Wait, what?
---------- Post added at 11:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:48 AM ----------
Ah. Just another symptom of what a fucked up couple of years it has been in this country.
The tax benefit stems from so-called tax-loss carry-forwards and other provisions, which allow companies to use losses in prior years and costs related to pensions and other expenses to shield profits from U.S. taxes for up to 20 years. In GM’s case, the losses stem from years prior to when GM entered bankruptcy.
Usually, companies that undergo a significant change in ownership risk having major restrictions put on their tax benefits. The U.S. bailout of GM, in which the Treasury took a 61% stake in the company, ordinarily would have resulted in GM having such limits put on its tax benefits, according to tax experts.
But the government, in a little-noticed ruling last year, decided companies that received bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program won’t fall under that rule.
“The Internal Revenue Service has decided that the government’s involvement with these companies, both its acquisitions plus its disposals of their stock, means they should be exempt” from the rule, said Robert Willens, a New York tax consultant who advises investment banks and hedge funds.
The government’s rationale, said people familiar with the situation, is that the profit-shielding tax credit makes the bailed-out companies more attractive to investors, and that the value of the benefit is greater than the lost tax payments, especially since the tax payments would not exist if the companies fail.
---------- Post added at 11:54 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:51 AM ----------
lol at least the rest of it is nonsense.
Seems like the Republicans are back to using fuzzy math.
President Barack Obama is being slammed by conservatives’ unsubstantiated claims—which the White House insists are bogus—that the president’s 10-day Asia trip, which Obama kicks off Friday, will cost hundreds of millions of dollars a day.
Then there are the rumors that he’ll be guarded by a vast armada of 34 U.S. warships. And that he’ll rent 870 rooms in one hotel. And that he’ll take thousands of people along with him.
Many of the claims originated from unnamed Indian officials in the Indian press. They were then perpetuated by conservatives
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann griped to Anderson Cooper on CNN this week that the trip “is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day,” she said. “He’s taking two thousand people with him. He’ll be renting out over 870 rooms in India. And these are 5-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.”
But as the Taj Mahal Palace’s website points out, there are only 560 rooms at the hotel. And Snopes.com, a site devoted to busting myths, called the claims “questionable,” and said even if the Indian press had accurately reported the size of the president’s group of 3,000, it would mean spending $66,000 per person per day, “a figure that stretches credulity to the breaking point.”
Factcheck.org notes the entire war in Afghanistan costs the U.S. $190 million a day.
But Bachmann wasn’t alone in repeating the claims. Fox News’ Glenn Beck went as far to say that the trip will cost $2 billion for Obama to see “the festival of lights.” Rush Limbaugh, Doug Powers and Sean Hannity also repeated some of the rumors.
The Pentagon’s press secretary, Geoff Morrell, told reporters the claims were “comical.”
“I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10% of the Navy – some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier – in support of the president’s trip to Asia,” Morrell said.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/11/05/2010-11-05_president_obamas_trip_to_india_will_cost_200m_a_day_gop_claim_white_house_says_t.html?r=news/politics#ixzz14QLlDaYa
