CBS news claims the US has the highest corporate taxes in the world.

[Archae]

Did they measure ACTUAL taxes?

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Catapulting the propaganda

I see

[Puzzledtraveller]

2. It's true.

I heard that it was official by something that occured recently.

[Cleita]

3. So how do they account for the fact that few pay them?

GE once of the biggest corporations in the world never seems to pay taxes.

[Shankapotomus]

16. That's a good point

If we do have the highest corporate taxes in the world, that doesn't necessarily mean corporations are paying them or there aren't loopholes to get around them.

[bayareamike]

4. The entire 60 minutes program tonight

struck me as blatant propaganda. The piece about the shuttle -- while the unemployment that resulted from the end of the program is sad -- left out (intentionally or not) key pieces of information like...

a) that the US also lacked capability to send people into space between the last Apollo mission (in 1975) and the introduction of the shuttle six years later

and

b) that we actually ARE developing a new manned-flight system (the SLS program). They conveniently left this out of their piece as well, making it seem like the Obama Administration dropped the ball and that a lack of manned-flight launch capability was unprecedented.

Obviously, leaving out this sort of info makes that anti-American Obama look pretty bad. Had me pretty upset when I was watching the program tonight.

[Puzzledtraveller]

6. Why?

Why is it always propaganda?

I was at a forum by Michio Kaku, without specifically stating corporate taxes he made it clear that the US needs to do more to encourage and entice business and tech industries.

[bayareamike]

7. Why is it propaganda?

I'm not sure what else to call it. It sure as hell wasn't quality journalism. In fact, the reporting in that piece was frankly crap. Very misleading.

I suppose it is propaganda if it was intentional. If not, then it is just poor journalism.

[Skittles]

9. ...

http://truth-out.org/news/item/8233-reality-check-us-corporate-tax-rate-much-lower-than-most-other-developed-nations

[Shankapotomus]

17. Now THAT

is a prophetic user name.

[Skittles]

28. by ten and a half years

here is the original Skittles:



yup, solid black

[Shankapotomus]

31. looks like he could take out a pitbull

cute

[Skittles]

32. aw Skittles was a big, soft cat

he was easy going; in that pic he's just squinting

he passed away on my fifth anniversary at DU

[HiPointDem]

19. It isn't "always," just usually. Michio Kaku. Oh, well, if Kaku says so, it must be true. Not.

[Cleita]

24. Why I stopped watching 60 minutes some years ago.

Too much propaganda, sloppy fact checking and forget unbiased reporting. Too bad that most of the nation will hang on their every word. We wonder why we are in trouble. It isn't just Fox News.

[ProfessionalLeftist]

5. The EFFECTIVE tax rate for corprats, after all the loopholes and subsidies....

is probably -0 - 15% - at most. What's -0? It's corprats like Exxon-Mobil who pay NOTHING and instead get HUGE refunds, even when making record profits. Remember who writes the tax laws: NO not politicians and certainly not the working class - it's Wall St., big pharma, big oil, big insurance, big business. And they have them written to suit themselves. "But it's all legal", they'll whine.

Perhaps so. But the point is it SHOULDN'T BE.

In other words, the claim that the US has the highest corprat taxes in the world is pure HORSE SHIT.

[Puzzledtraveller]

8. Defensive?

What should the tax rate be?

If the tax rate was what you think it should be, would we be the highest then?

It's as if the claim that it's the highest, true or not, bothers us more than the position we take that it isn't high enough. Then if by some magic is was as high as some have suggested then the claim would most certainly be true. Would we call BS then also?

[ProfessionalLeftist]

10. Condescending? n/t

[HiPointDem]

21. But it's NOT true. It's a LIE. So I really fail to see your point.

[Ikonoklast]

22. There should be at the very least a minimum corporate tax paid.

The canard that domestic taxes on corporations in this country are killing business is laughable. The lie that corporate taxes that are actually paid here are the highest in the world doesn't stand up to even rudimentary scrutiny.

The *rates* might be higher, but not after all the deductions that this country offers corporations, and that lower tax-rate countries do not allow. The overall tax burden is much, much lowewr than the stated rate.

The amount of deductions, loss carry-forward, depreciation schedules, 'special' tax legislation written specifically for certain industries, outright subsidies bordering on thievery of the Treasury that corporations enjoy is stupendous.

If every individual taxpayer could incorporate and write off the same things every corporation is allowed to, hardly any individual would pay much of anything in taxes.

Nice to see someone defending the poor, poor corporations here though. I bet they'll look kindly on their lackeys when it's time to ladle out the gruel.

[gratuitous]

30. Corporate tax rate? 50% or so seems about right

When one takes into consideration that corporations, our favorite people, get to deduct all their living expenses and pay taxes only on the profit they show (or don't show, if they can shift stuff around expertly enough). Unlike you and me, corporations get to deduct every last expense they incur from their income, and are taxed only on the money they don't spend. So a 50% tax rate seems about right. But I'd be open to consideration of a higher rate.

