Tag: Corporate Welfare

Tax Day Comes And Goes

Sorry to be a bummer but I just had to say something.

April 15th was a couple of days ago…..did you go through the agony of preparing your taxes only to learn you owed the government?

Will it be a burden on your finances?

Well do not worry for no one will take up the slack for our ‘saviors’, big business, has gotten a swell deal from the government…..did you?

Dozens of America’s most profitable corporations avoided paying any federal income taxes in 2025, according to an analysis out on Tuesday from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The 88 companies—which include Tesla, Southwest Airlines, Live Nation, Palantir, Citigroup, and many others listed in the S&P 500—brought in a collective $105 billion in pretax income last year.

ITEP found that 2025 saw a spike in corporate tax avoidance, enabled in part by new loopholes created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump and by his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the corporate tax rate to 21% from its previous 35%.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is expected to hand the wealthiest 1% of Americans $117 billion in tax cuts this year, while those in the bottom 95% are set to pay more in taxes while facing across-the-board cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

It also allowed multimillion- and billion-dollar corporations to find new ways to avoid paying taxes. More than half of the tax-avoiders listed in the report used a provision in the new tax law allowing companies to immediately write off capital investments, reducing their collective taxes by $11.4 billion.

Pharmaceutical and tech companies, meanwhile, were able to take advantage of tax write-offs for research and development, exempting them from approximately another $4.4 billion.

In total, the corporate tax avoidance documented in 2025 by the researchers helped to rob the public coffers of yet another $26.7 billion, enough to give every public school student a free lunch for a year, according to a University of Missouri analysis of the National School Lunch Program.

https://www.alternet.org/big-beautiful-bill-taxes/

I am so proud of this country for making the hard working public pay all the goddamn bills while the robber barons sit on their fat asses smiling like that fat cat from Alice in Wonderland.

I am starting to like this NYC mayor more4 these days……he sees what I see….I wish others did…..

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is using Tax Day to remind Americans that the nation’s tax code is “rigged” to protect the superrich while making the case for a more equitable system.

In a Guardian op-ed co-written with Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz and Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman, New York’s democratic socialist mayor lamented that the world is living with greater wealth inequality than ever before, with just 0.0001% of the global population holding the equivalent of 16% of global wealth—more than the bottom half of humanity.

Mamdani and the economists attributed the global surge in inequality in large part to America’s “regressive” tax system, which has grown dramatically more favorable to the wealthy over the past half-century.

Compared to 1960, when the 400 richest Americans paid roughly half their incomes in taxes, they now pay about 24%—helped by a combination of lower marginal tax rates and loopholes that allow billionaires and corporations to shield their wealth and effectively pay a smaller share of their incomes than everyone else.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/zohran-tax-day

Ain’t capitalism great?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

When The “S” Word Is Okay

The 2020 election is quickly approaching……and we have the usual word in the debate….socialism…..

Soon we will be bombarded with the “S” word as the Dem field starts to take its final shape……Trump will be out front with the accusations followed closely by the GOP and their lies that they do so well.

The problem is they are not against “socialism” just not for the people of the nation…they prefer that corporations get the “free stuff”……

This news report of 7 years ago helps understand just how bad “corporate socialism” can be……

A proposal to spend $250 million of taxpayer money on a retail project here illustrates the damage state and local subsidies do by taking from the many to benefit the already rich few.

Nationwide state and local subsidies for corporations totaled more than $70 billion in 2010, as calculated by Professor Kenneth Thomasof the University of Missouri-St. Louis

In a country of 311 million, that’s $900 taken on average from each family of four in 2010. There are no official figures, but this one is likely conservative because — as documented by Thomas, this column and Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations — these upward redistributions of wealth keep increasing.

http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2012/06/01/how-corporate-socialism-destroys/

Fast forward to the Trump presidency…….

“America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. That pretty much describes the $21 billion saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.

