Intellectual Styles Of The Rich And Clueless

[Kennah]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/intellectual-styles-of-the-rich-and-clueless/

Oh, my. Jeff Immelt, who President Obama for some reason appointed to head his job creation panel, insists that what’s good for GE is good for America:

I want you to root for me. Look, every one in Germany roots for Siemens, everyone in Japan roots for Toshiba, everyone in China roots for China South Rail, I want you to say, win GE.

I think this notion that it’s the population of the US against big companies is just wrong.

Wow. First, the macro picture. Here are corporate profits versus employee compensation, both measured as index numbers with the 2001 business cycle peak= 100:

[Safetykitten]

1. Does Jeff play golf? Maybe Obama needed a person to golf with.

[leveymg]

2. Iraq War and GWOT spending = pure corporate profit. Not so good for people.

[rfranklin]

3. Perhaps if you weren't such a slimey tax-evading corporation, we would support you Mr. Immelt...

G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

Published: March 24, 2011


General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?pagewanted=all

General Electric paid taxes at a rate of 11.5 percent (not really, see above), while Siemens, GE's German counterpart, paid 29 percent of its income to that government.

So is Siemens fleeing Germany while GE shutters its foreign plants and hurries home? Not quite. Both companies have more employees overseas than they do in their homelands, but Siemens has also struck a deal with its union, IG Metall, to keep its highly skilled production workforce - 128,000 German workers - in place, at work on its highest-value-added projects. The union has reached similar agreements with other leading manufacturers, such as BMW and Daimler.


If we're going to rewrite our corporate tax code, why don't we rewrite it to reward those companies that employ workers at good jobs here at home? U.S. unions are almost surely too weak to get the kind of deals that German unions get, but why can't our tax laws discriminate between those companies that both develop and manufacture their products here and those that go abroad for cheaper labor?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/25/AR2011012505413.html