Hey! Roster Rooster: Corporate Welfare!

[Slinky]

General Electric reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion for 2010. $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None. GE claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well, increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less. Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws, have pushed down corporate share of the nation's tax receipts -- from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.

Critics say that the assertive tax avoidance of multinationals like GE not only shortchanges the Treasury, but also harms the economy by discouraging investment and hiring in the United States.

Since 2002, GE has eliminated a fifth of its workforce in the United States while increasing overseas employment. In that time, GE's accumulated offshore profits have risen to $92 billion from $15 billion.

In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan overhauled the tax system after learning that GE was among dozens of corporations that had used accounting gamesmanship to avoid paying any taxes. The president supported a change that closed loopholes and forced GE to pay a far higher effective rate, up to 32.5 percent.

Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company's profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view GE not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and MRI machines.

For the full article:
http://www.startribune.com/business/118625649.html

[Wulfman]

I hate to break the news to you, but corporations like GE don't "PAY" taxes in the first place.......they increase their prices and collect the money from their customers. In other words, they're acting as tax collectors for the Federal Government. It's just a shell game that they and the Feds play......with the public being played as patsies.
When you're powerful enough to buy off as many legislators as you need to write specific legislation (have them inserted into bills) for your own special interests......what do you expect? It's not just them, it's the whole rotten barrel of apples.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric

Remember their old slogan?......"Progress is our most important product"........yeah, right!


Den

[LinkC]

Remember their old slogan?......"Progress is our most important product"........yeah, right!

They should update that... "Progressives are our most important product".

[Wulfman]

Remember their old slogan?......"Progress is our most important product"........yeah, right!

They should update that... "Progressives are our most important product".

RIGHT!!!
I'm curious to see what changes Comcast may end up making to the networks they acquired recently (NBC/MSNBC).
I used to be able to stand to watch some of the "opinion" shows (for a little while to hear some of both sides of issues), but they've gotten so many fanatical liberal/progressives hosting the shows and spewing partisan hatred now that I can't stand to watch them anymore.


Den

[deerhound]

Don't forget that GE CEO Immelt owns a piece of Obama, and it pays off well!

[Slinky]

Yup, yup. For someone who is supposedly so concerned about the little guys and the middle class and that everyone has access to health care, etc., etc. he sure has made some interesting appointments of Wall Street characters to his cabinet, etc.

I forgot to add: and tax dodgers, or at least those who don't claim and pay their taxes until they are in line for an appointment in the administration. "Honest" mistakes, of course. Simple things just "accidentally" forgotten. That get paid up real quick so they can "buy" their appointment.

[Wulfman]

Yup, yup. For someone who is supposedly so concerned about the little guys and the middle class and that everyone has access to health care, etc., etc. he sure has made some interesting appointments of Wall Street characters to his cabinet, etc.

My Wyoming oceanfront property is still for sale........
There's a big "bridge to nowhere" next to it, too.


Den

[Janetlm]

ExxonMobile not only pays no taxes on its billions of profits, we taxpayers pay Exxon a yearly bonus of millions or billions of dollars each year.

I guess i will no longer pay taxes on my "profits" as a teacher. In America only suckers and little people pay taxes.

Janet

[roster]

Taxing Businesses is Immoral and Sneaky

As Wulfman already mentioned, businesses don't pay taxes. The taxes are paid by the businesses' employees, customers, suppliers' employees, shareholders, retirement accounts, pension plans, (including pension plans of teachers and union members) and the rest of us. In other words, we, the people, pay these taxes. You, the teacher, are paying these taxes.

And we, the people, do not know how much more our food, our appliances, our gasoline, our clothes, our housing, our appliances, our salaries, our pensions, etc. are taxed. We get no statement showing the cost of taxes in everything we buy.

This is immoral and sneaky for politicians to tax us this way, keep it hidden from us, and tell us they are "taxing corporations" and not be honest and say it is a sneaky tax on us.

Support tax reform: http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer

Allowing Someone to Keep the Money They Have Earned is Not Welfare
It is just, er, uh, well, allowing them to keep the money they earned.

More to come on GE, our crooked crony politicians that are in bed with them, and a tax code that has 7,000,000 (that is 7 million for those of you educated in government schools) words and costs citizens $27 billion per year in expenses to fill out the forms ....

[Kilopy]

Absolutely true that corporations do not pay taxes - people do. Take look at GE - Were it not for being bailed out they likely would no longer exist.