Banks that are too big to fail – courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout – enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83 billion a year, because creditors facing less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans. Last year, Wall Street’s bonus pool was $31.4 billion. Take away the hidden subsidy and the bonus pool disappears.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/12/trump-wants-socialism-rich-brutal-capitalism-rest-us

After over a 100 years of demonizing socialism is now what the GOP tells their child-like followers to send them hiding under their beds…..

And while they are hiding democracy is slowly slipping from their grasp……

This growing animosity toward the greed of the immensely wealthy is not merely symptomatic of a popular presidential candidates’ rhetoric, but indicative of the harrowing economic inequalities existing in American society and politics. The 62 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the world, roughly 3.6 billion people. The wealthiest 1 percent of the global population have as much wealth as the other 99 percent of the world’s population. For decades, wages of the middle and working classes have remained stagnant in the United States while the top earners have seen their wages grow exponentially. In the United States since the 2008 recession, nearly 99 percent of all new generated income has gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. Current trends suggest these enormous disparities in wealth are expanding.

https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/economy-budget/268947-a-democracy-lost-to-corporate-socialism

Political lies have replaced knowledgeable discourse and the specter of socialism taking over and people will lose all their rights……under these lies that is exactly what is happening and socialism did not have anything to do with that loss.

 

Is Trump A Socialist?

Did you hear that?  That was the sound of millions of Trump supporters asses slamming shut!

Please read the post and not just the title like so many do…..

Ever read something that makes sit back and have a good chuckle?  Well I found one over the weekend……

Surely you have heard about the deal the Trump made with Carrier (UTC)…..the one about the jobs….ring a bell yet?

Don’t strain that sleeping brain……

With his deal to keep Carrier’s factory in Indianapolis open, Donald Trump has fulfilled a big campaign promise, saved 1,100 highly paid American jobs—and, once again, created an enormous controversy. Carrier, which had planned to shift production to Mexico, will receive at least $7 million in financial incentives from Indiana. Critics say this sets a dangerous precedent, and wonder whether Trump is planning to make deals with every company that threatens to move jobs overseas. A round-up of coverage:

  • Trump praised the deal in a visit to the factory Thursday, CBS reports. “Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences. It’s not gonna happen,” he said.
  • United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, “took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country,” Bernie Sanders writes in a Washington Post op-ed. With the deal, he writes Trump has endangered previously safe jobs by signaling “to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives.”
  • White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters the deal is “obviously good news,” but hardly comparable to the 804,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector he said President Obama created, the Guardian reports. Trump would need to “make 804 more announcements just like that” to equal what Obama did, Earnest said.
  • Trump revealed to Carrier workers that despite his promise to keep jobs there, he hadn’t really been talking about that particular factory. “I said Carrier will never leave,” he said. “But that was a euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all the other companies from here on in.” He said he decided to get on the phone to execs anyway “because of the love affair I’ve had—this has been a very special state to us.”
  • Jimmy Pethokoukis, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, didn’t pull his punches in an interview with CNBC. He said Trump’s remarks were the worst economic speech since Walter Mondale’s attack on Reaganomics in 1984. He says it is “absolutely chilling” that American corporations will now have to make business decisions based on “fear of punitive actions based on who knows what criteria exactly from a presidential administration.”
  • NPR notes that United Technologies makes a lot of money from government contracts, suggesting “strong-arm” tactics played a role in the deal. Analysts including George Mason University professor of economics Tyler Cowen, a libertarian, warns that “crony capitalism” could prevail under Trump, with plenty of rewards flowing to companies that please the president.
  • But at the Carrier plant itself, the mood is unsurprisingly jubilant—and pro-Trump. The announcement was a “Christmas miracle,” Jeffery Blackford, who was worked for the company for 25 years, tells the Indianapolis Star, which reports that under the deal, the average wage will be $30.91 an hour. “Hopefully this right here will be a start of a new beginning, where we can stop manufacturing from leaving this country.”

That should catch you up…..

