My invitation: Pick a statement you believe to be clearly true that contradicts anything I said; or pick a statement I made that you believe clearly wrong. I will cut and paste it verbatim to my blog, post a link to it, and we can debate until you start contradicting yourself, or we agree that insufficient data exists to formulate definitive positions. Or, until you embarrass me, and cause me to realize my sense of the strength of my positions is entirely unwarranted. I have never censored any comment, and for any lurkers will note that Anonymous is enabled. Feel free to pile on.
Response:
“Anyone who has ever formed a corporation, particularly a C Corp, is struck immediately by the gross unfairness of getting taxed both at the corporate level AND at the individual level.” My husband, Peter C. above, formed a C Corp and ran it for 30 years, and he posted Noam Chomsky’s video in response to that.
Here is that video.
Second Response: “I suspect most people who are surprised that for-profit entities would seek to maximize revenues have never seriously thought about going into business, much less run one.” [this is my comment, to which she is responding]. Ummm, also inaccurate. Both my husband and I ran for-profit businesses and we did not engage in unethical actions to maximize profits. Putting profits above all else has resulted in egregious behaviors in many businesses. Presumably you don’t need me to provide examples (I am highly educated and just covered corporate crime less than a year ago and would have no problem finding ample evidence for this.)
Third Response: “None of you are emotionally capable of” [full statement, from me, in response to what I perceived as generalized repetition of bad propaganda: None of you are actually emotionally capable of seeing beyond your patent biases, or engaging in meaningful, useful dialogue].… I am a cognitive neuroscientist by training (PhD-ABD with an additional degree in psychology),. Do you have any idea what type of experiments you would have to run to determine anyone’s emotional capabilities? And yet you made this pronouncement to a group of strangers based on your own emotional responses. I don’t even need to refute this as it is patently absurd.
I do not have time tonight to respond in depth, but will over the next few days, in comments.
3 replies on “Unfairness”
C corps: if, as an individual, I run a C corp that makes $100,000 in profit, I first pay taxes, let us say 20%, on that income. My corporate income is reduced by $20,000. If I then distribute the remainder to myself, I am taxed again, let us say at 25%. This is $40,000, or a de facto 40% income tax rate, which is punitive.
The foundational, ineluctable sine qua non of sustainable economic growth is growth in the revenues and following spending of for profit corporations. Government cannot do it, since it TAKES money that it then "invests" almost exclusively in economically unviable projects being undertaken in almost all cases by people connected to the government doing the redistributing, as was the case with Obama's massive transfer of wealth that was sold as a "Stimulus".
Corporations can do only three things with profits: they can reinvest them in the company, which facilitates growth; they can pay their employees more, which allows them to hire better people, which also tends to grow the company; or they can distribute the profits to share-holders.
In Case One, we get economic growth. In cases two and three we get taxable income. If the goal is taxation, it is realized. As should be obvious, and as I have proposed, we can increase income taxes to make up for lost corporate tax revenues when we reduce their tax rate to zero. The ONLY circumstance in which new revenues are not maintained is that in which the money is reinvested. But this, in turn, will create jobs, and the people who work those jobs will pay more income tax. Thus, in all circumstances tax revenues are maintained or increased.
This is logical, intelligent, and fair.
All Noam Chomsky pointed out is that many people resent paying taxes to governments which do not represent them. This is unquestionably true, but nothing he is proposing will do anything but make things worse.
Our system was designed to make the locus of control the sundry States. The United States of America were referred to in the plural until after our Civil War, after which the Radical Republicans, in their moral haste to punish the South for slavery, did considerable damage to our Constitution.
If Minnesota wants to look like Sweden, and Texas the Wild West, that is their right. It is the insertion of the Federal government into all areas of life, alone, which makes it impossible to use the word democracy without irony. It has nothing to do with the entities who create all the sustainable jobs, who facilitate the payment of all taxes, and who enable economic prosperity.
With regard to corporate responsibility, what is wrong with using legal tax shelters? By your logic, I am committing some sort of crime depreciating a company vehicle, or buying tax credits.
Clearly, people who work at corporations do things that are wrong. So too do government officials. So too do private citizens. It is silly to conflate the actions of some people with the aggregate. Candidly, I am not clear what your point is, other than that you like the corporations you like, and don't like the ones you don't.
