60 minutes

[plcdude]

I would be interested in your reactions to the 60 minutes expose on why corporations are avoiding American tax obligations.

[SharonAnn]

1. Corporations and their owners want all the profits, none of the costs.

[snappyturtle]

12. Hope you don't mind me sqeezing in here but, here's the transcript

and accompanying videos for those of us who didn't get to see 60 Minutes:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/25/60minutes/main20046867.shtml?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

[plcdude]

15. very good

thank you.

[shraby]

2. No expose there. It was a blatant shout out to the U.S. that if

we lowered our taxes even more on the corporations, they would come back to the fold...but lower than all other countries. Jobs would stay wherever they wanted them to. The only thing that would come back would be the headquarters.

[plcdude]

7. I think what was exposed

is the blatant avoidance of responsibility on the part of these corporations(now regarded as individuals)to meet legal requirements. Why not take their lobbying budgets and buy a lower corporate tax rate(ctr)from congress? I think it is not so much a question of ctr as it is cheaper labor and an escape from regulatory safe guards resulting in a greater profit margin.

[fasttense]

19. If we had a Democratic President who would stand up to corporations,

he/she would say: "Go ahead move overseas, move to where you can pay slave wages for child labor BUT don't expect to be able to sell your crap here in the US. We will be enforcing (Make up a law - like the trust busting laws that all presidents since Raygun have ignored. Let's face it we don't pay any attention to laws anymore anyway. It's powerful people's whims that count.) and charging a 50% tariff on all goods imported into the US by GE, or whatever corporation that's into dealing crap.

These corporation do NOT have a God given Right to sell their crap here in the US. The same goes for states. If a corporation decides to blackmail a state by saying give us a tax cut or we move all the jobs to Texas, say go right ahead. But every tractor, or whatever crap they sell, that comes into the state will have a 50% tractor sales tax. Tractor's are so bad for the environment we need a special sales tax to compensate. Let the corporation file suit. By the time it's through the court, they would have lost a good chunk of money.

But unfortunately we have very few Democratic Governors and no Democratic President in sight.

[DrDan]

3. It was a great show - the greed of corporations contrasted by that woman doing

the healing prep-work for the children of Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, China etc.

[The Wielding Truth]

4. My thought was that if 30,000 corp. are paying taxes to Zug the street should

be paved with gold. Didn't look like it.

[Chef]

5. 60 Minutes

I thought about the contrast between the corporate tax story and the basketball coach. The coach could have gone for the big bucks but stayed with the $9,000 per year job coaching intercity youth to successful lives. If the Cisco CEO took the same approach as the coach he would have said "we are an American Company. We made it here because America is a great country and we do most of our business here. So, we will stay here and pay the tax rate that applies to American companies". But, no. Instead it came across as the speech to Howard Beal in Network. In addition, why can't I take my "taxable self" to a place where there are no income taxes so I can enjoy the benefits of this country without paying for them? The system we have allowed to exist is not for the benefit of the majority of us but, for the benefit of the investor class. Also, the last I heard, Ireland with their 12.5% corporate tax rate wasn't doing so hot. I might be interested in letting corporations have a low rate if in return we had universal health care and a reasonable social safety net.

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

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[plcdude]

11. not sure what

you are referring to here.

[Yavin4]

8. Why Didn't Leslie Stahl Point Out to the Cisco CEO That The Other Developed Nations with Low Taxes

also don't spend $700 billion a year on defense, and they have single payer health care which allows them to lower costs by doing such things as negotiating the price of prescription drugs.

Why didn't Stahl point that out?

[shraby]

9. Stahl pointed out what the corporations wanted pointed out

no more, no less.

[mrmpa]

10. Here's how I see it......

American Corps. are taxed at 35%, yet we hear too often that corps. paid no taxes, because of all the loopholes, deductions, that our IRS code allows. So, we have a percentage, that companies really don't pay.

Ireland has a 12.5% rate, but I don't know if they have all the deductions, etc. that the US has. Let's say Ireland does, then it has a percentage that the corps. don't pay. Zero payment is zero payment. I say it's more about wages than anything else.

Someone interviewed on 60 minutes, stated that bottom line, it was about giving back to the shareholders. Well, I think that the most important shareholder(s) are the taxpayers in the US.

We don't buy Sara Lee products in my house, because a number of years ago, I learned that their mission statement said nothing about the product they produced or the consumers who bought the products, but was all about giving the best return to their investors.

I'm not a tax lawyer, or an expert, but I know that our Tax code needs cleaned up. I propose a straight 10% tax on corporate net profits. A straight 1% to 5% tax on individual investment profits, e.g. if you invested $10,000 in ABC corp. and at end of year it was worth $15,000 you would pay $150 to $750 in taxes.

That's how I see it, but I haven't put my contact lenses in yet.

:dunce:

[iamtechus]

13. Ireland is a good example

They can have a low tax rate because they have no army, navy or air force to support. Neither do they have a space program. Also, they don't feel obligated to be a world cop.

[Distant Observer]

14. The fix has been in for a while. The rich will get richer, etc. and Obama can't do

even the most minute thing about it -- eg. let the Bush tax cuts expire.

[snappyturtle]

16. One word answer...GREED! nt

[whattheidonot]

17. no extra jobs.

also it was pointed out that little extra jobs are created by a tax cut which is what the corporations always push. That is the correlation between tax cuts and more jobs is minimal at best. another corporate lie.

[snappyturtle]

18. ...and why is it that the corps fail to create the extra jobs? Greed. nt