.
1) corporations (whiny white rich rePUGliCONs) own the media=Propaganda baby!
2) check out Naomi Wolf’s “The End of America”. You WILL BE SCARED SHITLESS! Progressives, liberals…watch out next time you want to fly somewhere!
3) YES, SEVERAL OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME!
1) Because they bribe public officials.
2) Because they're part of a cult.
3) No, "this country" does not, but the Republican Party for damned sure does.
Agreed. For damn sure indeed! Republican Party=Criminal Organization
Just remembered as I check back in here 8 hours later, that my best friend in highschool would joke about a troublesome person,"they need a high colonic!" I didn't even know what that entailed but now know it's more thorough than an enema! [She was one of those who studied at Second City in Chicago, and became a paid Hollywood actress, mostly for comedy! Humor may be the highest virtue--it requires perspective!]
I studied improvisational acting at Second City too. Levels A thru E. I'm going back sometime.
"Hi Colonic" sounds like a martial-arts-themed fragrance from the seventies. But because it's "high," does that mean the colonic goes from the literal bottom to the literal top? Or at least throat level? Wait. Do I really want to know?
I read it to the rhythm of "My Sharona." Now that's going to be stuck in my head all night!
Hahahahaha!
Hi Collanic! Dadada Dada Dah Dah Dah Dah Dada Dah (repeat ad infinitum)
No. It's actually less messy...clear water flushed through the colon, and you don't see it come out because a practioner performs it. I have a feeling my friend's mother came up with that expression--she was a funny woman with a dry sense of humor.
Great that you studied at Second City!
Y
Hahaha! Noted. Kin we dump offal on head of t-rmp?
Yes!!!!!
All of the above izzit?
Y
Noted.
Reagan cut that tax rate from 70% to 35% and Trump cut it to 21% and now claims we need it to only be 15%? Their only response to the yawning gap between expenses and revenue on the federal government‘a expense sheet is to say welp, we need to cut services even more!
No. While Biden was blocked from increasing taxes back to where they should be by Sinema and Manchin’s misplaced insistence on retaining the 60 votes filibuster cudgel that prevents a simple majority vote for almost everything in the Senate, we need to abolish the filibuster and fix so many things that need fixing, including tax rates and giving the IRS the funding it actually needs in order to hold corporations and rich people to account and make sure everyone pays their fair share.
We need to restore the government spreadsheet to where they were back in 1980, at a minimum. 45 years of starving society and starving the government is quite enough.
What's mystifying is how enraged people get at someone on welfare buying a steak while being A-OK with billionaires fleecing them by siphoning money from the Treasury into their pockets. I guess it's a melanin thing.
And buying one steak on welfare or SNAP isn’t even illegal! I would buy one flat of sushi and one single cupcake a month with my SNAP back in the days when I was eligible for $200 a month and had no other food money. I’m Disabled. That was my one treat for the month. And then the rest was the needfuls. It’s insane how poisioned people got from the Reaganite rhetoric. As designed, I suppose.
But you see, you were using "our hard earned taxpayer money" for something other than a metaphorical hair shirt. That's how these folks think. Even worse if you have dark skin
"Even worse if you have dark skin!"
You're damn right! And I'm NOT talking bout Shaaft.
? Black Skin thing?
The sad part of changing the government is how many rePUGliCONs (& some dem’s) are in the government and we know what they want…stupid ppl who believe everything the tv says…or facebook…or twitter! Hey wait…putin is loving this reality…and it’s amazing how much big pharma is really pushing their drugs since ppl are not doing vaccines…geez did I mention the DEATH CULT want their constituents to die…have you seen the data…
Of course the aforementioned CEO's are effusive about their profits, gleeful about giving top level employees stock buybacks, and eager to lower their current tax rate! Meanwhile, the demands on our economy are constantly growing, and most of the demands are not negotiable--climate disasters, overflow of migrants who risk death to find their ways here because they are avoiding certain death in their native countries, and health emergencies (remember covid?) and outbreaks. Excessive wealth seems to always create heartlessness, indifference to others extreme suffering, and absence of generosity. For this reason alone, increasing the tax rate is appropriate. Thank you for the details about corporate taxation that help us to make clearer judgments and form wiser opinions.
“the demands on our economy are constantly growing, and most of the demands are not negotiable--climate disasters, overflow of migrants...”
You forgot to mention the bloated military budget that continues to grow year after year after year.
I am not disagreeing with you, Valerie, but I think an Alternative Minimum Tax - just like us DNA-based people have, would be more effective. Set the normal rate as high as you wish, their accountants have already shown that to be meaningless. Set the AMT rate to 16% as a reward for their deviousness.
