Excerpted from Thom Hartmann's newest book, Screwed; The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- And What We Can Do About It
A cornerstone of the cons' movement to consolidate power in the hands of a wealthy corporate elite is the campaign to end corporate income taxes altogether-- and leave the rest of us to pick up the entire tab for corporate use of our institutions and corporation despoliation of our commons.
Corporations are taxed because they use public services; they are therefore expected to help pay for them-- sort of like the example in chapter 2 of the Hershey bar in the 7-Eleven store.
Corporations make use of a workforce educated in public schools that are paid for with tax dollars. They use roads and highways paid for with tax dollars. They use water, sewer, power, and communications rights of way paid for and maintained with taxes. They demand the same protection from fire and police departments as everybody else, and they enjoy the benefits of national sovereignty and the stability provided by the military and institutions like the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the same as all residents of democratic nations.
In fact, corporations are heavier users of taxpayer-provided services and institutions than are average citizens. Taxes pay for our court systems, which are most heavily used by corporations to enforce contracts. Taxes pay for our Treasury Department and other government institutions that maintain a stable currency essential to corporate activity. Taxes pay for our regulation of corporate activity, from ensuring safety in the workplace and a pure food and drug supply to limiting toxic emissions in our air and water.
Under George W. Bush, the burden of cleaning up toxic wastes produced by corporate activity has largely shifted from the original polluter-funded Superfund and other programs to taxpayer-funded cleanups (as he did in Texas as governor there before becoming president).
Every year millions of cases of cancer, emphysema, neurological disorders, and other conditions caused by corporate pollution-- cases like my dad's-- are paid for in whole or in part by government-funded programs. From Medicare and Medicaid to government subsidies of hospitals, universities, and research institutions, these programs are funded by tax dollars through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Most drugs marketed in the United States were first discovered by taxpayer-funded research at universities.
Because it's well understood that corporations use our tax-funded institutions at least as heavily as citizens do, they've traditionally been taxed at similar rates. For example, the top corporate tax rate in the United States was 48 percent during the Carter administration, down from a peak of 53 percent during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years.
Today it stands at 35 percent despite a May 2001 suggestion by Bush administration Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill that there should be no corporate income tax whatsoever. This was the opening salvo in a very real war to have working people bear all the costs of the commons and of governance while the wealthy corporate elite derive most of its benefits.
In a feudal state, historian Ernest Bloch reminds us, "The nobles need not pay taxes."
Don't you think it is time the people took our goverance out of the hands of these wicked thieves and threw them in the garbage bin where there belong?
Out with them all!
by
amazin (32 articles, 0 quicklinks, 11 diaries, 396 comments)
on Saturday, September 16, 2006 at 10:08:31 AM
Take heart, Thom! If the corporations really are "people," just remember that they should also be eligible for the "death penalty;" and the champion of the DP is currently in charge. What a great irony!
by
Dave (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Sunday, September 17, 2006 at 5:10:49 PM
Mr Hartmann is correct: corporations do use public services, just as individuals do. Unfortunately, what Mr Hartmann fails to understand is that corporations do not pay taxes; they simply collect taxes from their customers.
Corporate taxes are a part of the cost of doing business. When I buy a gallon of milk at Giant Food Mart on Blakeslee Boulevard in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, I'm paying Giant for the milk. But I'm also paying Giant's corporate income taxes, Giant's gross receipt taxes, Giant's portion of employees' Social Security and Medicare taxes, Giant's unemployment compensation taxes, the taxes on utility bills that get passed on to Giant, the diesel fuel taxes of the trucking company that delivered the milk from the dairy to Giant, so many taxes that listing them all would make this paragraph forty lines long.
I wish that our friends on the left understood something very simple: all taxes are paid by the end consumer of a product!
Our friends on the left are very much in favor of taxing the wealthy; the rich should pay, through the nose. But when people like Mr Hartmann write articles such as the one I partially quoted above, they have apparently forgotten that Giant charges me exactly the same amount for a gallon of milk as it charges my neighbor across the street, as it charges the single woman trying to make do on $24,000 a year, and as it charges the family on food stamps. Whatever percentage of the price of that gallon of milk I pay in passed down the line taxes from the however many corporations it takes to get the milk out of the cow and into my glass of Quik, the wealthiest man and the poorest man in the county pay the same.
I, of course, don't mind it at all that I don't get taxed any more for the things I buy than the wretchedly poor guy living in a shack. I don't mind that the toll on the Pennsylvania Turnpike is the same for my wife, a registered nurse making pretty good money, as it is for a guy making $7.43 an hour; I don't mind that the tax on gasoline is calculated by the gallon and not by my income.
But it sure is humorous that our supposedly learned friends on the left don't understand the even the most basic principles of economics!
by
Dana Pico (5 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 142 comments)
on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 5:26:23 PM
In medieval times, the nobles probably didn't pay much in the way of taxes but when the king embarked on a "crusade" of theft and murder in the middle east they had to volunteer the use of their soldiers to do his bidding
by
Matthew Peters (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 78 comments)
on Sunday, September 24, 2006 at 10:08:32 AM
5 comments
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