GE has continually been touted as one of the most well run companies under Jack Welch's watch, then transferred to Jeff Immelt. All Immelt did was continue the process of running GE into the ground then run to Uncle Sammy to get bailed out through TARP, which I like to refer to as TRAP. I have never been a fan of GE, Welch, or Immelt or any other corporate welfare. I am, however, a good little capitalist that gets the shaft just like everyone else when tax time rolls around. Unlike the GEs of the world I do, however, treat my employees well - They work hard but I pay them very well and treat them with the respect they deserve. Corporate America could learn something from that but they prefer to treat their employees like dirt which works out fine for me, as it makes it very easy for me to recruit the best people when I am hiring.

[roster]

Now here is what corporate welfare really is:

In America today, the biggest recipients of handouts are not poor people. They're corporations.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt is super-close to President Obama. The president named Immelt chairman of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Before that, Immelt was on Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He's a regular companion when Obama travels abroad to hawk American exports. (Why does business need government to do that?)

"Jeff Immelt is perhaps the CEO who is most cozy with President Obama," says journalist Tim Carney. "General Electric is structuring their business around where government is going ... high-speed rail, solar, wind. GE is lining up to get what government is handing out."

Businesses love to have government as their partner. There's safety in it. Why take chances in a marketplace full of fickle consumers and investors, when you can get secure money and favors from the taxpayers? It's an old story, and free-market advocates as far back as Adam Smith warned against it. Unfortunately, too many people think "free market" means pro-business. It doesn't. Free market means laissez faire -- prohibit force and fraud, but otherwise leave the marketplace alone. No subsidies, no privileges, no arbitrary regulations. Competition is the most effective regulator.

Left-wingers criticize corporate welfare until it's for something they like -- for example, "green technology."

"The government's going to invest in certain companies to pioneer new technologies. That, I think, is not corporate welfare," says Tamara Draut of the Progressive think-tank Demos.

I asked her if business is too dumb to pioneer without government direction.

"The private sector will only invest if they know for sure that there is a commercial marketplace."

But if everyone wants these products, that should be an incentive for greedy businesses to make them.

"Not always," she replied. "But the free market does not know anything unless we all collect our interests and say: This is of national import to us."

This is nonsense. How did Apple know we would want iPods, iPhones and iPads? It didn't know with certainty. It took a risk with its own and investors' money.

But for some reason, other products and services are different, according to people like Obama and Draut.

"We desperately need high-speed rail in this country," she says, meaning the taxpayers must be forced to finance it.

The government gives companies billions of dollars to develop new trains. Guess who receives some of that money.

GE.

The problem is that government has no wealth of its own. All it can do is move wealth from where the market would have channeled it to where politicians want it. Who knows what would have happened if free people had the money that goes to high-speed rail? Maybe cancer would have been cured.

"The private sector isn't going to cure cancer by itself," Draut says.

Greedy drug companies aren't going to cure cancer? I asked.

"They would have by now, if they could."

People with a central planner's mentality have what F.A. Hayek called "the fatal conceit."

I'd have thought the fall of the Soviet Union would have taught us that central planning is destructive, but the conceit of the central planners lives on. Maybe the problem isn't merely economic ignorance. Maybe it's something more sinister: a wish to keep the freeloading system going. After all, if politicians and business leaders admit that government cannot play a constructive role in the economy, what grounds would there be for subsidies, shelter from competitors and other privileges at the people's expense? The anti-free-market ideology is a vast rationalization for favoritism.

The favors, of course, go those who are best at lobbying for them, those with connections and the means to make big campaign contributions. So the government pours billions of taxpayer dollars into wind farms that are half-owned ... by GE.

I bet it's a waste of money.

"Well, maybe it is," Draut says. "But it should be one thing that we, as a nation, are investing in so that we aren't left behind."

This sort of nonsense provides intellectual cover for privilege and crony capitalism.
http://townhall.com/columnists/johnstos ... are/page/2

Republicans and Democrats, left and right, conservative and progressive politicians are all into corporate welfare - spending huge amounts of our money while they cozy up to big business. Throw the bums out when you go to the polls!

[montana]

Corporate TAX cheats is all they are period.. Bank of America paid... "O" ...tax in 2009 ... defend them all ya want we don't care..YOUR money

[quote="Slinky"]General Electric reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion for 2010. $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None. GE claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

[roster]

Corporate TAX cheats is all they are period.. Bank of America paid... "O" ...tax in 2009 ... defend them all ya want we don't care..YOUR money

No one has defended corporations in this thread. It has just been pointed out that corporations don't pay taxes - we, the people, pay those taxes.