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April 19, 2016 06:51 AM UTC

Tuesday Open Thread

  • 43 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”

–Benjamin Franklin

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43 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

  1.  

    get this…

    This Study Shows How Low Corporate America’s Taxes Really Are

    A new government report shows just how easy corporate America has it.

    Every year from 2006 to 2012, some two-thirds of U.S. corporations did not pay federal income tax, according to a Government Accountability Office study released on Wednesday. In 2012 alone, 42.5 percent of businesses that the GAO defines as large did not pay federal taxes, including 19.5 percent of big corporations that posted a profit.

    The GAO said those corporations in the black that still did not pay federal taxes benefitted from loopholes and tax incentives, such as the practice of rolling over losses from previous years. That enables companies to deduct those losses from their tax burden.

    Profitable U.S. corporations paid, on average, an effective federal income tax rate of 14 percent over the slightly shorter period from 2008 to 2012, the federal government watchdog found.

     

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gao-study-profitable-corporations-no-federal-taxes_us_570e6c62e4b0ffa5937dbadb?

    1. It doesn't really seem to matter much how high or low corporate tax rates are since corporations mostly don't pay them and even wind up with negative tax rates anyway. Even if your tax rate is 90%, if you don't pay 110% of that 90%, that adds up to …. let's see… less than nothing, right? Money back. With the added benefit of sky high tax rates to whine about. Win/win. They really should be agitating for higher tax rates to not pay. Wouldn't cost them anything but would make a really good excuse for why the jobs they keep claiming they'd create with lower taxes haven't materialized yet.

      Here goes. What's the story on editing today? Testing.

        1. The upgrade to WordPress 4.5 broke the old editor plugin, and our replacement had a security flaw. Be assured we are working hard on getting a comment editor working in some form. We'll update when we've made progress, but you'll probably see it first.

          1. Is this the one you're using?  Looks like it, but that's not a particularly distinctive interface smiley

            It says it was updated a couple weeks ago, and should be good for 4.5.  But I have no idea if this site's been customized in a way to not make that accurate.

        2. beyond those 2 things, Republicans consistently enact budgets that underfund the IRS, which makes enforcement less consistent and lets Billions of tax dollars go unpaid.……which then justifies more underfunding by our Brilliant Legislators from the Right:

          But while the Republicans are only too happy to remind you about the horrors of taxation in general and the IRS in particular, they'd prefer to stay silent on about their roles in gutting the agency, starving the U.S. Treasury of tax revenue and redirecting trillions of dollars to the very richest among us. Here, then, are 10 helpful Tax Day reminders from the Republican Party.

          1. Congressional Republicans slashed the IRS budget by 17 percent since 2010 …
          Given the right-wing rhetoric, Americans could be forgiven for believing an out-of-control IRS is growing like crazy. But it's not. Thanks to the House Republican majority that swept into power in 2011, the agency has seen its budget slashed by 17 percentsince fiscal year 2010. The result of the draconian reductions from $13.6 trillion in 2010 to $11.2 trillion in 2016?  Full time staff has been reduced by 14 percent and enforcement staff has contracted by a staggering 23 percent, even as individual returns have jumped by 7 percent and new laws passed by Congress have added to the agency's work load.

          Oh yeah, it also ruins whatever "customer service"  targets they might have so you and I have to wait on the phone longer, which also justifies more budget cuts, and/or outsourcing, by Republicans.

          Anyone who believes the first word out of their mouths regarding budgets or taxes should be reminded of their consistent history of this malfeasance weekly…….daily……hourly……

           

    2. There is a strong case for abolishing the corporate inccome tax entirely and replacing it with a value added tax.  Corporate taxes act as kind of a sales tax anyway and are thus regressive.  A value added tax would be much easier to collect and end some of the monkey business in congress.

       

      1. VAT and sales tax are, for all intents and purposes, the same.  Both result in additional payments by the end consumer, and are, therefore, taxes on consumption.  They are simply collected differently, and, while that tends to result in greater compliance under VAT regimes, the end consumer pays the same amount either way.  Here is Wikipedia's example. Businesses don't pay under VAT any more than under sales taxes.  To the extent sales taxes are regressive, VAT is too.

        In order to replace corporate taxes, which target the profits of a corporation, one would want to look to increasing taxation on capital gains and dividends– essentially the pass-through of corporate profits to individuals.  Those income streams currently receive special treatment (reduced tax) to account for the so-called "double taxation" of corporate profits that may occur by taxing corporations and their investors.

        1. I agree that you need to target capital gains. All of US tax policy is needlessly complex and confusing.  All you can count on is that the rich will always pay less (as a percentage) and the middle class will always pay more.  For example, as a small business owner, I pay approximately 25% on my salary (what I pay myself), and15% (jumping up to 25% for amounts over 50,000) for profit. The wealthy that do not receive a paycheck pay 15% capital gains.  As Warren Buffet often points out, this is patently unfair. I do not expect it to change.

