David A. Schwinghammer
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Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
General Electric paid no corporate taxes
4/5/2011 9:29:24 AM
Unlike corporate tax dodgers, good citizens will pay more taxes.
Corporate trust has taken a couple of hits lately. The NEW YORK TIMES reported that General Electric paid zero taxes last year, and Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes” did a segment on companies dodging corporate taxes by sending their home offices overseas to countries like Switzerland and Ireland where corporate taxes are as low as fifteen percent. Leslie tracked one of them to a place called Zug, Switzerland, where she found the home office of an oil supply company. The problem was that nobody was there; Coincidentally (or maybe not) the company was involved in the oil spill in the Gulf. Meanwhile Big Business complains about a 35% corporate tax rate, which they rarely pay. They hire lawyers and lobbyists to get out of paying them, which I assume is what happened with GE. Their CEO says they lost thirty-four billion during the recession. Want to bet they get it back?
Saw another related article in the Minneapolis STAR TRIBUNE (“Executive Perks Are Piling Up” by Chris Serres and Patrick Kennedy) the other day. Corporate America claims they need to pay big bonuses and high salaries to keep the best and the brightest. According to the article executives get free limousine service, a home security system, and personal use of corporate jets.
Other Minnesota executives receive free medical benefits (God forbid public employees should be allowed to negotiate a reduction in their premiums) country club memberships, and financial planning services. According to Serres and Kennedy, of the fifty firms in their study, the average firm paid out over a hundred thousand in perks last year.
Once one executive gets a perq and another company hears about it, you’ve got a sort of monkey-see-monkey-do process called “Benchmarking” which is hard to eliminate. During a recession, when a company is “forced” to downsize, these perks often stay in place.
Serres and Kennedy mention a snowmobile manufacturer that is moving much of its operations to Mexico that offers free clothing and annual physicals at the Mayo Clinic. Some companies also pay the tax bill for the perks given executives. So then, could the problem be the corporate structure? Just as congressmen can vote themselves a pay raise, the best health care in the country, plus a pension, executives can feather their own nests at the expense of the poor peon workers who get to stand in the unemployment line, and God forbid they try to unionize.
Meanwhile elsewhere in Minnesota the new democratic governor, Mark Dayton, suggested the legislature add a three percent surcharge to the top one percent of taxpayers in Minnesota. The GOP went nuts. This just so happens to be the first time in forty years that the GOP gained control of both the senate and the house, so it would have been pretty tough to ram that through anyway.
Not all corporate entities are out to ream the public however. UCare, a non-profit Health Insurance Company, donated thirty million dollars to the state of Minnesota which has a five billion dollar deficit. UCare was created by the University of Minnesota Medical School; it covers 200,000 low income people and those with special needs in public health programs and Medicare recipients. Medica is also mulling over making a contribution.
UCare might be said to be dependent on government programs for their business, but there are other businessmen out there who don’t buy the conservative party line. Jim Pohlad, son of former Minnesota Twins owner and Banker Carl, purchased a full-page ad along with 200 other Minnesota businessmen, complaining that he wasn’t paying enough taxes. The Minnesota governor at the time, Tim Pawlenty, laughed and said he’d take their checks. Pawlenty then set about balancing the state budget with accounting tricks that landed the deficit in the lap of the new governor.
As we can see from the Switzerland scenario, there’s no assurance those companies are going to spend the corporate tax cuts the GOP wants to give them on jobs. As I write, they’re creating one million jobs . . .in Southeast Asia. Why should they hire more people, when American workers are the most productive in the world, when they can hire part time workers with no health care benefits and no pensions?
Conservative commentators like to claim that the top twenty percent of American earners pay most of the taxes, while the bottom ten percent pay none. Like they’re getting ripped off and those poor people are a bunch of freeloading bums. That’s just mean-spirited. Those people in the top one percent who were going to have to pay that surtax under Dayton’s plan should pay it voluntarily and set a good example. Like Jim Pohlad, they ought to know how lucky they are, that they could just as easily be one of the bottom one percent.