Our total frustration Valerie comes from this exact summation.
Where are the people who actually could make these changes. We can’t always put off until the next election. Tax and tax and tax and hire the people who know that this is the only fair answer. Hire well trained and honest employees.
Some days, like today, it's just overwhelming to see state governments turn down money for hungry children because it's charity. The same mindset looks at the tax breaks for wealthy corporations and billionaires and think they deserve a bigger tax cut, but that is just good business, not charity.
The divide between rich and poor widens in both money and heart.
The "welfare queens" or "kings" are the unspeakably rich. Yes, persons who work hard, take risks, sacrifice, develop products that improve out well being, demonstrate exceptional management skills, etc., do deserve ample compensation. They've EARNED IT. (Read: Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns, for example.) But beyond a certain point, the vast wealth simply is a massive market failure, as I think Adam Smith would agree. This distortion of market economics should be heavily taxed and invested in or returned to those whose contributions are the basis for the real economy and to help others who need the safety net for simple human decency and the benefits to all. BTW, I just read Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. I highly recommend it for her insights into why our country is as it is.
And, Ava DuVernay has made a personalized (real peoples' stories) version of Caste!
I think the distortion is worse than you imagine. If only rich people can afford to buy good stuff, then of course prices will have to rise in order to make a profit making good stuff. Selling to the masses of poor people requires having only the cheapest stuff and a larger profit margin. So everyone gets ripped off in the end, at the top and at the bottom. I wish rich people weren't so stupid.
In this case it’s economic policy, but notice how we’ve become so conditioned to reading pieces in which there is no consensus, let alone clear policy statements, to help voters determine Trump’s future actions. He has no principles or real policy ideas, of course—other than self-interest—but it’s just a given that voters don’t know what he’s going to do. And oracles like NYTimes, CNN, etc., pretty much OK with that.
When a politician doesn't have a publicly stated agenda, people make up what they want and imagine that's what the politician will do for them. Trump is a master at pretending to be everything for everyone when in fact he's just in it for himself _and_ he's not a good person that you can trust with that.
lol.... What difference does the tax rate matter if they NEVER pay taxes? None. The system isn't broken - it's rigged to the whopping sum of $50 trillion, and it's probably more than that! ------- "Beneath the surface of our financial system lies an unseen world worth trillions of dollars. Among today’s threats to democracy, it is one of the gravest and least acknowledged. A metastasizing culture of tax avoidance by corporations and the wealthy has weakened national values, institutions, and goals across the West while fueling inequality and empowering the enemies of democracy at home and abroad. Governments need to take dramatic action to close down this parallel financial system, criminalize its enablers, and reassert their sovereignty.
Only recently have headline-making insider leaks such as the Panama Papers (2016), Paradise Papers (2017), and Pandora Papers (2021) begun to lay bare the system’s workings. Millions of documents became available detailing the offshore dealings of companies such as Apple, Facebook, McDonald’s, and Walt Disney, as well as people such as British royals, former U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The totality of these revelations shows massive tax avoidance, the concealment of kleptocratic loot, and the systemic avoidance of the rule of law. These leaks have given us only a keyhole view into a much bigger industry, which the economist James Henry estimates at more than $50 trillion." ------- https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/13/capitalism-financial-secrecy-corruption-democracy/
Thanks for the link. I read the excellent article which prompted me to sign up for FP.
What most American's "assume" is that Citizens United lets American corporations vote (i.e., llc's) - but is more insidious. The four Buckley walls are impenetrable and have allowed dictators, mob bosses, and heinous oligarchs to control American politics since 2014. They were definitely playing the long game and Justice John Robert is behind it ALL. ------ "The net result of the four Buckley walls was a strangely configured room where ideologically driven independents were privileged to spend as much campaign money as they wished, while candidates and political parties scrambled to raise contributions in relatively small amounts in order to deter “corruption.” The Buckley Court left some air in the room because the Court’s studiously vague definition of “corruption” or the “appearance of corruption” initially permitted the government to argue that allowing a hugely wealthy donor to exercise “undue influence” over elected officials based solely on campaign contributions not only eviscerated any concept of political equality, but it also resulted in both the reality and appearance of corrupting the very idea of representative government, by eroding the ability of elected officials to exercise genuinely independent judgment. That’s why aggregate limits on campaign contributions were upheld by the Buckley Court, and why aggregate contribution limits were assumed to be constitutional for forty years, until today.
