How many times must I remind you that money doesn't necessarily get you the best qualified person for the job. It can help, but it's not necessarily going to find you the best people for a job as not everyone values money the same as others.
It's not a guarantee.
But it's a hell of a factor.
Let me be frank: I am, for all intents and purposes, a teacher. I haven't completed my student teaching process as yet, but I know the meat of everything a teacher needs to know.
More importantly, I interact with teachers in a professional sense on a regular basis.
There's a test for certifying teachers in Delaware called the Praxis. In truth, there are several tests, but for the moment we'll focus on the Praxis I.
That one is, more or less, a version of the SATs. The difference is that the Praxis I requires a certain score to
pass. A fairly high score in Delaware, in fact, right around a 90%.
You would be
disturbed how many would-be teachers fail the Praxis I.
Do they love what they do?
Of course.
Are they necessarily the best people for the job because of that?
Now
there is an interesting question. I've had friends who love to play poker; it didn't alter the fact that they were
terrible at it and I could pretty easily fleece them at will, despite the fact that I
do not enjoy gambling in particular.
Just because someone loves something, or loves the
idea of a thing, it does not follow that they're any good at it.
Highly competent people tend to seek professions which will reward them accordingly. People good with their hands may take up a trade, people good with their minds will find a career.
A career that pays poorly, however, will tend to weed out a significant fraction of the most competent, simply because
they know they can do better elsewhere. You can natter on all you like about how you only want people who love what they do working in government, but if I were going under the knife of a surgeon, I'd be looking for the one who was the most skilled, and
fuck me if I'd care whether he liked the job or not.
So long as he got paid.
And abolishing corporate taxes is a terrible idea. They'd still sit on it...
Don't be an idiot. The only reason they invest (yes, those foreign corporations and investment accounts
are still investments) the money outside the country is to avoid paying taxes on it, because
in the short term those taxes would cost more than the money is likely to make if put to greater use, and they like having a reasonable amount of money around for emergencies.
they'd still influence our politics with it, they'd still push for laws that allow them to pollute because it's cheaper and they'd never get fined for it because of "too big to fail, too big to jail" that's become the way of our world now since government and corporations are so heavily married together.
Well duh.
That's what corporations do: seek ways to make money.
The job of
government is to work
against that. Yet, ironically, you spend most of your time railing against corporations rather than elected officials.
And, I'd argue the full costs of taxes AREN'T being pushed down on us because they couldn't possible to do that and hope to keep selling to people for luxury items.
That's because you're not looking at the situation very carefully.
I will make this as simple as I possibly can:
Taxes are an expense.
At the end of the day, it's a matter of bookkeeping for a corporation. That's all. Net profit is proceeds minus expenses. Materials, wages, taxes; all of these are expenses. All of them add to costs, and all of them will subsequently be reflected in the costs of products and the amount of money available to the corporation for investment.
For things of necessity like power, water, food, etc I could see them fully pushing the costs of taxes on us, but for non-essentials I don't. But that's why most things that are essentials (Power, water) are heavily regulated so that their profits should be around a "normal profit" so that they aren't over inflating the cost on people.
Water and power are heavily regulated because they operate as functional monopolies. Yes, FERC has the power to regulate prices, but they exercise it
rarely. Mostly the ability is there to prevent outright
gouging, since those industries operate, as I mentioned earlier, in a near-monopolistic state.
You
might have options for power, less so for water.
An opinion blog, but well written with facts to back it up.
An opinion blog that tends to ignore the evidence regarding capital gains tax rates vs revenues.
