Take a Cool Guess—The Fun Quiz on Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability. Today’s Topic: How Our Democracy Works
Question: The Koch brothers spent $20 million to pass the tax reform scam. What’s their ROI, i.e., the annual percent return they’re getting on that $20 million investment?
Answer: Can be found at Clean Energy Answers.
Relevance: As Bernie Sanders says, “The rich are using their wealth to pass legislation to make themselves even richer at the expense of working people. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.”
Craig,
I know you said it would never happen, but US tax reform has occurred. The Tax Reform bill is designed to give corporations and individuals incentives to invest in the US economy and make America more competitive.
In a globalized trade environment where few nations or corporations play by largely obsolete rules and tax laws, there’s no alternative to pursuing this sort of reform.
Not all corporations and high worth individuals will welcome a cut in the US corporate tax to 21 per cent. GE, Apple, Eaton, IBM and many other international companies have discovered their ability to minimize tax by the means of a complex web of credits, invented expenses and losses, is greatly reduced.
Foreign subsidiaries of US corporations or international corporations operating in the US will face a new minimum tax on “global intangible low-taxed income”, making avoidance by shifting profits to lower-tax jurisdictions difficult. Another new measure, the “base erosion anti-abuse tax”, limits company tax credits.
Other corporations such as Exxon who already pay the maximum tax, will be now be encouraged to invest more heavily in US petro-chemical manufacturing. (Exxon have announced a $ 35 billion new US diversification (including bring ceramics and clean energy component manfacturing back to the US ).
Tax reform is partly due to foreign competition. Most of America’s competitors in Asia are taxed at 21%, the United Kingdom will soon be only 17 per cent with France and most of Europe below 25 %.
The President’s tax reform was necessary if the US was to regain competitiveness with othere industrialized economies.
Bernie Saunders has nothing useful to contribute, except more old fashioned fantasy and ‘symbolic’ policies that can never work.
However, while the tax reforms were necessary, essential in fact, they don’t adequately address the issue of the increasingly wide division between the rich and poor.
In an age when “wealth’ and ‘disadvantage’ is increasingly hard to define, solutions for this phenomenon are complex and difficult to structure.
Advocates for tax reform argue (and with proven merit) the tax package will benefit everyone. Tax reform will bring back job’s, reduce tax avoidance, increase revenue, reduce off shore relocation and increase domestic economic activity.
While all of those objectives are desirable, and plausible, tax reform doesn’t address the changing nature of wealth and the desolation of those left behind.
IMHO, the nature of wealth has undergone a profound change with the arrival of the information age. Industrial and resource Dinosaurs like the Koch brothers are anachronisms, rapidly becoming as irrelevant as the economic theory of socialism. Bernie Saunders and David Koch are two sides of the same coin, both locked into 19th concepts.
Virtual reality has become the new reality ! The divide isn’t just between poor and rich, it’s between those under 36 and an older generation, who don’t understand the new reality.
I spent a great deal of time and money over the last two years investing in understanding this brave new world. Over the last year personally and for my high risk fund, I made more profits form crypto-currency trading than all other investments put together and I’m a fairly cautious, conservative investor.
My younger son is more adventurous, has been wildly successful in currency specualtion, while adhering to the age old principle, speculate, consolidate, speculate only with profit , of the Medici family.
Sometime ago I informed you of a sudden, new (and completely irrational) energy usage. This usage equaled the power consumption of nations like Denmark, Holland or even Chicago. Massive computer power is used to “mine Bitcoin” ! Such a dramatic new usage must produce environmental implications.
Sadly, you can’t seem to grasp the dramatic changes occurring around you, because like poor ol’ Bernie Saunders, you seem frozen in the politics of Woodstock placing your faith in rose tinted granny glasses.
Those left behind are becoming a real social problem. You can’t propose a solution, until the problem can be accurately defined. That requires a paradigm shift in thinking, old inappropriate solutions just won’t work !
I smell ad hominem, and lots of it.