Several Justices then set about trying to pump out that little bit of air, misreading Buckley by insisting that the only form of “corruption” that could justify contribution limits is quid pro quo corruption, already illegal as bribery or extortion. As Justice Breyer’s dissent in McCutcheon demonstrates, they failed for almost forty years, until they were successful in slipping a narrow definition of “corruption” into Citizens United as dictum. In McCutcheon, the Roberts plurality pivots on that dictum to seal up the last air hole. Under the plurality’s governing test (which is governing because the Thomas approach rejects even the risk of quid pro quo corruption as a justification for limiting contributions), prevention of narrowly defined quid pro quo corruption is the sole possible basis for limiting the size of campaign contributions, with independent expenditures continuing to be treated as wholly exempt from regulation because, in the eyes of five Justices, independent expenditures pose no risk of quid pro quo “corruption.” Once the government became trapped in that airless box, it proved impossible to persuade the plurality that aggregate contribution limits play a real role in preventing quid pro quo corruption, as long as the base limit on each individual contribution is adhered to. The argument is a simple one. If the base contribution limit defines the point at which a risk of quid pro quo corruption is present, adhering to that base limit should take care of the corruption risk, no matter how many base contributions are made, rendering the aggregate limits unnecessary. Watching the government twist in that airless room trying to build Rube Goldberg scenarios explaining how a $3.2 million aggregate contribution can seep down to individual candidates or entities in amounts that exceed the base limit would have been funny, if so much weren’t at stake. You knew that five Justices, dead set against the regulations, would reject the government’s scary stories as either unlikely, or subject to other forms of regulation. And that’s just what the McCutcheon plurality does, insisting that the real-world prospect of a single donor cutting a check for millions of dollars to an umbrella entity poses little or no risk that any of the money would find its way to constituent entities in ways that threaten quid pro quo corruption. After all, if you don’t believe that massive independent expenditures on behalf of a candidate pose a risk of electoral corruption, why would you be concerned that even unequal distribution of aggregate contributions poses a risk of quid pro quo corruption of any given recipient? Even on its own terms, the Roberts plurality simply ignores the fact that political decisions are not always, or even usually, the result of atomistic decisions by individual legislators. That was the initial vision of the Founders. All agree that the Founders’ vision did not survive the election of 1800, and that today’s politics take place in the shadow of collective decision-making by political parties, or other less formal political groupings. To the extent the Roberts plurality has a technical flaw, it is the failure to address the risk of quid pro quo corruption in the context of a deal with a group. But I’m afraid that train has left the station.
When the dust from the McCutcheon demolition settles, all that’s left are base contribution limits in a larger campaign finance system where America’s oligarchs can choose between unlimited independent expenditures and unlimited aggregate contributions to buy all the political influence they will ever need. The one good thing you can say about the opinion is that maybe it will re-direct some of the money now being expended as independent expenditures to the major political parties in the form of large aggregate contributions, giving candidates and parties a chance to regain some control of the electoral agenda. In that sense, McCutcheon improves the configuration of Buckley’s airless room, but leaves American democracy trapped at “one dollar, one vote.” There is no ignoring the fact that American democracy is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oligarchs, Inc."
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/welcome-oligarchs-united
Wow! Your comment was a sweeping indictment of Roberts and his influence. You also filled in knowledge gaps that I was unaware of having. I am in your debt. I'll check the link later. I work from home and right now I am earning my corn.
So....here's the thing -- John Roberts is not what America thinks he is. And, mainstream media will make sure we stay misinformed. "Fake Media" is all about protecting Trump and 30 years of rigging the system. Get ready for 135 pages of pop corn and juju bees fun! This is why we have Citizens United, a dysfunctional underfunded IRS, and more corporations in Delaware than there are legitimate residents. ------------------- "An Emblematic Ruling Illustrates The Long Con -
When Chief Justice John Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court almost two
decades ago, he was billed as the “go-to lawyer for the business community.” His
appointment was enthusiastically endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce, an
organization he had represented as a corporate attorney.
Since then, Roberts, his fellow conservative justices, and business interests have
been playing a long game to try to shield corporations from accountability — and
one of this week’s rulings illustrates how that game has unfolded.
Thirty years ago, casino magnate Donald Trump helped create a dangerous legal
precedent that made it far harder for investors to sue Wall Street firms when
those firms use fine print to mislead them with rosy financial projections and
promises. In that case — which revolved around assurances that Trump’s
company made to investors before they lost their money — Trump secured a
landmark ruling from future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
Two decades later, Goldman Sachs was telling clients in investment documents
that it has “extensive procedures and controls that are designed to identify and
address conflicts of interest.” But then the firm was exposed for betting against
the mortgage investments it was selling its clients. During a congressional
hearing on the topic, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) grilled a top Goldman executive
about the fact that he had pushed investments on clients that he had referred to
in an email to a colleague as a “shitty deal.”
