August 2011 archive

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

While the proposed corporate tax holiday was dumped out of the debt ceiling agreement doesn’t mean it’s dead. What’s a corporate tax holiday you ask? Here’s a little history from Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone:

For those who don’t know about it, tax repatriation is one of the all-time long cons and also one of the most supremely evil achievements of the Washington lobbying community, which has perhaps told more shameless lies about this one topic than about any other in modern history – which is saying a lot, considering the many absurd things that are said and done by lobbyists in our nation’s capital.

Here’s how it works: the tax laws say that companies can avoid paying taxes as long as they keep their profits overseas. Whenever that money comes back to the U.S., the companies have to pay taxes on it.

Think of it as a gigantic global IRA. Companies that put their profits in the offshore IRA can leave them there indefinitely with no tax consequence. Then, when they cash out, they pay the tax.

Only there’s a catch. In 2004, the corporate lobby got together and major employers like Cisco and Apple and GE begged congress to give them a “one-time” tax holiday, arguing that they would use the savings to create jobs. Congress, shamefully, relented, and a tax holiday was declared. Now companies paid about 5 percent in taxes, instead of 35-40 percent.

Money streamed back into America. But the companies did not use the savings to create jobs. Instead, they mostly just turned it into executive bonuses and ate the extra cash. Some of those companies promising waves of new hires have already committed to massive layoffs..

Now, there is a proposed bill that would lower the corporate tax rate to 5.25% for all profits that are brought back to the US. Needless to say it didn’t create one job in 2004 and it won’t this time either.

More from Taibbi:

For people interested in this story, I definitely recommend reading this Bloomberg article focusing on Cisco, one of the biggest lobbyers in favor of the tax holiday. This is a company whose CEO, John Chambers, wrote an editorial last October in the Wall Street Journal predicting that the tax holiday would generate a trillion dollars in repatriated earnings, money that Chambers insisted would outdo even Barack Obama’s stimulus as a job-creation engine:

   The amount of corporate cash that would come flooding into the country could be larger than the entire federal stimulus package, and it could be used for creating jobs, investing in research, building plants, purchasing equipment, and other uses.

And yet: Chambers’s company, Cisco, would not commit to creating so much as a single job if the tax holiday is passed. As it is, the company has already committed to a wave of layoffs. When asked a question about Cisco’s plans w/regard to a potential tax holiday, the company’s spokesman, John Earhardt, declined to answer. From the Bloomberg piece:

   It’s unclear whether any jobs would come from Cisco, which announced plans in May to shed an unspecified number of workers. Earnhardt, the spokesman, declined to comment on hiring plans for the company, whose customers include Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and AT&T Inc. (T)

There is little doubt that if this bill passes, Obama will sign it.

Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile of so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River.  It was a redneck sort of place, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.

I never write about living people except with their express permission, but since he is long gone, he is fair game.  He was not really an uncle, but rather was my great uncle, the brother to my paternal grandfather.  I always called him Uncle Bill, but did not know him very well, and hardly at all until his old age.

Uncle Bill was always nice to me, and I liked that.  When I grew to know him, he lived in the little, shabby rent house up the street.

If you do not get Current TV you can watch Keith here:

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Wisconsin and the Case of the Dogs That Didn’t Bark

By: Scarecrow, Firedog Lake

Tuesday August 9, 2011 11:12 pm

With such a profoundly misguided and destructive message coming from the President and national leaders, it must have been particularly difficult for Wisconsin citizens to explain why voters should recall Republican State Senators for taking positions their President and party were embracing in Washington. To be sure, Wisconsin’s Tea-Party Governor is a fraud, and his party’s actions have been abusive and excessive in slashing state programs and benefits. But Walker’s budget goals and methods are consistent with those of his national counterparts whom Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders have now promised to meet half way in slashing federal programs and benefits. There are few at the national level, and none at the top, making the counter argument about how offensive and obscene this is.

…

Our national leaders should have been reminding those fighting in the states that they were not to blame for the budget crises in their state capitals. Instead, men like Greenspan and Bernanke and Geithner and dozens of other federal regulators who were supposed to be watching the financial/banking sector either fell asleep on their jobs or willfully looked away, while Congress passed laws pretending that fraud and looting were okay if it was called “financial innovation” and “market making.” The regulators failed the country and the looters plundered, but thanks to this President, they’re still in power or presuming to lecture us on television. And now men like Boehner and Cantor and McConnell – and yes, Warner and Durbin and Lieberman are preventing desperately needed federal money from helping the states deal with the damage.

The truth is that President Obama and the national Democratic Party undercut the Wisconsin fighters by adopting harmful Tea-GOP talking points and repeating them night after night on national television. While the national Tea-GOP reinforced their state counterparts’ message at every turn, the national Democrats sabotaged the Wisconsin Democrats’ message.

Wisconsin Democrats didn’t need the President or Senate Democratic leaders to come to Wisconsin. What they needed were national leaders fighting for their cause, for their pro-government principles, for recognition of their rights – in Washington. They needed a President making that fight in Washington and carrying that message to the nation.

But the President and his party have abandoned that fight in D.C., and so abandoned those fighting in Wisconsin. And that’s why, despite heroic Wisconsin efforts, the good guys fell short. No one should count on or follow these corrupt leaders again, ever.

If you’re looking for new leaders, look to Wisconsin and other states under siege, where working people understand what’s going down and aren’t afraid to fight back.