          1. I should say that I don't actually support getting rid of corporate income tax.  Taxing capital gains and dividends the same as any other income is something I think should be done regardless of how we fix corporate income tax.  Income is income.

            As for corporate tax, I'm in favor of something more like what's described here — a global minimum corporate tax regime that stops treating the 400 subsidiaries of a company as though they are anything other than that company.

        2. You are wrong pseudo, to believe that corporate taxes are paid primarily from profits.  For the most part they are simply passed on in the price of goods and services, though some are deducted from wages and dividends. Check out Galbraith's the New Industrial State for a much more detailed discussion of administered pricing than you can get from Wikipedia.  It is dated in some ways but still a classic

           You are right that value added and sales taxes are similar except for the fact that VAT is much easier to collect, which is important when discussing a replacement for the mostly uncollected corporate sales tax.   But you are also right to suggest that taxing dividends and capital gains as ordinary income (I assume you'd go all the way) is also much fairer and more effective than our alleged corporate tax.

          There is one downside to eliminating the corporate tax.   One way companies zero out is by investing in new equipment.   Obviously, tax credits for investment don't stimulate investment if there is no tax.  I'm not concerned about that because I'd rather see investment driven by real economic factors than political ones

          You may be surprised to know I agree with you that abolishing our phony corporate tax and replacing it with capital gains and dividend reform is a better option than a vat.  Politically, however, you'd face a firestorm.  Like millions of seniors, I own some utility stocks that pay me modest dividends.  You may have seen the periodic ads showing an old couple outraged because Congress wants to "tax our dividends."  IRA/401(k) don't really count because they are taxed as ordinary income when withdrawn.   But the 1,000 shares of Southern Company and the 800 shares of excel I earned over 40 years of dividend reinvestment, starting with 100 shares each, would face higher taxes.

          For me, that's ok.  Southern pays about $2300 a year and excel about $1,028 so upping their taxes by a few hundred won't break me.  But big investors use us old ones as human shields for those teary ads about how you bolsheviks are trying to make us eat dog food.  A vat might be easier to sell.  But that is a political judgment, not an economic or moral one.  What I think we agree on is that the current nominally high but rarely paid corporate tax is a farce.

          2. I'm sorry if my phrasing made it easy to misunderstand what I was saying.  When I said that corporate taxes "target profits" I was describing the mechanism by which corporate income taxes work (a tax on profits) as opposed to VAT or sales tax, which target consumption (a tax on purchases).

            However, I disagree with the statement that corporate income taxes are "simply passed on in the price of goods and services."  The degree to which any tax on a corporation (or the cost of regulation, or of increases in the cost of inputs, for that matter) is passed on to consumers is dependent upon the price elasticity of demand for the goods or services provided.  For relatively inelastic products (say household water or gasoline) the amount of the tax increase passed along to consumers will be quite high.  For products with highly elastic demand, however, the corporation's profits will bear the brunt of the tax.

            Although I think that ending corporate taxation in favor of higher taxes on capital gains and dividends is a reasonable position (and one that one of my Economics professors and I used to talk a lot about).  I noted above that I prefer both rather than either.

      1. absolutely, dave, see my discourse above.   Corporations aren't really people and don't really pay taxes.  They only pass taxes on to customers, stockholders or employees.   Yeah let the profits go to the investors and collect it in their income taxes, but only if you reform the capital gains and dividend loopholes in the current law.  Pseudo made that suggestion above, though he later backpedaled.  but I think he was right the first time.

        1. Oh, Voyageur.  I never backpedaled.  In my initial post, I used the phrase "one would," in the British style, specifically to indicate I was making a generalized comment about your argument rather than stating my personal belief, which I did shortly after in response to another commenter.  I did it as what I thought was a pleasant way to engage you, after you suggested replacing corporate income tax with VAT, which I thought missed the mark.

          Feel free to make your own arguments, but, again, stop lying about mine.  For my part, I'll work to help prevent this by no longer responding to you.  That's my bad.

          1. V relishes his role as provocateur…he is, perhaps, our premier chain yanker…or wanker…I am not sure which noun is appropriate.

            Don't let his sad delusions bother you, though. He is a good man who simply overdosed on the hillaryjuice and hasn't yet cleared his head. Perhaps he will seek much needed therapy when President Trump institutes Medicare for all.

          2. I don't think it was a lie to say I agreed with your first idea.  Nor was it wrong to say you backpedaled when you then clarified that you weren't really advocating the position.  Sorry if you took offense because this is the first time one of your posts has actually shown some merit.  You did indeed engage in a pleasant way, which I reciprocated.  Then ypu reverted to dickhead mode.  I guess that is just your default programming.  Of course, when I call you  dickhead, I mean no offense, I am just using the term in the "British mode"

              1. A very good, and depressing piece.   We've farmed Phillips County since 1887 and never took a drop from the aquifer except for household use, a couple drinking tans for livestock, and a small garden..  We can sustain summer fallow type farming for another century, easily.  But the looting of the aquifer is ruining the future of eight states.   Just like you said, the pipeline was never the problem.  As my tattered old Pogo poster says, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

                and, yes, as if this wasn't bad enough, we subsidize our destruction with king corn and low-cost REA rates to pump up still more water.

