The subsidies are paid to:
If residential solar panels are such a damn fine investment why do they need subsidies?
I just read an article that claims that leading oceanographers
"The 27 participants from 18 organisations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats - and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history."
Sounds like something straight out of "Soylent Green." With the top predators slowly vanishing from the oceans, we may soon have nothing BUT plankton to eat and if the oceans become too acidic, we might not even have that food source.
-- Bobby G.
Correct. I shudder when Bill Gates talks about all the lives he's "saving" in the third world by improving AIDS awareness and AIDS health care. He appears unconcerned about how all these "saved" people and their offspring are going to eat when they can't feed themselves as it is. Tunnel vision. When the late Sam Kinison said "you've got to move to where the food is" he was being more truthful than humorous.
-- Bobby G.
What do those number prove other than that the country is splitting into "haves" and "have nots" in a way we perhaps have never seen before except during the Great Depression? Your numbers are deceptive because they don't explain why the rich are paying so much more (apparently) in taxes. It's because year after year, they're making more and more money and average workers are making less and less.
Let's look at the numbers:
The NY Times Sunday Business editors asked Equilar to examine exec compensation: The final figures show that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009. Most ordinary Americans aren't getting raises anywhere close to those of these chief executives. Many aren't getting raises at all - or even regular paychecks. Unemployment is still stuck at more than 9 percent. According to a report released by GovernanceMetrics
Those kind of numbers tell the real story behind your observation that the wealthy are paying more in taxes than they used to. The answer is simple: the amount they pay reflects the growing schism between the haves and the have nots. CEO's are earning obscene salaries and compensation compared to the workers in the companies they run. The workers that still *have* jobs, that is.
The average American worker was taking home $752 a week in late 2010, up a mere 0.5 percent from a year earlier. After inflation, workers were actually making less.
The rich got a 23% "raise" while the workers actually got one worth less than zero. So just looking at what percentile pays what tax rate doesn't tell the whole story: you have to look at the bigger picture.
Adapted from:
Why, then, are we giving billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to the richest companies on earth like Exxon? That knife either cuts both ways or it doesn't cut at all. One hundred years ago, the tax breaks given to the nascent oil industry made sense. Dry holes were common and the Feds countered with deals that made it still worthwhile for drillers to take the risk.
Very few dry holes occur these days, comparatively speaking, but the tax "loophole" still lives on. The tax breaks given to companies researching newer, improved ways of doing things were as important then as they are now. It burns me to hear solar and wind tax credits attacked as government charity when the voluminous credits given to the oil and gas industries are simply glossed over or deemed necessary to maintain the status quo. Worse, still is how established industries tend to actually stifle innovation to protect their markets.
him into make work jobs.
Ah, the false choice. The *real* choice we're facing is something slightly different. It's better to put a man in a job making solar panels or windmills than it is it have him sitting at home watching Maury and drinking beer, consuming tax dollars and producing nothing useful to the economy. If subsidies were good enough for the oil and gas industry (and still continue to this day) why should solar and wind be denied their opportunity to grow? If putting in solar panels and turbines helps blunt the need for yet another coal-fired power plant to handle the peak load, that's an overall good thing. We've got factory "ghettoes" in the country where skilled workers are rotting away contributing nothing to the economy. The free market says that's just fine. I say it's stupid and shortsighted.
The S&L crisis that *I* remember was based on the same damn idiocy that tripped us up in the current recession. Deregulation.
"Congress finally acted on deregulating the thrift industry. It passed two laws, the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of
1980 and the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982. The deregulation not only allowed thrifts to offer a wider array of savings products, but also significantly expanded their lending authority. These changes were intended to allow S&Ls to "grow" out of their problems, and as such represented the first time that the government explicitly sought to increase S&L profits as opposed to promoting housing and homeownership. Other changes in thrift oversight included authorizing the use of more lenient accounting rules to report their financial condition, and the elimination of restrictions on the minimum numbers of S&L stockholders. Such policies, combined with an overall decline in regulatory oversight (known as forbearance), would later be cited as factors in the collapse of the thrift industry."-- Bobby G.
Thanks for throwing logic into this. The simple fact is that very wealthy individuals, and corporations, pay far less % of their income in taxes than they have since the 1940s. On top of this, we have three wars that are solely for the purpose of ensuring that corporate profits remain high. Corporations, of course, have no loyalty to the US and if they can increase their profits but hurt the US, they do so and are doing so.
Oh, but if we just give them more money, then they'll create jobs. True, but those jobs aren't in the US because corporations make more money if they pay lower wages overseas. And they keep those profits offshore.