Goldman investors led by Arkansas’ teachers pension fund sued — and this week,
the Supreme Court effectively solidified the original Trump doctrine. In an
opinion written by Justice Barrett, the high court tossed out the class action
lawsuit that aimed to hold Goldman accountable.
“The plaintiffs said that when they bought Goldman shares they relied upon the
bank's statements about its ethical principles and internal controls against
conflicts of interest, and its pledge that its ‘clients' interests always come first,’”
Reuters reported. “Goldman argued that these ‘aspirational’ statements were too
vague and general to have had any impact on the stock price.”
The Supreme Court agreed to send the case back to a lower court — delivering a
huge victory to Goldman and Wall Street firms aiming to limit their exposure to
shareholder lawsuits.
The ruling was the latest in a series of decisions that don’t merely side with the
Chamber of Commerce, but that deny basic standing to plaintiffs that bring cases
against big companies. Rather than rule on the issues at hand, the high court has
often either ruled that cases cannot move forward, or that lower courts must
impose higher thresholds on plaintiffs that seek redress from big companies.
As the Constitutional Accountability Center put it: “Chief Justice Roberts’s legacy
when it comes to access-to-courts issues will be one of closing the courthouse
doors as much as possible.”
https://www.levernews.com/content/files/2022/07/John-Roberts-Revolution_A-Lever-Reader.pdf
Thanks for the link; good article.
Yeah.... it just keeps getting better and better. ---- "‘Pandora’s box’
In December 2018, the Bahamas enacted legislation requiring companies and certain trusts to declare their real owners to a government registry. The island nation was under pressure from larger countries, including the U.S., to do more to block tax dodgers and criminals from the financial system.
Some Bahamian politicians opposed the move. They complained the register would discourage Latin American clients from doing business in the Caribbean. “The winners of these new double standards are the U.S. states of Delaware, Alaska and South Dakota,” one local attorney said.
Months later, a confidential document indicated that the family of the Dominican Republic’s former Vice President Carlos Morales Troncoso had abandoned the Bahamas as a go-to sanctuary for their wealth.
For their new refuge, they chose a place 1,600 miles away: Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
The family set up South Dakota trusts, leaked records show, to lay away various assets, including shares they’d held in a Dominican sugar company. The family did not respond to questions about the assets moved from the Bahamas to South Dakota.
The Pandora Papers provide details about tens of millions of dollars moved from offshore havens in the Caribbean and Europe into South Dakota, a sparsely populated American state that has become a major destination for foreign assets."
https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/global-investigation-tax-havens-offshore/
I wonder if King Abdullah II (aka: "You know who") did any shopping after his photo op with President Biden today? Greed is the incurable disease and power is the asymptomatic carrier. It must be a maddening frustration for the journalists at ICIJ.
I can feel 600 journalists' heads exploding all at the same time. Augh!
The fact remains that the very people (voters) who need to hear and accept this as the truth are so far removed from reality, thanks to their affinity to a dictator-wannabe and his cult, that this is like spitting into the wind in a hurricane. THAT is the real problem.
So, basically, Citizens United anointed corporations as individuals for the purpose of campaign contributions. But these corporations don’t have to pay taxes - even without the loopholes, at the same rate as individuals. I wonder if individuals can incorporate themselves and get in on that action?
And Americans wonder why they are paying higher prices for goods and services. We are being price gouged left and right. Greedflation.
I'm guessing most of the imbalance is due to tax-loss carryforwards. The correct approach would be setting some minimum tax rate that limits how quickly tax-loss carryforwards can be used.
'Corporations are people, my friend.' Romney, not Ronna Romney
I don't think corporations should be paying high taxes. The left hates to hear it, but corporations DO employ people. We should encourage corporate investment with low tax rates. The problem is that corporations don't use tax savings to grow/improve their business. The problem is personal enrichment, and the expectation that shareholders should see 20% Y/Y returns. We want to encourage corporate investment, while discouraging efforts to siphon money into personal bank and brokerage accounts.
It is possible to encourage investment AND discourage grift: reinstate the ban on stock buybacks, peg executive compensation to some multiple of the lowest-paid employee (e.g. 40:1, incl. the par value of stock options), force boards to seat 50% mid- and low-level employees on a rotating basis, trim LLC protections for mismanaged companies, etc. As long as corporate investments are invested, instead of stolen, the capital is more productive in the private sector than it is routed through DC.
Define "high" corporate tax rates. Depending on how you do, we may not need for corporations to be paying high taxes, but we certainly need them to be paying _higher_ taxes.
