Kirkland perhaps you would care to explain...

[El Kabong]

There is a time to reduce corporate taxes, that time is when we have a surplus, but you do it gradually.

And why would you do it then?

[killersheep]

There is a time to reduce corporate taxes, that time is when we have a surplus, but you do it gradually.

And why would you do it then?

Because a surplus is a sign the spending is under control AND the economy is in a more healthy state. The goal in my view is
to have a national balance of as close to zero as possible.

[Kirkland Laing]

killer, listen when the buble burst didn't that TRICKLE DOWN? You feel it don't you? Or maybe someone you know feels it If you make it affordable for businesses to hire people then you make it easier for them to open up shop here in the States. We are used to having businesses be run FROM America and we don't like our jobs being exported, but we have some of the highest corporate taxes in the world so it only makes sense that our jobs leave us.

Yep, that makes two Treasury toppers in a row who are running jokes. Things don't look very good going forward, do they?

Thanks to this bill ......nope it doesn't make things look great.

And thanks to the people who think Obama is a fucking PANACEA yeah things look like crap....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-88Il-4nby0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjiKPWzN878
.....thank you Kirkland....YOUR people have just sucked the life out of our econonomy.

Capitalism has become a four letter word recently and that is just absolutely fucking ridiculous!!!!!

This bill is an attempt to repair some of the damage caused by george bush and his fellow dumbasses who've created the biggest financial crisis for over a century. You'll be paying taxes for the rest of your life because of what the Bushies did yet you're blaming the guys trying to put the fire out. Facts and evidence just don't matter to you, do they?

And your corporate tax claims are beyond silly. I'll explain when I have more time but I'm wasting my time trying to use facts to explain it to you.

[El Kabong]

Newsflash Kirkland, we're still paying taxes for what FDR did

[Kirkland Laing]

Newsflash Kirkland, we're still paying taxes for what FDR did

No you aren't. And America already has the lowest corporate taxes of any industrialised nation. And corporate taxes play no part in the decision of firms creating jobs in America.

Corporate taxes are one of a bunch of taxes that the GOP and their media push as an answer to every economic problem. Taxes including corporation taxes were slashed in 2000 by Bush and economic growth collapsed to zero. It only got going when Bush cut interest rates to help create the huge bubble that just burst recently, triggering the current crisis. It's amazing that guys like Limbaugh can convince so many low/middle-earning Americans to support policies that are at odds with their economic interests and that benefit a tiny handful of people only.

[El Kabong]

So we are NOT paying for Social Security

Oh and we have low corporate taxes?
The Tax Foundation - U.S. States Lead the World in High Corporate Taxes

The Tax Foundation begs to differ.

[Trainer Monkey]

So we are NOT paying for Social Security

Oh and we have low corporate taxes?
The Tax Foundation - U.S. States Lead the World in High Corporate Taxes

The Tax Foundation begs to differ.

Caution: The Tax Foundation�s State and Local Tax Rankings Are Unreliable, rev 8/13/08

[Kirkland Laing]

So we are NOT paying for Social Security

Oh and we have low corporate taxes?
The Tax Foundation - U.S. States Lead the World in High Corporate Taxes

The Tax Foundation begs to differ.

Funding

The Tax Foundation is funded partially by private donations from members, but is primarily funded by corporate donations, with limited foundation funding from the Koch Foundation, Earhart Foundation, etc.



Tax Foundation - SourceWatch




It's unsurprising that a bunch of corporations should want lower corporation tax. However America already has the lowest real rates of corporation tax in the world. Half of all corporations pay no tax, some even get rebates. They can also defer taxes for up to 30 years. I'm sure you're aware that money invested for thirty years plus inflation means that when they do pay the tax it's less than 3% of how much they should have paid 30 years ago.


Here's a quick breakdown of US corporation tax for you :



Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study on taxes paid by corporations. In what Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND) mildly called "a shocking indictment of the current tax system," the GAO found that about two-thirds of corporations operating in the US did not pay taxes annually from 1998 to 2005.
Now most corporations in America are start-ups or small, mom and pop operations that have adopted a corporate form to lower their tax rates. And a greater percentage of large corporations do pay some taxes. But in 2005, with corporate profits reaching new heights as a percentage of national income, the GAO found that over one-fourth -- 28% of large corporations paid no taxes. (It defined large corporations as those with assets of at least $250 million dollars or gross receipts of at least $50 million dollars.) They can tell you how to make $50 million dollars and not pay taxes.
Not surprisingly, the income collected from corporations has been declining as a percentage of GDP, with the burden transferred to your income and payroll taxes. According to a study by the Treasury Department, from 2000-2006, an average of 2.2% of GDP was collected in corporate taxes. This compares to an average of 3.4% in other industrial countries. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that, under current law, corporate revenues will decline to 1.9% of GDP by 2017, the lowest rate in the industrialised world.




