Ruminations From the Void



Not a legal play.....

One weekend of March Madness left to go.  My bracket has been begging for over a week to be put out of its misery.  VCU happily obliged and finished it off.  All the fun aside, I must admit that this is probably a terrible way to determine which team is the best in the nation.  Does anyone really believe that VCU belongs in the Final Four?  Of course they don’t.  But it sure has been fun watching them get there.  NCAA football probably has the better system for deciding the best team, even though it is the most disparaged.  Despite the inherent problems of allowing 68 teams to play a one loss-you’re out tournament, I’m still a big fan of March Madness though.  It’s a three week party for both the hoops aficionados and the March-only fans.  Plus, what championship can top “One Shining Moment”?

>>  GE recently announced that they have stolen many taxpayer dollars from you and me.  The company reported profit of $14.2 billion, $5.1 of it from operations here in the US.  Any guess to how much in tax they paid?  That’s right class – a big fat goose egg.  Well, technically that’s not correct.  They actually received a ‘benefit’ of $3.2 billion.  By my simplistic math calculations, our tax dollars supplied 63% of domestic profit.  Feeling angry yet?  Remember that GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt was selected to head President Obama’s Jobs Council, which I thought was as an unpaid volunteer, but it’s hard to say now.

So how does one go about such thievery?  The New York Times explains,

an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

As NRO’s Kevin Williamson writes at his Exchequer blog in a post aptly titled, Our Tax Code is Corrupt,

In spite of our having the second-highest nominal corporate-income tax rate in the developed world (Hello, Japan!), the rates actually paid by businesses vary wildly according to their political clout. Progressives look at that and see the evidence of businesses’ having undue influence on Washington; I look at that and see evidence of Washington’s undue influence on business. But it’s a two-way street, and the end product smells the same.

The truth is that when Big Business and Big Government collude together, they win and we lose.  All I can add is Flat Tax FTW!  Loopholes aren’t the problem.  The whole ballgame is fixed; or rather in need of fixing.  But if voters don’t demand it, this reform may never happen.  While I have no place in my heart for GE, this isn’t an anti-business issue – it’s a political issue.