Corporate Taxes Archives

The tax bill confers a spectacular benefit on America’s bottom 50%

December 4, 2017 by Bookworm 4 Comments

Ignore the Left’s collective scream about the new tax bill — it will confer a benefit on those who are economically in the lower half of American earners.

I’m not an economist, but I was blessed with a fair amount of common sense. Despite Democrat hysteria, it’s obvious that “the little people” will fare better under the proposed tax bill than they do now — and for a reason the Republicans ought to be speaking about a lot but, because they’re bozos, they are not.

Before getting to the most significant benefit for the less wealthy under the new tax bill, let’s look at life under the current tax laws. First, it’s helpful to define terms and the two terms I want to look at are “progressive” and “regressive”.

A Progressive tax is one that sees tax rates increases proportionately to an individual’s increase in taxable wealth. The first X number of dollars are subject to a low tax rate, the next X+1 dollars are subject to a higher tax rate, and so on for each increase in X dollars. In other words, as you make money, the government demands a bigger and bigger cut. It’s a wealth tax.

The opposite of a Progressive tax is a Regressive tax. That is a tax that places a disproportionate burden on those least able to bear it. Back in the late 14th century, England enacted a poll tax, requiring every person in the kingdom to pay a fixed amount just for being alive. That led to a Peasants’ Revolt, because the amount of the tax placed a vastly disproportionate burden on the poor, to whom a shilling was a fortune, than on the rich, to whom a shilling was negligible.

Currently, America ostensibly does not have a “Regressive” tax system. This is a lie. America’s tax code is highly regressive. This is because we have the highest corporate tax rate in the Western world. Yay, say Lefties. Let’s stick it to the corporations. That sentiment proves that Lefties are either stupid or uninformed. [Read more…]

photo by: saturnism

Bernie again showcases his economic ignorance and disregard for data

April 14, 2016 by Bookworm 9 Comments

I received the following email from a friend. I really can’t add anything to it:

***

I just read the most ungodly economically ignorant article I have ever read. . . . It even beats out the $15 an hour minimum wage arguments, which at least are based on rational fantasy. [Bookworm here: Or maybe not so rational.]

Let me set this up: Bernie goes to Brooklyn, where he rails against all of the evil businesses he means to destroy, starting with Verizon. Bernie claims that Verizon has paid nothing in taxes, and that it is time for Verizon to pay its “fair share.” (I am starting to become violent every time I hear the word “fair” at this point.)

Sayeth the Bern, “[Verizon] is just another major American corporation trying to destroy the lives of working Americans.”

Verizon’s CEO responds calling Bernie an economic idiot in none too veiled language: “The senator’s uninformed views are, in a word, contemptible.”

After laying out all the facts, including the pivotal fact that, while an NY subsidiary lost money and paid no taxes, the parent company paid over $15.6 billion in taxes in just the past two years, the CEO states, “Nostalgia for the rotary phone era won’t save American jobs, any more than ignoring the global forces reshaping the auto industry saved the Detroit auto makers.”

Wonderful stuff. The CEO’s letter is worth a full read.

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The collected (nit)wit and (un)wisdom of Bernie Sanders

August 17, 2015 by Bookworm 152 Comments

My Progressive friends are flooding my Facebook feed with posters dedicated to what they perceive as the “wit and wisdom” of avowed socialist and Democrat Party candidate Bernie Sanders. I thought I’d take a look at what passes for intelligence from Bernie Sanders and his acolytes on the Left. My comments are below each poster. Please feel free to chime and, most definitely, to correct me if I’m wrong:

You’ll constantly see Bernie use this type of “cause” and “effect” rhetoric. To Bernie, too many millionaires and billionaires equals poor children. In this, he is just as sophisticated as the Climate Changistas who attribute every weather event and every societal wrong to climate change.

Here’s the reality about those poverty stricken children, and it has nothing to do with the Koch Brothers (who are Bernie’s favorite bête noire and scapegoat). In a free(ish) market system, there is one sure way to become financially secure: study, marry, and have children, in that order. If you skip studying (and this is true no matter how useless America’s higher education system is), you’re less likely to have money. And if you skip marriage on your way to children, you’ve virtually consigned those children to poverty:

A dramatic rise in unwed births and the accompanying decline in marriage are the most important cause of child poverty in the United States. As Chart 1 shows, in 2009, 37.1 percent of single-parent families with children in the U.S. were poor. In the same year, only 6.8 percent of married couples with children were poor. Single-parent families were nearly six times more likely to be poor than were married families.

[snip]

The overwhelming majority of poor families with children in the U.S. are not married. (Overall, a third of all families with children at all income levels are not married.) But a staggering 71 percent of all poor families with children are unmarried. By contrast, married couples comprise only around 29 percent of poor families with children. (See Chart 2.)

[Read more…]