One sure outcome of the debt ceiling discussion now going on between the two corporate-controlled parties will be another tax holiday for overseas cash. That is, money on which no taxes are paid because it is kept overseas will now be allowed to return to the US with a tax rate of perhaps 5%. So, GE, Honeywell, Verizon, and 7 or 8 other corporations that made $167 Billion over the last few years and paid no taxes will be allowed to bring home their cash and pay almost nothing.
On 7/26/2011 7:54 AM, dgk wrote: ...
Well, that's better than maintaining the present situation of tax rates being more favorable overseas so that _none_ of it returns to the US.
If tax rates were/are so low on US corporations in the US and they pay so little as seems to be the thesis, why are these corporations not taking advantage of that low rate?
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Nope. Top 20$ of wage earners (according to IRS stats) saw their share of pre-tax income rise from 54.8% to 55.7% (55/54~1.6% increase) from 2000 to 2006. Share of fed income taxes increased 81.2% to 86.3%. Also between those same two years, the negative income tax paid by the lowest quintile increased and, after the Bush cuts, the second lowest quintile also had a negative income tax. Bush took a bunch of people off the roles at the low end. (The bottom 40% actually got money back).
Adn this is all related to a Democratic (at the time Congress) trying to punish those same evil people. In the late 80s or early 90s Congress decided that CEOs, etc. were making too much money. So, they essentially capped the salary (the money paid to actually run the company) at $1 million by not allowing a company to deduct anything over that. However, in order to (in their words) "align the interests of the shareholders and the executives" the gave great tax advantages to the performance based bonus and stock options. THe outcomes were soon seen when Esiner at Disney was paid more than any Board would have had the balls to pay him directly. Probably the zenith was Merril Lynch just before the fall when one of the honcoes had a salary of $300,000 and bonuses, options of nearly $300 million. BTW: This not only resulted in a much quicker concentration of wealth, but actually served to divorce the interests of the executives from the shareholders by paying them relatively little (in salary) to run the company and so much more to run the books. (As an aside, a study by profs from Penn State and BYU showed that "options-heavy companies" average annual shareholder return of 26% between 1993 and 2000, compared to 36.5% for "options light companies". So much for Congresses idea to align interests.
"Outrageous government and tax law encouraged compensation packages.
If some VP makes 20 times
Hell the tax laws brought 90% of this on.
Two wrongs don't make a right. YOu haven't heard me defend them. I have a little less problems with depletion allowances on reserves since this essentially works the same as depreciation on machinery.
But if it is so highly subsidized, the usefulness to the economy is, by definition, under consideration.
If
Actually the free market says they should move to where the jobs are.
Precisely. Corporations have no conscience. Worse, still they have the potential for eternal life and are acquiring rights of citizenship once exclusively reserved to human beings. Government is the only force able to effectively counter the wrong-doing of corporations. Even a casualstudy of Federal law reveals much of it was put in place in response to corporate malfeasances.
Work safety laws, drug laws, food laws, etc. almost all came about because of instances of horrific corporate wrongdoing like locking factory fire doors or poisoning hundreds of people to death. A true free market would be as workable as a football game without refs.
I was hoping Obama would try to turn the rust belt around and remake it as a center of alternative energy manufacture. Sometimes all that's needed for an industry to take off is a little early "pump priming." The idea that if we slash taxes more that jobs will be created is just more Reagan mythology. Economists keep reporting that companies are sitting on piles of cash. They aren't hiring because the demand's not there. The demand's not there because so many people have lost their jobs and are barely scraping by. That's in large part due to the stimulus being too small to make a difference.
The difference between individual tax and corporate "optimizing" is incredibly unfair. Big Business can hire armies of accountants and lobbyists to get them sweet deals we individuals can only dream of. Big Business perpetually whines about how the US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world but they never mention how few big businesses actually pay that "show" rate. The Democrats should be daily pointing out how easily businesses like Exxon bypass tax liabilities with subsidies, tax perks and accounting games when the people are being told "we've got to cut back on your health care - for the children." The people that stole billions from the nation's pension funds should at leave have to pay some of it back in taxes.
-- Bobby G.
There are other reasons. Interesting stat from the Bureau of Labor statistics, although you have to go looking through the reports. From the low of the recession in January 0f 2009 to April of 2010, private sector net jobs increased on average 67,600 a month. From April 2010 through May, the average increase in private sectors jobs was 6,400. The cutoff date in April? The passing of healthcare reform. No hiring because there is no clarity in what each person is going to cost.
