I’m bashing the hypocrisy. Saying one thing on the campaign trail and doing the opposite. He ran as this maverick outsider and then other than that Breitbart fuckstick, his other Cabinet appointees may as well have come from Ted Cruz. Drain the swamp and fill it with billionaire lifelong Republicans.
You honestly believe Apple or ExxonMobil should be able to make hundreds of billions and never pay a dime in taxes? I don’t think I’m the one who’s confused. Especially with a Supreme Court that apparently thinks they deserve all of the same rights as people. United Technologies made $7 billion in profit last year with all of the jobs in America. That wasn’t enough for them. They want to pay people $3 an hour in Mexico instead. Instead of the big tariff Trump promised for doing so, he gave them a $7 million reward for that move. Why wouldn’t every manufacturer in America threaten the same move and demand the same deal?
The tariffs were intended for those currently operating out of country. That is an incentive to bring them back to our country, once they enter the room to negotiate a return to avoid tariffs I would expect that they will ask for something in return. This is how negotiating works. Trump gave a little and got a lot in return from Carrier. They were gone, they had packed their bags and were walking out. He stopped them.
Yes, I do believe Corporations should pay little to no tax… and here is my reasoning… The CEO of Exxon Mobil’s salary is like $2 million, but his stock awards are worth ~$30 million. He pays the highest tax rate on his salary income earned…but the majority of his salary comes from stock awards… meaning he pays only 20% in (long term) capital gains on profits…making his effective tax rate lower than someone who makes $50k/yr. (again, all ballpark figures). If you want the rich to pay their “fair share” (even though they pay more taxes than any other class) get rid of low capital gains taxes on stock awards over a certain dollar amount.
If you cut corp. taxes from the current 35% to say, 5% or nothing… corporations will have that much extra money to either pay their employees, invest in new technology which could increase the well being of millions of people that benefit from the product, donate their extra $ to charitable contributions…etc.
Exxon Mobil’s EBITDA was $22 billion… they paid $5.5 billion in income tax. If the US corp tax rate was extremely low, Mulitnational companies would have no problem bringing in huge sums of money kept overseas, potentially paying the same amount of dollars in taxes to the US, but introducing billions more dollars to the US economy.
If I had millions overseas, which hopefully someday i will… instead of repatriating it and paying the US income tax I would just keep it in the foreign holdco and then reinvest it back either in the US or wherever the hell else I wanted to in the name of that holdco.
Eg. Apple Europe doesn’t need to repatriate… nor are they just sitting on hoards of cash doing nothing in chequing accounts. They can invest that money abroad just as Apple USA did to fund operations in Europe without paying taxes on the money transferred to do so. They don’t even need to fund any operations with it… just buy foreign cash-equivalent investments. For example, just bring it back to the US buy buying US bonds or stocks or whatever in foreign holdco.
Besides, there are tons of tax forms that negate the double tax anyways. The US has W8-BEN-E that I provide to Canadians to avoid the double tax in the US when bringing it back to Canada.
guys, how would you feel about additional threads to discuss different issues that are arising with this campaign?
Trump’s ‘calling-out’ of defense contractors is really interesting but maybe too involved for this thread?
I had read many times that the US Army cant balance its own books and cannot account for hundreds of millions of dollars in spend… things like that gotta be stopped somehow.
I was actually going to suggest that as well. There’s a lot of discussion in here that gets buried in the meme train. (Not that the memes are a bad thing)
