You're finally coming out of your liberal closet, but your handle keeps showing. You really should do something about that.
Tax Rates by Industry
Effective tax rates by industry varied widely...
Notice the word, "effective".
ITEP, like you, has an ax to grind. They look for fairness.
Why not tell me why there should be any corporate tax?
What Happened to the Alternative Minimum Tax?
The corporate Alternative Minimum Tax was established in 1986 to assure that profitable corporations pay some substantial amount in income taxes no matter how many tax breaks they otherwise take advantage of.
Doesn't this undermine the intent of Congress to avoid taxes? Your liberal friends don't want to obey what previous liberals put into law. Why is that?
But because of laws enacted in 1993 and 1997 that sharply weakened the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, only a few companies now pay the AMT. In fact, almost as many are getting rebates for past AMT payments as now pay the AMT.
This is part of the socialist credo that corporations should be punished. Why do you want to do that?
Who Loses from These Low and Widely Varying Corporate Tax Rates?
Low- and no-tax companies may be happy about their ability to avoid huge amounts in taxes every year, but our current low and widely varying way of taxing corporations is not a good approach for most of us.
Why is that? What has how someone else's tax situation have to do with him or you?
The losers from this system include:
The general public.
How?
In fiscal years 1997-99, personal income tax payments grew by 28 percent and Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes on wages grew by 22 percent. But corporate income tax payments went up by a total of only 8 percent over the three years, and actually fell from fiscal 1998 to fiscal 1999.
What does that show? It shows that corporate tax rates rose since less tax was paid. When taxes are lowered more taxes are paid. Why did ITEP omit that historical fact?
So one obvious group of losers from growing corporate tax avoidance is the general public, which has to pay more for—or get less in—public services.
It's very simple. The more you take from corporations, the more goodies people get. The only problem is that the mechanism works in the opposite way. The more taxes levied on corporations the less they deliver, the less they pay, the less they produce, and the more the public has to pay to make up the difference.
Disadvantaged companies. Almost as obvious is how the wide variation in tax rates among industries and among companies within particular industries gives relatively high tax companies and industries a legitimate beef that federal tax policy is helping their competitors at their expense.
Wide tax variance? This is a false claim. How does one company not get the same law applied to it in comparison to a competitor? Again they are conveniently applying effective where it suits their ax.
As the industry tables starting on page 17 detail, examples of these kinds of discrepancies abound:
Maytag and General Electric both make kitchen appliances. But Maytag paid 35 percent of its profits in taxes from 1996 to 1998, while GE paid only 8.1 percent.
GE used the tax law set up by liberals in order to achieve "fairness". Don't you approve?
Among industries, both publishers and oil companies provide much sought-after products. But publishers paid a 1996-98 effective tax rate of 31.6 percent, while the oil companies paid only 12.3 percent.
It is well known that tax rate should be proportional to desirability. Who gets to determine "desirability"?
The U.S. economy. The fact that the government is offering much larger tax subsidies to some companies and industries compared to others is also poor economic policy.
No question, but the intent of the government is to subsidize labor, to promote employment at any cost. The companies aren't beneficiaries of this largesse. In fact, it makes them less competitive and more vulnerable to BK. It also makes their workers more contentious, demanding more strikes for higher compensation. I don't think your liberal friends at ITEP are averse to higher compensation for the "little guy".
Such a system artificially boosts the rate of return on investment dollars for tax-favored industries and companies and reduces the rate of return for those industries and companies that are less favored.
What determines "favored"?
To be sure, companies that push for tax breaks argue that the “incentives” will encourage useful activities. But the idea that the government should tell businesses what kinds of investments to make conflicts with our basic economic philosophy that consumer demand and free markets should be the test of which private investments make sense. In fact, the good news is that tax breaks often don’t have much effect on business behavior.
Even my liberal friends can shoot this clown down. It's clear the clown has never run a business.
After all, companies don’t lobby to have the government tell them what to do.
Say what? This is non sequitur even in the way that the clown intended.
They lobby to get rewarded for doing what they would have done anyway.
Say what? If they would have done it anyway, then why would they pay the very high price for lobbyists?
But there’s no doubt that making some kinds of investments more profitable than others through tax breaks will sometimes shift capital away from what’s most beneficial and into lower-yield activities. As a result, the flow of capital is diverted in favor of those industries that have been most aggressive in the political marketplace of Washington, D.C., at the expense of long-term economic growth.
This is total bull shit.
I've wasted enough time with idiots and assholes like you, so don't post here any more. |
