The congratulations, Mr. or Ms. High Roller! You paid more in Federal taxes than did CitiBank, JPMorganChase, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Boeing, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and probably a shitload of other big corporations--combined!
That's correct. You paid more to the Treasury than all of those fuckers. And all of those bastards either received large bailouts or are large contractors. Boeing is going to make billions and billions on the KC-X contract, but they won't pay any Federal taxes while they are doing it.
Something is seriously wrong here. But nothing will change, between the spineless Democrats who quake in their shoes whenever somebody says something mean about them to the Republicans who scream "Gays! Guns! God! Abortion! Illegal Aliens! Sharia Law!" whenever it is pointed out that they do nothing that does not serve the interests of the wealthy and the corporations.
We are really pretty much screwed.
The Price is WRONG.
15 minutes ago
13 comments:
The general effects of combining the tea stained thugs and money.
Their motto, mine, mine, mine, and their goal Think of the Pink Floyd tune Money that and Pigs on the wing.
Eck!
And they all paid less than I, an unemployed ex-software engineer (who lost her job to outsourcing years ago) who was paid a pittance during the year as a part-time computer repair person.
Thanks for mentioning it.
Corporations don't pay taxes. The taxes are passed along to the purchaser of their goods and/or services or a reduction is made in the dividend payout to the stockholders.
Either way, people pay.
Lower the corporate tax rate to zero and see how may jobs are created.
I'm guessing "none".
Anyway, corporations are people, or so say Johnnie Roberts and the Supremes. They have freedom of speech and the right to pour unlimited amounts of money into political campaigns.
They goddamn well can pay some taxes.
Corporate income taxes accounted for around 30% of income taxes collected in 1950, whereas they account for only around 7% of income tax collections today. Interesting figure, hmm?
As for the notion that corporations shouldn't pay taxes because they'll just pass the taxes thru to the consumer anyhow, I call bullshit on that. Prices are set by the market, corporations can't just pass costs thru unless they have monopolies. And if a corporation has a monopoly we're fucked anyhow.
If we tax corporations at the 1950 levels again, all that happens is that corporations have less capital to stash away as excess profits -- over $2 *TRILLION* in cash that corporations are sitting on and doing nothing with. And frankly, I'd rather that $2 trillion be back in circulation in the economy actually doing shit than have it sitting under fat corporate asses who are fondling their piles of gold while jacking off on the rest of us. And if you find this rant to be shrill, good.
- Badtux the Shrill Penguin
Oh yeah, as for the cretinous dimwit above who says that if you lower corporate taxes to zero, corporations will create more jobs: You stupid ass motherfucker, CORPORATIONS do not create jobs. *DEMAND* creates jobs. Corporations are sitting on TRILLIONS of dollars of money right now and NOT CREATING A SINGLE GODDAMNED JOB WITH IT because, look. You seem to be ignorant of the most rudimentary and FUNDAMENTAL law of business, which is that YOU DON'T HIRE UNLESS YOU GOT DEMAND TO JUSTIFY HIRING because the whole POINT of a business is to maximize profits. Corporations are not welfare agencies. They don't hire people just out of the goodness of their hearts. They hire people because they HAVE to hire people, otherwise they have no product to sell. And if demand for their product is low, it doesn't matter HOW many trillions in tax breaks you give them -- they will hire NO workers. None. Zero. Nada. ZILCH.
You don't have to believe me. In fact, please DON'T believe me. Believe the actual DATA. Because the DATA says that anybody who says that corporations will hire just because they have money is a LYING COCKSUCKER WHO PROBABLY LICKS HIS CORPORATE MASTER'S ASS EVERY MORNING and then takes it up the rear while cheerfully saying "Thank you sire, give me more!" Because the data says that corporations are already sitting on trillions of dollars and doing nothing -- nada -- zero -- hiring with it. What, you think giving them two MORE trillions will make them suddenly start hiring out of the goodness of their heart? If you believe in such a deranged notion, you're either the dumbest motherfucker on this whole goddamned planet, or you're stuck so far up your corporate master's ass that you probably can't even remember what your own dick looks like.
-- Badtux the Rude Penguin
Badtux, in my judgment, your second post is a Rule 1 infraction. I do not disagree with the facts of your post, but the tone needs to be taken down a notch or three.
If you don't think that corporations notice what the corporate tax rate is, look how many have moved out of Michigan and California. Part of running a business is constantly evaluating how to be more competitive. It makes less competitive sense to run your business in a location (city/county/state/nation) that siphons off more of your earnings in the form of taxes, because in the end, the business owners want the company to produce profits. That's what businesses are there to do.