As far as emotional capacity, there are any number of cognitive distortions, such as confirmation bias and negative hallucinations, that are driven almost entirely by emotional factors. People see what they want to see, and don't see what they don't want to see. This is not complicated.
Having spent a great deal of time debating leftists, it has been my uniform experience that nearly everything they believe is riddled with patent contradictions, abdication of principle, and a complete apathy with regard to whether or not the policies they promote actually work to achieve the ends they allegedly support.
I will address "corporate inversions" as well, in part. I will not treat it fully, but make one obvious point.
You mention Walgreens more or less moving its corporate headquarters to Switzerland. Why would it do this? Simple: Switzerland has lower corporate income taxes, perhaps none.
Does Walgreen's have a "moral responsibility" to pay more income taxes than absolutely necessary? No, not in my view. As I mentioned, if you want to argue this, you are arguing that the work of CPA's in building tax shelters and reducing taxable income is also immoral.
And we need to be clear that the well being of corporations is the well being of our economy. Everyone who works at Walgreen's pays taxes. This includes the CEO and various executives who, if they live in the United States, pay income taxes here.
Further, most States have sales taxes, so that everything sold at any Walgreen's gets taxed. This is tax revenue gained that would be absent if Walgreens did not exist.
And Walgreen's exists within a web. Someone delivers their goods. Those people pay taxes, both income taxes, and gas taxes. Their employees spend their money in the local economy, generating revenue for other businesses. They "stimulate" the economy in a real way, and not the bullshit way proposed by the Keynesian fascists (Did you know Mussolini himself pronounced Keynes ideas "pure Fascism"? Surely if anyone understood Fascism, it would be the person who invented it.)
Thus, of all the injustices in the world, this is surely one of the least important.
We are in an economic recovery that is the worst since the Great Depression, and for the same reason: we have a Socialist in the White House who has lost the trust of corporations like Walgreens, who have responded with decreased economic investment, and less jobs created.
You say you have a Ph.D in psychology. How complicated is the proposition that you should not direct hate at people you need? How complicated is the idea that you should not punish the activities you want to encourage?
None of this is rocket science. Quite the contrary: people of average intelligence can grasp them quite quickly. The problem is that people of nominal above average intelligence use that intelligence to rationalize the indefensible, to build islands in the sky that appeal to unmet emotional needs, which is why they keep building them even though they crash, to the detriment of nearly all, every single time they are floated.
She refused to respond, and instead deleted the comment.
I will note that when I take a high and mighty tone, when I take a condescending tone, when I act like the people I am debating are stupid, it is not because of my elevated sense of self importance. I think I am smart, and think I can demonstrate it on most any topic.
But is not it, when I am dealing with leftists. There, what I have is a HUGE,ENORMOUS pile of experience. I have many, many thousands of hours spent with them, asking them to do their best to defend their views. I don't try to defend conservatism–really, what I call Liberalism, what IS Liberalism–on conservative sites. I do it in their territory, on their home ground, where they can hog pile on me, where as many minds as possible are deployed, where someone, somehow, should be able to make sense.
And it doesn't happen. It NEVER HAPPENS. I have been banned from the Daily Kos, Media Matters, the Huffington Post, and others I've forgotten. I was banned from a local site twice.
YOU CANNOT DEFEND THE INDEFENSIBLE. This is an extraordinarily simple point. This is why these ass clowns spend so much time controlling the message, controlling the dialogue, controlling who gets to speak and what they get to say.
This gal, Sandra, has a Ph.D is Psychology. One would think that with a credential like that you she would be able to grasp the point make implicitly by her demonstrated inability to defend her own views, or coherently attack mine.
But at a certain level of intelligence, rationalization gets easier, not harder. It becomes possible to defend the indefensible simply by relabeling it. She was not retreating in the face of a determined use of reason and fact. She was simply not engaging with someone who was plainly a bully, not interested in rational dialogue, and doing nothing more or less than repeating Republican talking points. Life is short: why bother with such people?
And of course her life and informational consumption patterns are DESIGNED to protect her from ideological alterity/diversity/confusion.
Fuck these people. I can and do speak about love. But there is a time and place for anger, and it is quite justifiably directed at people who create pain and confusion from a stance of moral superiority, emotional callousness disguised as compassion, and who take ZERO responsibility for their actions.