A 2008 study of 24 leading economies by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concludes that, "Taxation is most progressively distributed in the United States, probably reflecting the greater role played there by refundable tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. . . . Taxes tend to be least progressive in the Nordic countries (notably, Sweden), France and Switzerland." The OECD study?titled "Growing Unequal?"?also found that the ratio of taxes paid to income received by the top 10% was by far the highest in the U.S., at 1.35, compared to 1.1 for France, 1.07 for Germany, 1.01 for Japan and 1.0 for Sweden (i.e., the top decile's share of Swedish taxes is the same as their share of income). There are also reasons to suggest that increasing some of these (especially cap gains) may actually result in LESS taxes. The top 1% reported fewer capital gains in the tech-stock euphoria of 1999-2000 (when the tax rate was 20%) than during the middling market of
2006-2007. It is doubtful so many gains would have been reported in 2006-2007 if the tax rate had been 20%. Lower tax rates on capital gains increase the frequency of asset sales and thus result in more taxable capital gains on tax returns. LArgely because (especially at the pinnacle) tax consequences are figured in. A person has to hang on longer (slowing fruquency of sales and thus taxes) to reach a simliar post tax earning. This was also seen following the first cut in cap gains during the Clinton administration.. something both sides conveniently forget to mention for differing reasons.
So what? Employees are paid what they are worth, what they contribute to the profitability of the company, or what they can weasel out of the board of directors. "Fairness" doesn't enter into it.
As for the executives getting stock options and the like, attribute that to the class warfare mentality of the Congress. It passed a law limiting executive pay to something like a million bucks per year but allowed "bonuses" tied to productivity.
In a capitalistic society, what a worker gets paid is determined by two things.
The first is supply and demand. Burger flippers in North Dakota make upwards of $17/hour because of low supply. Further, if an employee is willing to work for the minimum wage, as an employer I would be a traitor to myself and the company to pay more.
Secondly, pay is often determined by the overall "worth" of an employee to the organization. As the decider-in-chief, the CEO obviously thinks he is worth more, often a lot more, than the serf who toils on the factory floor.
That's the way the system works.
I've got a better idea. Suppose (in round numbers) our budget is $3 trillion and there are 300,000,000 Americans. Each person pays $10,000 in taxes, end of conversation. I call this the flat-flat-tax.
You can't really get more fair than "equal."
Good catch!
Business Administration 101 teaches that an enterprise should trade a variable expense for a fixed on at every opportunity, even if the fixed expense is slightly more in the long run. You do this for planning purposes and to eliminate surprises. Business do not like, they REALLY do not like, uncertainty.
Businesses are sitting on immense amounts of capital. Evidently these businesses are run by businessmen who simply will not commit their resources to an uncertain future.
Another is the idea to increase or take off the limit on SS taxes. The newspaper article won this week's "no Duh" Award when it noted that "some econonimists are hesitant to increase the employers tax since they think SS taxes may be included in what the employer views as the total pay package." No shit, Sherlock. Only SOME economists think that??
Yeah. The are making ever so much more money at 1-2% in short term securities than they could actually buying something with it. \
of course you can
Suppose you're Acme Appliances and you make, um, rice cake ovens. Your factory is running three shifts, totaling 600 workers, and, while you don't sell all you make domestically, you can export all you can produce. You've banked $10 million over the past two years in profits.
You're considering expanding your factory. It will cost $5 million. You'll triple your production and double your workforce.
But it's possible that the new health care law will end up costing you an additional $2,000 for each employee. That's $2.5 million per year - your working capital will be gone within two years after the new factory opens. In the current "Let's regulate the shit out of everything" governental mentality, you have completely unknown costs to accommodate these new, unknown, rules.
Taxes are going up at your local level as state revenue drops. Illinois, for example, just raised its corporate tax by 60%. How much extra will you have to pay next year?
No, the solution is to lie low, do nothing to put your company at risk, and weather the storm.
Because the Russians were godless communists and we're not.
Build the factory in China, keep the profits there, and let 'em eat rice cakes.
Since this is "let's assume", let's also assume that since all of the employees are covered by health care Acme has increased productivity due to less sick time and the need to train new employees. Just to be fair let us assume that each employee's new productivity amounts to $1.10 per hour which means that not only does Acme recoup the $2000 in health care costs, but gains an extra $200 per year, which would mean an extra $240,000 per year in additional profits.
But what would the fun be in that?
Except that the employees were _already_ covered w/ health care at less cost and higher benefits than are allowed under the new rules so that in fact they have less care available and higher costs than before.
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Thought of that, but Acme would still have to pay tax on their foreign profits eventually.
There were churches in Russia after the revolution - many of them turned into museums.
I did not say there were no churches.
I visited an Orthodox church in Israel, located at Jacob's Well. It was about four feet high. According to the guide, construction was begun in
1903, paid for by remittances from the "White" Russian Orthodox church. After the revolution all payments by the Office of the Patriarch were stopped by the Communist government. Construction began again in 1995 and the church is almost finished.By definition, however, atheism is an article of faith in Communism. Not benign atheism, but atheism antagonistic to all religion.
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