A leading conservative writer has stepped up and given what Trump has done a name……

GEORGE WILL: So far Donald Trump’s style is personal, not to say visceral, and ad hoc. And what that adds up to is a kind of use of presidential power absolutely unconstrained by law and statute and all those other niceties. The problem is when you have, in the Carrier case, political power used to bring pressure upon a privately held corporation that has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value and drive them off with political pressure from making economic decisions about economic assets, you are, in effect, at the end of the day, getting the federal government involved in capital allocation. There is a name for that, it’s called socialism.

This ought to put the conservative writer on the shit list of all those slobbering Trump supporters……

After accusing the Left for decades of being a socialist group and plotting to somehow install a socialist government….we find the Trump is more socialist than the Left…..according to Will.

I cannot wait for the mindless dribble that should come my way…..but…….

Please before you slugs on the Right have anything to say….leave me out of it…..your point of contention is with George Will, a fellow conservative….all I did was show that not all conservatives are willing to kiss his ass like you.

Remember All Those Freeloaders?

Sure you do!  All you Right thinking people have bitched and demonized them with every election since Reagan….they have been called “welfare queens” and “freeloaders” and I am sure some others that are not too polite……those people that get those freebies without paying any taxes…..surely you remember all those people that are destroying this country because they get “freebies”.

I am sick of the “freeloader” bullshit!

But let’s be honest…the real cheats are the corporations that do little for this country and in return are allowed to pay little to no taxes……

Apple has skipped out on paying close to $60 billion in taxes on $181 billion it holds offshore, according to a new study. But though the company holds the most profits offshore of any US company, it’s hardly alone: At least 358 American companies hold $2.1 trillion in profits, which would be subject to a 35% corporate tax rate if the funds were to reach the US, according to the review by two left-leaning nonprofits, per Reuters. That means $620 billion could be collected by feds—enough money to eliminate the federal deficit, notes CNBC. Instead, companies move assets to places like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, where they pay about 6% in taxes. The report finds 60% of companies with tax subsidiaries had at least one in either country, though the Netherlands had the highest number of subsidiaries.

Think $620 billion in potential tax gains is high? The actual number is likely much higher. The report notes just 57 companies disclosed how much they would owe if they transferred their offshore holdings back home. As “nearly 72% of the Fortune 500 operate subsidiaries in tax haven jurisdictions as of the end of 2014 … Congress can and should take strong action to prevent corporations from using offshore tax havens, which in turn would restore basic fairness to the tax system, reduce the deficit, and improve the functioning of markets,” the study from Citizens for Tax Justice and the US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund found. Just 30 companies account for $1.4 trillion in offshore profits. General Electric was found to hold $119 billion in 18 tax havens, Microsoft has $108.3 billion in five, and Pfizer has $74 billion in 151.

This is one of the reason I will NOT buy any of the crap Apple sells…..that and the fact that they use sweat shops to make their crap……so they can charge $600 for a phone made for $10…….

The very people that bitch and moan about this country and its problems are the very ones that spend hours in line to buy a product for $800 that is basically a “freeloader” dissing its country……

Here is an outrageous idea……how about you stop bitching, whining and blaming poor people for the problems in this country and go after the REAL freeloaders.

How American businessmen are ruining American business — and the U.S. economy – The Week

Many Americans have blamed business for the slow rate of jobs growth…..and for me they deserve all the criticism……it is all about their bottom line…..screw the country and especially screw the people……

Americans, all Americans, need to wake up to the fact they they, corporations, are NOT on the side of the people……they fund crap like the GOP and all the time they get corporate welfare….

we need to take this country back from sleazy politicians and fat cat bankers……who’s with me?

 

How American businessmen are ruining American business — and the U.S. economy – The Week.

The shocking numbers behind corporate welfare | Al Jazeera America

The closer we get to an election the more loud the rhetoric on welfare gets…..we will hear all about the so-called ‘free rides’…..but individuals are NOT the only ones that get that ‘free ride’…..very little will be said about another form of welfare….that of corporate welfare….and believe me there is more money wasted there than on some poor person needing help……

Want to know more?  Read on McDuff!

The shocking numbers behind corporate welfare | Al Jazeera America.