                1. Did you hear the news there's a 30,000 hd. dairy being proposed in Phillips County?  Rumored to be an organic dairy that will supply Horizon Organics.  So we can pump water from the Ogallala with wanton abandon to nurture the alfalfa fields with (subsidized, cheap) coal-fired power from Wyoming to its extinction – while our friends sip on their organic lattes and assume they're supporting something sustainable?  

                  And yet, Sonnenberg had his panties in a twist over a few rain barrels? <sigh>

                  We've yet to prove we're the most intelligent form of life to occupy this spinning speck of dust. 

  2. Good news – for the Koch Brothers: 

     Rising temperatures brought on by global warming are resulting in more fog-free days on the coast, whilerecord drought deprives both redwoods and sequoias of water. The rapidity of the change in their environment wrought by the burning of fossil fuels threatens to overwhelm the giant trees.

    “The climate changes that redwoods have seen in the past, they were taking place over millennia,” says Todd Dawson, a redwood expert and a professor at UC Berkeley. “It would take a thousand years for temperatures to change over two degrees. Now it’s taking three years.”

    If the biggest, most formidable trees on the planet can’t survive climate change, can any?

    The Kochs and their Big Energy Brethren would be first in line to chop down these miracles of Creation.

     

    1. Zap,  I hate the Kochs as much as he next decent human being does but if you're going to use "Good news for the Koch brothers" as your introduction and first link  that link, or at least one of your three links, really should go to something about the Koch brothers, like a plan to exploit Sequoia and Redwood die off or something. This reminds me of some of your past posts railing against Bennet with links to articles that contained no mention of Bennet. 

        1. …and let's not forget that industrial hemp can create 4x the pulp-like product/yr of a managed forest system.  That's why Hearst was amongst the cabal in 1937 that helped end the existence of the plant on American farms – he had 10s of thousands of acres of trees he intended to convert to paper for his news empire. 

          The Hearst and DuPont families are very powerful. With powerful newspaper articles, Hearst was able to confuse the populace. The confusion was over the difference between marijuana and industrial hemp. Marijuana that is attractive to drug users has a THC level (which is responsible for the psychoactive effect) between 5 to 20 percent, the higher percent being the desired material. Industrial hemp contains 0.3 percent or less of THC and has higher levels of CBD (cannabidiol), which counteracts and effect that THC may have. It would be impossible to get high on industrial hemp. The disinformation spin was to confuse people into thinking that marijuana and industrial hemp were the same thing and had the same ability to get people high. Hearst effectively eliminated any threat to his vast forest holdings. DuPont had developed new plastics and wanted to eliminate the competition with hemp, which had many advantages over the plastics.

          In other good news today, despite the leadership of the likes of my state senator who has a coal fetish – and the ongoing jiggery-pokery of ALEC – American business giants are rapidly moving to clean energy to source their operations.  Why you say?  It is a positive addition to their bottom line.  Who'd have thunk?

            2. But the real villain of the piece is Bennet, because he once viewed Citizen Kane and we all know who that was about.   [Sorry, just channeling my inner Zapatero]wink

  4. Polls close in New York in 3 and  1/2 hours.  

    Hang on, Fair Hillary!  The sailors from Kronstadt are marching to your relief! 

    (OK, I'm mixing my medieval and Red October metaphors.  at least I'm not two corinthians short of a New Testament, like the other party's favorite is.)

  5. Thank you #FuxNews and Carla Lowe, founder of Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana, for a great belly laugh.  I pictured her sitting beside the crazy old lady in the gay sex debate at the Capitol explaining God's purpose of the sphincter muscle.  Or next to Phylis "sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions" Scholarly. Or Mike "I drink a different kind of Jesus juice” Huckabee.

    'Colorado is Headed Down the Tubes'

    "Poor old Colorado; if their schools allow edible marijuana on school grounds, they are simply out of their gourds," said Carla Lowe, the founder of CALM, Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana.

    Lowe has been fighting legalized pot in her home state of California and the rest of the U.S. for 40 years. "'If we could just get it accepted as a medicine’ has long been the plea — but that has always been a red herring," said Lowe. "The potency of the drug has been increasing right alongside the movement to legalize it."

    Gawd these angry, old white puritan Prohibitionists die hard.  Perhaps given she's spent 40 years on a losing proposition to John Q. Public she should focus her energy in her waning years on real problems, like, Ritalin? The herion epidemic (fueled by prescription drug use)? 

    1. In a surprising new study, deaths from marijuana overdoses hold steady for second year in a row

      In 2015, the rate of absolutely zero deaths from a marijuana overdose remained steady from the year before, according to figures released in December by the Centers for Disease Control. But while Americans aren’t dying as a result of marijuana overdoses, the same can’t be said for a range of other substances, both legal and illicit.

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