As for your claim that "the capital is more productive in the private sector than it is routed through DC," it flies in the face of research on everything from public services to homelessness.
Re: Define "high" corporate tax rates
It depends. If it's high enough to incentivize executives to establish complex offshore tax evasion schemes, it's too high. If it's high enough to discourage investment in the core business, thereby incentivizing stock buybacks and executive bonuses, it's too high... in other words, it's generally too high. IMO, corporate taxes should be progressive, starting at single-digit percentages for small businesses, up to perhaps 10% for a large corporation (flat, no loopholes).
My plan basically boils down to: don't tax the business. Tax individuals for taking money out of the business, for themselves.
Re: Research says public spending > private sector financial flows
It sure does, but this entire body of research depends on deeply flawed assumptions. It's not gospel; it's only true in a specific context. IF corporations do not use tax savings to grow their core business, then yes, that money is better in the hands of the government. Unfortunately, that is our reality, so in our current context I agree with the research.
However, if we structure incentives such that growing the core business is always the best use of capital, it is much better to grow the private sector than the government. We want corporations paying living wages, not taxes. The taxes are a band-aid, to compensate for the fact that our incentive structures make paying a living wage less appealing than stock buybacks. To be clear, high corporate tax rates *are one of those bad incentives.* If shareholders want to grow the business, hire more, raise wages, etc. *we should let them.* We should make those choices easier. Instead we discourage them by extracting tax revenue from corporate investments (among other poor policy choices).
We need executives to think, "let's hire a thousand new employees and raise wages" with surplus capital, rather than thinking, "let's buy back our stock and harvest the higher valuations for ourselves." ... If shareholders want to grow the business, hire more, raise wages, etc. *we should let them.*
Let's be very clear: Nothing, NOTHING is stopping executives from doing those things now -- not even marginal corporate income-tax rates. Instead, executives have eaten more at the trough every year, regardless of how their companies or the overall markets perform, such that the ratio of a CEO's pay to a company's lowest paid worker, which averaged about 40:1 40 or so years ago, is up over 300:1 today. Executives do not respond to incentives not to gorge themselves; if they did, they'd have done it by now.
You're missing the point. Nothing is stopping executives from putting revenues back into the business, but nothing is stopping them from distributing it to a small group of shareholders either. Therefore, you need better incentive structures.
Did my comment make it sound like I believed companies would self-regulate? Because that is insane, and I would never say that. The state must play a role. The question is, which role?
You are making my point for me here: "The ratio of CEO pay has gone up from 40:1 to 300:1"
Yes. Those are the kinds of incentives we need to change: the ones that enrich individual executives at the expense of investments in labor, quality, safety, sustainability, expansion, etc.
The state can play a few different roles to address this concern, all of them coercive. The left more-or-less coalesces around the opinion that the best option is for the state to force companies to pay more taxes so the wealth can be filtered back to the working class through middlemen bureaucracies. I believe that the state should (among other things), make it illegal for executives to earn more than 40:1 their lowest-paid employee, and force them to bring low-level employees onto corporate boards, so companies distribute their wealth to the working class and their communities by default.
The last 40+ years of Neoliberal ideas and Neoliberal propaganda have tricked us in our society. The numbers are in and can be compared to the prior 40 years. Robert Reich and Thom Hartmann write wonderful economic substacks about how and what has happened.
Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut together with Trump’s inept, incompetent, arrogant handling of Covid and corporate greed are the primary causes of the massive inflation we experienced right after President Biden was elected our President.
I’m sorry but if ppl can’t figure why the rich whiny white rePUGliCONs want this and they control the media…DUH AND WATCHING NEWS, EVEN MSNBC IS MAKING ME FAST FORWARD THRU THE ORANGE CHEETO…SO IM NOT LISTENING…how many other ppl are doing the same. It feels like the democratic party doesn’t care because it will benefit black ppl. Melbar did a graph on wealth and white ppl got more wealth, ppl of Latin America made more than black ppl…seriously man this is such a joke!
Make no mistake, republicans and democrats are opposite sides of the same coin. Yes, I am aware of one party trying to enslave us, but the duopoly of the two parties is a huge problem.
It is in effect a coalition government, many interests focused into two parties, one that leans left and one that veers toward the black hole of fascism. If you had four or five parties 'coalescing', the result would be the same. The point is to save the democracy and tax those with the money before it's too late. All it takes is for the people to understand that all profits and savings throughout the system are taxes paid by all of us but not yet remitted to the government.
When America was “great” (1952) the corporate tax rate was 90%.