My apologies, Misfit. You are correct, I shouldn't have descended to that level. I just get so, so frustrated at dealing with zombie lies that are demonstrably wrong, that we actually have DATA showing are wrong, but th at right-wingers keep lying about as if they were fact anyhow. For example, two lies: 1) California has high corporate tax rates (it doesn't, California's effective corporate tax rates at about 6.8% after all the deductions and tax exemptions are taken, which puts California in the middle of the pack), and 2) Jobs are *not* moving out of California, we have actual *data* on this, in two different studies looking for companies leaving California we see negligible numbers of jobs leaving California, California forms more new venture funded businesses every year than the entire former low-tax "heaven" CSA *combined* (roughly 36% of the total for the United States as a whole). Those new businesses, however, apparently don't exist as far ast the Party of the Confederacy is concerned...
It is one of the most fundamental concepts of propaganda that if you repeat a lie enough, people start to believe it's true. Liars disgust me. But you're right, personal attacks upon liars aren't really fruitful, they just chortle, "hey look, I got a Progressive to personally attack me!" and people focus on the personal attack, rather than on the fact that the liars are, well, LYING.
- Badtux the Somewhat-apologetic Penguin
Oh yeah, next zombie lie that the right winger is going to throw up: "California is driving away its rich people with its high taxes." While true that California has a net outflow (but population is still growing due to birth rate), the primary reason is not taxes, otherwise you'd see more rich people (as a percentage) leaving than poor people. Instead, the opposite is true -- poor people have a hard time with the high cost of living in California and leave, while far fewer rich people do.
So why is California's cost of living high? Again, not taxes, but, rather, *geography*. The desirable coastal areas where the climate is mild and access to ports is available are constrained by mountains on all sides, leaving limited flat areas to build houses (and the mountains are mostly unbuildable due to a) that's where the earthquake faults are, b) they're as a result unstable and tend to slide, and c) it's thus very, very expensive to build anything there, meaning most of the owners of that land have instead sold it to the State and County as nature preserves as they lose interest in ranching on it). This causes housing prices to be higher in those desirable areas due to normal supply and demand market forces. The much, much, much lower housing prices in California's Central Valley areas are proof enough of that... they bubbled up briefly in the mid 2000's due to the housing bubble, but before and after that were similar to housing prices in, say, Texas. The problem is that high-value people don't want to live in the central valley because the climate sucks there, they want to live in the milder coastal areas, so the coastal areas are where the jobs are. Just more proof that taxes aren't everything. I could have stayed in low-tax Texas back in the early 90's when I lived there. But then I would have been living in Texas.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Even Obama's own job guy (czar?) Paul Otellini just announced the new $8,000,000,000 Intel manufacturing facilities won't be built in California, but in Oregon and Arizona instead.
http://tinyurl.com/6aw7j86
I find it interesting that nobody will refute the core of my original post-corporations don't pay taxes.
I find it interesting that nobody will refute the core of my original post-corporations don't pay taxes.
Sure I did. You just weren't paying attention. Your claim was that either a) corporations would raise their prices (and I pointed out that the market, not corporations, set prices -- if corporations raise their prices beyond what the market will bear, competitors will out-compete them), or b) corporations would reduce dividend payouts to stockholders. I will simply point out that there is a third pot of money that I pointed out to you, (c), the trillions of dollars of cash holdings that corporations are sitting on that they could instead use to pay taxes if we raised corporate taxes.
Not that (b) is a big issue anyhow, since most corporations don't pay dividends and most dividend income goes to the top 10% of the population, which owns 81.2% of the stocks and mutual funds in America. Given that all data shows a surplus of investment income and a shortage of consumption income (that is, investment income is at such surplus that the wealthy are having problems finding worthwhile investments to invest it in, thus leading to parking of trillions of dollars into 0% interest U.S. Treasuries, while the current unemployment rate maps directly to decreased consumption due to lack of income by the consumer class, i.e., the bottom 90%), transferring some of that income from the investor class to the consumer class via tax policy (that is, raise taxes on the investor class while reduce them on the consumer class) or from corporate cash hoards to the consumer class (ditto) simply makes sense.
But oh wait, I forget, in some fictional Libertarian universe of unicorns and cotton candy trees, corporations aren't sitting on trillions of dollars of cash like Smaug the Dragon sitting on his hoard of gold and treasure. Too bad that's not *this* universe. We have the universe we have, not the one that Libertarians *wish* we had :).
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Just stumbled across this. Thought you might be interested.
http://www.thebredafallacy.com/2011/02/bravex2.html
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