So, I was surfing around the net yesterday and I happened upon this masterpiece of right wing wet dreamery at Red State Daily Kos. Seems Robert Reich, former Clinton Secy of Labor, had a short brainfart the other day where he suggested that we should eliminate the corporate tax in favor of caps gains taxes. I think maybe Reich may have started being a morning tippler, or maybe he didn’t quite think it through or some sort of similar lapse. Anyway it was all of 3 paragraphs long.
Of course, this was music to former GOPer cum gate crasher cum Dem Party neoliberal gate polisher and blog owner’s ears. In his zealous embrace of the idea, he even seemingly managed to forget copyright and posted 2/3rds of the entire missive. He brought up being able to hire more employees on the money he’d get to keep. The whole post had a rather gleeful feel to it.
(Jump!)
One commenter did manage to point out a few inconvenient points:
Not one person
Has pointed out HOW you owe corporate taxes.
It’s at the end of the year, and the money you took in is greater than the money you put out.
Repatriating profits, if they we’re put to use in the business, would no longer be profits, but expenses. So not taxing the profits would have zero effect on hiring or capital improvements.
Kos claiming he could create more jobs by not paying taxes is pure bullshit. He pays taxes AFTER he pays his employees, on what’s left over, or what we rubes refer to as “income”. Not taxing it will only make him richer, not hunter. He could pay hunter more and have less profit and therefore less taxes.
His hiring is based on demand, not on a prediction of leftover income.
What right wing claptrap. It’s Romneyesque.
Kos did mention the burden to small businesses, but really, throwing out the entirety of corporate taxes, when a whole lot of companies exploit multiple loopholes and pay a whole helluva lot less, seems to be handing a huge gift to the big corps. Why not figure out how to ease the burden on small businesses only?
Now, cap gains taxes are a great idea. But here’s how this exchange plays out in Congress. The bill gets written in mostly GOP/neolib-land, somewhere along the way fighting ensues, it becomes agreed that they’ll do the corp tax repeal first, and as a show of good faith, the Dems pony up votes. Then they start to do the cap gains and all of the sudden, they don’t have the votes, or maybe they even get something very token-like to pass and have a self congratulatory circle jerk, or they kick the can down the road and we never hear much about it again. I’ve seen this movie too many times now. It’s so not worth admission.
For those who really want to read the post in question, it’s here.
Getting off my soapbox now. How you doin’?
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I saw the article by Reich and heard about kos’ agreement with it. I couldn’t help think that Reich had been possessed by that CNBC’s resident loon Rick Santelli.
I thought kos’ posts last year praising Tesla were a tell about his more than comfortable life style.
He sounded like a true 1%er. He is showing his true, privileged colors and none of them are blue.
If lowering corporate taxes would help him hire more employees, he needs to prove it. Make the accounting records public. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.