[Rain Mcloud]

11. Welcome

to the General Electric Sock Puppet Theater.
GE proud sponsors and makers of the world's sorriest light bulb's since 1962.

[Selatius]

14. I thought General Electric owned NBC and partly owned MSNBC.

Regardless, NBC's news coverage in the lead-up to the fateful invasion of Iraq was all pro-war all the time. All the networks were largely pro-war, even the so-called liberal outlets like CNN and MSNBC.

Wait, I looked it up. Westinghouse owned CBS and bought it in the mid-1990s. In 1999, Viacom, a company originally spun off from CBS way back in the 1950s, ended up buying its parent company. Today, it's still under Viacom's control, but that likely means Viacom is also owner of Westinghouse. Back in its hayday, Westinghouse pioneered the first operational turbojet engines for use in American warplanes after the United States won the last world war and got a close-up look at German jet engines used by the Luftwaffe.

[Rain Mcloud]

27. GE was an early adopter

of media as a soapbox to express its managements views.
You might remember a hack B list actor who switched party's and went to work for GE as its spokesman.
I hear they built him a very fine house of the future and in 1961 GE sponsored a record called Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine.
This is what I had in mind for the above comment.

I found this wonderful link to Reagan endorsing Truman before he drank the GE Flav-R-Aid and switched sides:

[link:

]
edit:hope the link works now

Sound like the Do-nothing-Obstructionist congress of today? I think so.

I once worked for a small family owned electrical shop and I had a very interesting conversation with a retired electrical engineer who once worked for Westinghouse and the topic was crappy light bulbs.
He maintained that the light bulb manufacturers formed an uneasy consortium at the end of the 1950's. The consortium agreed to find ways to limit the life span of light bulbs and to make them cheaper.
The customer would see it as a good thing from paying less while the manufacturers would see higher profit margins through increased sales.
I do know that the antique bulbs which we still had for use-in-house lasted for years unlike the modern ones we sold,typically lasted a few weeks.

I have no doubt that the Westinghouse J30 engine was based on the engine from the Messerschmidt ME-262.
I believe that i heard from some of the old timers that as many as five 262's were brought here to the states after the war for reverse engineering.
A number of Japanese jets may have also been based on the ME 262,a primitive manufacturing plant was discovered inside a mountain with hand built jets inside when the US troops occupied Japan after the war.
As a kid I used to dream of jet propelled Mustang's and Spitfires,who knows,with todays advanced materials and technology something like that could be awesome fun in the aerodrome/fluketaag.

[jmowreader]

12. The complete elimination of corporate taxes wouldn't "draw" business to the US

In fact, companies like GE would lobby very hard against the abolition of the corporate tax; if you were to eliminate all taxes along with all tax loopholes GE's taxes would effectively go up $173 million per year, because right now the government sends them $173 million for being good corporate citizens or something and eliminating the corporate tax would also eliminate GE's annual good-corporate-citizen checks.

Here's reality: China could set their corporate tax at double the US's tax rate and still draw business because they have effectively no employment laws, industrial safety laws or environmental protection laws. Oh, if you do something that gets people killed or embarrasses the state, they'll take you into a little room and have a colonel of the People's Army put a bullet in the back of your head, but other than that you can do damn near anything you want. As far as big business is concerned China is a libertarian paradise.

And in case you're wondering, Japan's corporate tax rate is two and a half percent higher than ours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world

[aquart]

13. Pity nobody pays them, then.

[chelsea0011]

15. Look at Ireland. Didn't they lower their corporate tax rate to next to 0

and after the business boom, they are in the same trouble of most of Europe. And 60 Minutes did a show about Dublin and the boom and how Irish natives who were in the US were flocking home. Now they are trying to flock back to the USA. And Seantor Brown-MA would llike to make it easier for them to come here with his bill aimed only at Irish immigrants.

[HiPointDem]

18. Big lie. Corporations pay a lower percentage of federal taxes than ever.

[mmonk]

20. Of course not.

The people must be deceived.

[HughBeaumont]

23. K & R.

It's now a headline on CNBC. Once a lie spreads . . .

[rufus dog]

25. And Obama recently offered to cut them and the offer was rejected by the Republicans

Why?

ProffessionalLeftist has the answer up thread.

It is because the EFFECTIVE tax rate is one of the LOWEST in industrialized Nations.

Obama's plan would have lowered the overall rate, but increased the effective rate paid by may corporations by eliminating loop holes.

[KamaAina]

26. The highest nominal tax rate.

But the most loopholes.

Either shoddy reporting or blatant bias. I'm guessing the latter.

[sarcasmo]

29. Lies.