Raes, you have the vast misconception that corporations will take that 2.5 billion and spend it on new facilities and new jobs. Have you not paid attention for the last decade+? Have you not seen their low tax rates? Their record high profits? Where are the jobs? That mindset is flawed and failed. Why? Because when you give them more tax breaks, they take that money and give it to their shareholders who then put it in offshore accounts and sit on it, or they sit on it themselves in off shore accounts. Bullshit at the idea they only hold onto it for future anything. They hold onto it for their own pure greed. The same reason anyone does who has an excess of money and keeps demanding more.
Ah, an "excess" of money.
Yes, offshore anonymous banking is a thing. Not a good thing, even. There are, however, some important things to consider.
First off, that money (for the most part, outright illegal activities obviously slip past the radar on this one) was taxed once already. The profits don't magically disappear into Switzerland, they get taxed, and
then some unscrupulous soul hides them in the home of alpenhorns and Nazi gold.
Secondly, yes, some estimates place the amount of wealth squirreled away in offshore accounts at between $20 to $30
trillion. Bear in mind that this estimate is from an advocacy group, so it is immediately suspect, but there's certainly a great deal of wealth hidden away out there, no question. But it's not like that much wealth is going into the anonymous banking system every year. That vast sum represents
decades of accumulation. And in a century (which is quite possibly how long some of these accounts have been open), even relatively modest sums can become something truly epic.
Thirdly, offshore banks are still
banks, at the very least, and most of them are investment banks at that. The money isn't vanished from the economy, it's still out there funding businesses, investments, loans and mortgages, it's just not being taxed for the original account holder. Which is
bad, certainly, but not abysmally so. It's not, again, the Scrooge McDuck scenario where the wealth is squirreled away in a giant vault full of gold.
Fourthly, banks have lousy return rates. 3% compounded annually on a savings account is pretty damned good, probably better than most of what these sorts of accounts would have; what they represent is the opportunity to save the 15-30% in taxation, rather than being a good investment in themselves. It's not where all the money goes, it's just another part of the portfolio for most of these hypothetical super-wealthy.
So if we take the bottom end of the scale ($20 trillion) with a
very respectable interest rate (let's say 2%), and tax it to a likely amount (30%, for example), what do we have left?
Well, it's still a significant pile of cash, ~$180 billion. But that's a
global total, not what any one nation could expect to see. If we were generous and assigned 20% of that to the United States, it's $36 billion in lost revenue. Which is no joke, certainly.
It's also less than 1% of the budget.
Yes it's bad. No, it's not where all the money goes, just a small portion of it. No, taxing it will not solve our budget problems. Taxing it is still a worthwhile goal, of course.
So where are the jobs?
Ask China. Ask Mexico.
Ask Japan. There's this misconception that somehow, the loss of manufacturing jobs (which is what most people talking about when they ask "where are the jobs?!?!") is all about businesses moving to countries with cheap labor and lax accounting laws.
There's a
lot of that, certainly, but it's not the whole story by any stretch. The fact of the matter is that manufacturing as a source of jobs has been dwindling, and will continue to dwindle over the coming decades. Eventually, it will disappear altogether.
So, right now, yes, a lot of manufacturing jobs are outsourced overseas, to countries where the corporations can minimize their costs. It's interesting to note that on that front, a lot of manufacturing is moving back to the United States to take advantage of reduced shipping and energy costs, it's just not doing so in states with crippling union laws.
But there will never be as many people employed in manufacturing as there once were.
Ever.
Productivity per worker in manufacturing today is
four times what it was in 1950. And while a lot of that has gone into cheaper goods, a lot of it has also gone into just not as many workers in the factories. We make more goods, with fewer people, and that trend will not only continue, it will
accelerate.
What about the argument that make their taxes higher, they opt to invest it back into their business instead of just putting it into their coffers to avoid giving it to the government?
Because they
have to turn some measure of a profit to be considered a good investment. That's what the shareholders are looking for, and that vast pool of capital circulating is what drives the engine of business. It's a messy pool, no doubt, and it can lead businesses into very strange and sometimes very
bad decisions, but no worse than an arbitrary tax code that forces businesses to invest unwisely in order to dodge taxes.
Let alone you ignore that the government has a lot of good programs to help people who need it and considering no corporation, no person either, gets big without the society's help (the society they are a part of) from the roads, the protection of the military and cops and courts, the purchasers of their product/service of that society, etc.
I don't ignore it. I never said taxation was a bad thing, or that public goods have no place.
I said that corporate taxes are paid by individuals.
That's all I said. This is what we call a "straw man" argument.
Stop making it.
And the idea is that congress shouldn't be paid better than the average person.
And if we do that, we'll get average people in Congress.
Having worked with average people in the past, I'm perfectly comfortable paying them wages more appropriate to their education and personal investment.
No one in the elected public, especially federal, jobs should really get any privacy of who they meet with imo and it should all be forced to be made public for all to know and if it's found they are taking money from other industries? Trial, if found guilty, minimum of life in prison. That's down right treasonous of them. They're intentionally harming the government's operations and the people of the nation for their own greed. They don't deserve anything less than life in prison.
While I'm all for transparency in finance with elected officials, life in prison would probably be considered... a little harsh.
Particularly when you label it as a "minimum", since the only way up from there is the death sentence.
And, if you've ever talked to your own state legislation, most of them actually do still listen to their people.
Or they make the noises to indicate that they do, at least.