Meanwhile US corporations are the only people seeing any growth inearnings when the economy is growing. Workers certainly aren't :







So again you've got people pushing your buttons on cultural issues to make you support huge tax cuts for corporations and billionaires, in opposition to your own economic interests.




And because since Reagan so much of the tax burden has already been transferred from these guys to Joe Sixpack we're in crisis. The bursting of the housing bubble caused the current crisis, but the underlying problem began much earlier -- in the late 1970s, when median U.S. incomes began to stall. Because wages got hit then by the double-whammy of global competition and new technologies, the typical American family was able to maintain its living standard only if women went into the workforce in larger numbers, and later, only if everyone worked longer hours.When even these coping mechanisms were exhausted, families went into debt -- a strategy that was viable as long as home values continued to rise. But when the housing bubble burst, families were no longer able to easily refinance and take out home-equity loans. The result: Americans no longer have the money to keep consuming. When you consider that consumers make up 70 percent of the economy, the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent.


What happened to the money? Since the late 1970s, a greater and greater share of national income has gone to people at the top of the earnings ladder. As late as 1976, the richest 1 percent of the country took home about 9 percent of the total national income. By 2006, they were pocketing more than 20 percent.



But the rich don't spend as much of their income as the middle class and the poor do -- after all, being rich means that you already have most of what you need. That's why the concentration of income at the top can lead to a big shortfall in overall demand and send the economy into a tailspin. (It's not coincidental that 1928 was the last time that the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of the nation's income.)



To get out of this we're going to have to have massive redistribution of wealth. The best way to start would be to get corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. let's look at the US tax situation right now. The wonder of google gives me exaclty what I'm looking for. If you only read one article this year Lyle read this one. It's full of facts and evidence but don't let that put you off :



Fiscal Therapy | Mother Jones

[El Kabong]

Hey I gave you an example and facts and you say "But look who funds them"....I will also reference Ireland and their choice to lower their corporate taxes and what happened there as a result.

I read your article....it didn't impress me.

[El Kabong]

Also your "motherjones" article is just as if not more biased than my use of The Tax Foundation as a source. Sure you can claim it's "an independent nonprofit whose roots lie in a commitment to social justice implemented through first rate investigative reporting."

But just take a close look at who runs it: Monika Bauerlein, Clara Jeffery, Adam Hochschild, Steve Sielberstein, Janet Shenk, Anita Roddick, Meredith Spear....show me a conservative....and I'm even using the small c just to help you out

[Trainer Monkey]

Also your "motherjones" article is just as if not more biased than my use of The Tax Foundation as a source. Sure you can claim it's "an independent nonprofit whose roots lie in a commitment to social justice implemented through first rate investigative reporting."

But just take a close look at who runs it: Monika Bauerlein, Clara Jeffery, Adam Hochschild, Steve Sielberstein, Janet Shenk, Anita Roddick, Meredith Spear....show me a conservative....and I'm even using the small c just to help you out

Except I didnt post from Mother Jones,and you blew right by that

[El Kabong]

Except I didnt post from Mother Jones,and you blew right by that

That was re: Kirkland's post......so don't get so excited

[Kirkland Laing]

Hey I gave you an example and facts and you say "But look who funds them"....I will also reference Ireland and their choice to lower their corporate taxes and what happened there as a result.

I read your article....it didn't impress me.

You didn't give me an example or facts. You gave me something by an organisation funded by corporations and billionaires which argues for huge tax cuts for corporations and billionaires.

I explained the fact that the US has the lowest real rates of corporation tax of any major economy and used stats published by the US's own nonpartisan government stat offices to back my claim up.

Ireland is a developing economy and part of a major trading bloc. It cut its taxes to attracty corporations who were elsewhere within that bloc. The US is a major trading bloc all of its own and doesn't need to cut taxes to atract business. Business would still locate in the US, the world's richest single market, even if taxes were double current rates. You're cluelessly comparing apples and oranges here.

What outlet the article I linked appeared in is irrelevant. The facts and the evidence contained in the article obviously bounced off you harmlessly as usual. Trying to discredit something on the basis of where it's published is just pathetic, something you do when there's no real argument to make agains t it.

[Kirkland Laing]

Also your "motherjones" article is just as if not more biased than my use of The Tax Foundation as a source. Sure you can claim it's "an independent nonprofit whose roots lie in a commitment to social justice implemented through first rate investigative reporting."

