Best comment from the post –
Is our government functioning properly?
Absolutely not! We may have just made the same (similar) mistakes that were made in 1937. I think all of Washington has folded on their responsibilities.
The attached essay explains better than I could the nature of the tax increase about to hit almost all of us in a few months.
James Pilant
via 1 Nation Blog
This is a personal view of our current debt limit crisis. I liked his take on the situation and call your attention to it.
James Pilant
Income inequality in the developed nations is almost exclusively an American phenomenon. As you can see from the graph, we are more equivalent to African nations with limited economic development in terms of income
Another interesting article is the graph on the origins of our budget problems. Please pay attention to the enormous role played by the Bush tax cuts in destroying revenue.
James Pilant
In this articles, a British student thinks about the job market and the unemployed. This guy thinks his own way based on the data before him. In my opinion as an instructor, he may not make a lot of money, but he will spend his life in the world of ideas with a mind never subject to boredom because of inaction. He will live a life rich in thought and deed.
Maybe, just maybe, he hears the music of the spheres.
James Pilant
I have been arguing that the deficit should be second in our concerns. I want our first concern to be getting people back to work. But right now, it’s deficit hysteria news cycle hour after hour.
From John Talton writing in his column, Sound Economy –
Amid the deficit hysteria, it’s important to remember its two major causes: The worst recession since the Great Depression and two wars, along with many other military commitments, that have lasted longer than World War II. As in 1945, the year the war ended and the deficit was even higher. Such was one of the reasons that taxes were above 90 percent on the rich in the 1950s: To pay off that debt.
(Why don’t we add the totally irresponsible tax cuts of the Bush administration? They made a lot of people very, very rich and devastated the budget.)
More from the essay –
Nobody in power is talking about seriously taxing the richest, really closing corporate tax loopholes, eliminating tax breaks on mergers, and returning to a more progressive tax system to hold down what is now historic income inequality. Cutting Social Security and Medicare are much in favor, and not only among Republicans or crusty old Alan Simpson, co-chairman of Obama’s deficit commission and a Social Security hater from way back. If this happens, will the deficit hawk elite ensure jobs are available for those once quaintly called “retirees”? Jobs with benefits? Also, nobody in power is talking at all about stopping the unsustainable military adventures that are helping drive up the deficit.
Discussing the issues is not in fashion. Any rational discussion of the deficit would have to arrive at the simple, obvious conclusion that it its much easier to pay off debt in a society with high employment, therefore you spend what it takes to get full employment and then work on the deficit.
We are instead going to pretend that paying down a deficit during an economic catastrophe makes sense.
Is doesn’t.
James Pilant
From MSNBC –
Everyone curses the tax man, but Romanian witches angry about having to pay up for the first time are planning to use cat excrement and dead dogs to cast spells on the president and government.
Also among Romania’s newest taxpayers are fortune tellers — but they probably should have seen it coming.
Superstitions are no laughing matter in Romania — the land of the medieval ruler who inspired the “Dracula” tale — and have been part of its culture for centuries. President Traian Basescu and his aides have been known to wear purple on certain days, supposedly to ward off evil.
Personally, I’m waiting for Dracula to react to the new taxes.
James Pilant
I wrote in the previous post about how the fifty companies that laid off the most workers paid their CEO’s a total of 598 million dollars. But if you read the study itself, you discover that they also shirk their duties as good corporate citizens.
This is from the study –
Under current law, U.S. corporations face a 35
percent statutory tax rate on corporate profits. Of the 50
layoff leaders, only two reported paying this statutory
rate in 2009 and most paid substantially less, according
to an IPS analysis of domestic earnings and federal tax
payments in company 10-K reports.20 Hewlett-Packard,
under Hurd, remitted $47 million in federal corporate
income tax, a mere 2 percent of the company’s reported
$2.6 billion in pretax domestic net income.
Citizens for Tax Justice has used forensic accounting
methods to demonstrate that corporations
often pay an even lower tax rate than they report to
the SEC. Overall, as a result of various tax avoidance
schemes, U.S. corporate income taxes have plummeted
from almost a third of all non-Social Security federal
tax revenues in the 1960s to only a sixth of total taxes
today.22
In some extreme cases, major U.S. corporations
are actually paying less in taxes to Uncle Sam than
they pay, in compensation, to their CEOs. At Occidental
Petroleum, for instance, CEO Ray Irani made $31.4
million last year. That represented almost twice as much
as the $16 million the international oil firm paid in federal
corporate income tax for all the services the federal
government provides.
It is almost too obvious to mention that when corporations avoid their taxes, the burden falls on the middle class.
What is meant by CSR, corporate social responsibility? Are they just code words, that mean, “Get off my back and stop complaining,” or “Can’t you crazed citizens and nosy government officials recognize our good works and let the magnificent engine of capitalism grind on?”
I wonder if it is just a public relations thing. I bet you do too.
James Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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