No response to my post Catawba? Maybe you just missed it. or maybe its hard to come up with a good emotional liberal arguement when faced with the facts.
Yes I guess I did miss it in the flurry of earlier posts. Sorry.
Originally Posted by SgtRock
Is it possible for corporations to be profitable and provide what you consider a living wage? That depends on what the standard of living is for employees.
Yes, it is, a living wage is only a couple more bucks an hour than minimum wage. Given the 400% increase in CEO salaries, it should be no problem to increase labor cost slightly, just as they have done with minimum wage increases in the past.
You also have to remember that America does not exist in a vacuum. We have to compete with the rest of the world. As employees in other countries wages and standard of living increase ours are decreasing.
We compete by out educating them, out innovating them, like we used to do in the past. If you were planning on competing by making our workforce as undereducated and housing people in dormitories and feeding them a biscuit and a cup of tea for a 12 hour day, it aint't happening while CEO's and company owners get rich. You may as well go live over there if that is your plan.
The middle class is vanishing in America. What can be done to reverse this.
By reversing the things that brought it about - the flattening of our progressive tax system over the last year which included providing tax breaks for jobs overseas, catching minimum wage up to inflation so we have a stronger consumer base to create demand, and by reregulating the banks so we don't have another financial meltdown that takes trillions of taxpayer dollars and years to correct.
As it stands now America has the 2nd highest corporate tax rate in the world only behind Japan. Tax rates around the world - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. If I start a company in America I pay a corporate tax rate of 38%. Then if I choose to invest my profits I pay an additional 15% capital gains tax on top of the corporate tax. I can also pay state corporate taxes as high as 12% depending on where I start my business. How can I compete with someone who starts a business in a country where corporate taxes are less than 20%? The current administration wants to increase taxes on corporations. This will effectivly drive another nail in the coffin of the middle class.
"Corporate income-tax receipts typically fall during recessions, and they declined sharply after the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out big swaths of profits across the huge financial sector. But U.S. profits have rebounded sharply in recent quarters, while tax receipts have stayed low.
So where is the money? There are a lot of moving pieces, budget watchers say, but one view shared inside Washington is that a temporary tax break—supported by both political parties—is a key reason.
This tax break, known as "bonus depreciation," has allowed companies to write off investments in goods like industrial equipment, manufacturing machinery and computers in the year in which they're bought rather than over time. The White House estimates the subsidy has saved companies roughly $55 billion in corporate income taxes over each of the past two years.
Companies just reporting fourth-quarter earnings made clear they have aggressively taken advantage of the tax break, which lasted in full through December."
Tax Break Pushes Corporate Taxes to Just 12.1% of Profits, Lowest Level in 40 Years - WSJ.com
I haven't heard of any plans to raise the corporate taxes, except for the big oil subsidies have you?