But just take a close look at who runs it: Monika Bauerlein, Clara Jeffery, Adam Hochschild, Steve Sielberstein, Janet Shenk, Anita Roddick, Meredith Spear....show me a conservative....and I'm even using the small c just to help you out

Show me an article written by any conservative on any economic or financial subject in the last thirty years which stands up to history or a cursory examination of the claims made in it. There are tons of these organisations funded bty conservative billionaires and they produce thousands of articles, but they're all nothing but a joke. You can't point to any single policy tidea they've had which has ever worked, everything they've advocated has been a total disaster. Here's a perfect example, this article has been emailing its way around recently :


This article appeared in The Business on March 21, 2007.


Listen up, Gordon Brown and George Osborne. Iceland has joined a growing list of nations that have sharply cut their corporate tax rates and adopted flat-rate individual income taxes, with hugely positive consequences on economic performance. With the expiration of a surtax last year, individuals now pay a flat rate of 22.75% of their taxable income to the central government.........


Iceland also granted independence to its central bank to create a stable monetary policy, and it has privatised numerous businesses.
All these reforms have helped Iceland climb from 26th to ninth in the "Economic Freedom of the World" rankings since 1990. According to the World Bank, Iceland is now one of the world's richest nations, ranking in the top 10 using either of two different methodologies. Unemployment in Iceland is almost non-existent, dropping to less than 2% in 2006, according to the International Monetary Fund............




Iceland's flat tax rate remains high. Other reforms, particularly the low corporate rate and the 10% tax on capital income, are more dramatic. From a political perspective, however, the Iceland reform is remarkable. It is the first time a western nation chooses no longer to impose discriminatory tax rates on successful taxpayers.
Tax reform and economic liberalisation have helped Iceland prosper. Let's hope that other industrial nations – and especially Brown and Osborne – will learn from Iceland's success.





Iceland Comes in From the Cold With Flat Tax Revolution




Conservative fre market policies are an historical footnote Lyle. They've bankrupted every major economy. The US government is terrified to admit all its banks are insolvent and that they're going to have to be nationalised. Britain, where laissez faire in the financial sector is even less than America is looking increasingly like Iceland. Europe, which ended regualtion of its banking system is in massive trouble too. European banks are all owed trillions by Eastern European countries, countries who embraced free market economics and are now basket cases. British banks are owed fortunes by Asian countries guilty of the same thing. At some point this year there's going to be a major credit default event and phase two of the current crisis is going to begin and it's all because governments ended regulation of the banks and let the market take care of the global economic system. Now we're going to pay the price of that. For you to advocate more of the same policies that got us here is stunning.

[Kirkland Laing]

The Obama administration's plan to fix the banking system was unveiled last week. At first glance it looks like a continuation of the Bush plan, which was to give trillions of dollars to insolvent banks to prevent them officially going bust. This plan requires American taxpayers to pay an ever-increasing part of their earnings as tribute to the government for the next few decades so that the government can then hand it out in corporate welfare to slightly more legitimate versions of Bernie Madoff. It won't fix the problem and will make the crisis much worse in the long run, delay the recovery etc. But it's in the interests of the people currently running the banks and their shareholders.

The one ray of sunshine in last week's announcements was that banks are going to be "stress tested" by banking inspectors to see if they're insolvent and if they're found to be so this would open the door to the only effective way to deal with the banking crisis, nationalising the banks.

Any bank happy that it's solvent has no worries about being stress tested. After being tested and found to be on a sound financial footing it would see its share price rise, new business come to it etc. A bank that knows it's bust would want to avoid any inspection of its books, as then the guys running the bank get sacked, the shareholders wiped out and the bank taken over by the government. So guess how the banks are reacting :

Wall Street is to lobby the Obama administration to relax its plans for stringent reviews of banks’ financial health and capital injections that could leave the government as a large shareholder in many of those institutions.
People close to the situation say financial groups were frustrated by the administration’s decision not to hold detailed talks with the industry before last week’s release of its $2,000bn (£1,390bn) financial rescue plan.
Administration officials said the announcement was always intended to be a framework rather than a final plan and stressed that input would be sought from industry “stakeholders” as details were fleshed out. “We’re going to get opinions from across the industry ... to help shape the final plan,” said one official.


FT.com / Companies / Banks - Wall St eyes influence over rescue plan


The outcome of this is going to decide a lot of the economic situation over the next couple of decades. Hopefully the Obama administration will have the balls to stand up to these guys and do the right thing. Where's Jimmy Carter when you need him?


In other news, Switzerland has taken the lead from Britain in the competition to see who can become the next Iceland first. Switzerland is a bywordfor banking prudence and security for investors but the full horrors of their banks' balance sheets are now being revealed. When the gnomes of Switzerland have fucked things up you know that you're in a serious crisis.