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More Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
• Skunks Believe Everybody Else Stinks - Thursday, May 16, 2013
• The Morning After Pill - Friday, April 12, 2013
• What Would Thomas Jefferson Say? - Saturday, April 06, 2013
• Boneheads - Tuesday, March 12, 2013
• Why Benedict XVI Resigned - Sunday, February 17, 2013
• Gabby Giffords Testifies - Wednesday, January 30, 2013
• Newspaper Caters to Gun Owners - Wednesday, January 23, 2013
• Piers Morgan Deserves a Medal - Monday, December 24, 2012
• The Red Devil and the Blue Devil? - Tuesday, October 30, 2012
• Is the new TV show, REVOLUTION, fantasy? - Wednesday, September 26, 2012
• Fanatical Moslems Aren't That Different From Our Fanatics - Wednesday, September 12, 2012
• We Need the United Nations - Wednesday, July 18, 2012
• Stop Catering to People's Basest Instincts - Monday, July 09, 2012
• Concerned Women for America political ad - Saturday, June 23, 2012
• Independent Voters Need to Pick a Side - Monday, June 11, 2012
• Romney's Solyndra Appearance - Friday, June 01, 2012
• Single Issue Voters - Sunday, May 20, 2012
• Bully or Sociopath? - Saturday, May 12, 2012
• Tan-orexic Woman Poor Role Model - Friday, May 04, 2012
• So Far Right They're Almost Left - Sunday, April 22, 2012
• Dog Eat Dog - Sunday, April 15, 2012
• The Tea Party is Back! - Sunday, March 25, 2012
• Gas Prices - Tuesday, March 13, 2012
• "Doofus" - Tuesday, March 06, 2012
• Bon Iver Front Man Makes Important Statement - Thursday, February 16, 2012
• Contraception Blowback - Friday, February 10, 2012
• 800 vetoes! - Saturday, February 04, 2012
• Issa Hounding Holder over GOP program - Thursday, February 02, 2012
• Rick Santelli's Rant - Wednesday, January 18, 2012
• Corporate Raider President? - Thursday, December 01, 2011
• Is This the Best They Can Do? - Thursday, November 17, 2011
• Tea Party a non-violent Movement? - Sunday, October 30, 2011
• Wall Street Protests - Wednesday, October 05, 2011
• Three new stooges - Thursday, August 25, 2011
• Hypocrite enters the race - Friday, August 19, 2011
• Business Leaders Need to Speak Out - Saturday, July 30, 2011
• Rupert Murdoch and GOP Credibility - Monday, July 25, 2011
• Playing on the railroad tracks - Sunday, July 17, 2011
• Scapegoating - Sunday, June 19, 2011
• The Biggest Swindle in US history - Friday, June 03, 2011
• We're Still Here! - Saturday, May 21, 2011
• Improve education by improving teacher morale - Wednesday, May 04, 2011
• Tea Partiers Don't Know What They're Talking About - Thursday, April 28, 2011
• General Electric paid no corporate taxes - Tuesday, April 05, 2011
• The Flat Earth Society is at it again! - Thursday, March 17, 2011
• Crap fest - Thursday, March 03, 2011
• Egyptian Revolution - Tuesday, February 08, 2011
• Tucson - Wednesday, January 12, 2011
• Would you want a right-winger for a neighbor? - Friday, January 07, 2011
• Noah's Ark Museum - Monday, December 06, 2010
• Frick and Frack Shoot Off Their Mouths - Friday, November 05, 2010
• Enthusiam Gap - Wednesday, October 27, 2010
• Super Computer - Tuesday, October 19, 2010
• US Chamber of Commerce, conservative front group. - Wednesday, October 13, 2010
• 13 Reasons to vote the straight democratic ticket - Wednesday, September 01, 2010
• Breitbart Makes Segretti look like a choirboy - Wednesday, July 28, 2010
• House on Fire? - Thursday, June 17, 2010
• The Blame Game - Friday, May 28, 2010
• National Prayer Day - Tuesday, May 18, 2010
• Conservative psyche (continued) - Friday, May 14, 2010
• Conservative psyche - Wednesday, May 12, 2010
• Are you smarter than a half-term governor? - Wednesday, April 14, 2010
• Rewriting History - Monday, April 05, 2010
• Fred Phelps - Friday, April 02, 2010
• Combing the Daily Newspaper - Wednesday, March 17, 2010
• Noir - Friday, November 06, 2009
• Interview with SOLDIER'S GAP author continued - Tuesday, November 03, 2009
• More from SOLDIER'S GAP author - Thursday, October 29, 2009
• SOLDIER'S GAP author answers questions. - Thursday, October 22, 2009
• Everything you always wanted to know about writing a novel - Tuesday, October 20, 2009
• Manuscript conventions - Thursday, September 10, 2009
• Revision - Monday, September 07, 2009
• Dialogue - Thursday, September 03, 2009
• Scene cards - Tuesday, September 01, 2009
• Point of view - Thursday, August 27, 2009
• Plot - Tuesday, August 25, 2009
• Arnie's dream - Friday, August 21, 2009
• Rituals - Thursday, August 20, 2009
• Dressing Arnie Vogel - Tuesday, August 18, 2009
• Character sketch continued - Friday, August 14, 2009
• Character sketch - Thursday, August 13, 2009
• Characterization - Wednesday, August 12, 2009
• Scene outline - Tuesday, August 11, 2009
• Warm-up activity - Freewriting - Monday, August 10, 2009
• Warm-up activity - brainstorming - Sunday, August 09, 2009
• Warm-up techniques (clustering) - Saturday, August 08, 2009
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