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from the wish-we-were-in-the-one-percent dept.
Due to completely messed up U.S. tax policies, some even got a rebate check. Only small businesses pay taxes. Big companies often pay nothing at all.
Look at a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice ( http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2015/04/fifteen_of_many_reasons_why_we_need_corporate_tax_reform.php#.VSbihhPF8QY ), a Washington, D.C. group. It finds that some of nation's most famous brands have paid remarkably little to the government over the last five years. In fact, many actually enjoyed a negative tax rate: They received a nice rebate check from the U.S. Treasury.
The 15 giants highlighted by CTJ were chosen to represent a wide range of industries among Fortune 500 companies. They include CBS, Mattel, Prudential, and the California utility PG&E. Together, they paid no federal income tax in 2014, despite profits totaling $23 billion. CTJ's point is that these companies are not anomalies, they are examples.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @01:47AM
A capitalist democracy will always be captured. Once anyone has enough money, they will buy things which allow them to obtain even more money, like lawmakers; there will always be corrupt, bribeable legislators, and all it takes is a few, or even just one (like President Reagan), to change the laws so they can rake in even more, allowing them to capture even more of the government for private interests. Any laws and regulations set up to protect against this just get repealed or changed to be powerless, which is exactly whats happened in the US, more than once even, so the only longterm solution we're left with is to not allow money to concentrate into the hands of individuals by getting rid of this system of exploiting workers for slave wages, where only the owner benefits, and replacing it with a system where people get rewarded for their hard work and given a reason to care about the company for which they work, which allows people to move up the economic ladder by working hard and having good work ethic and also prevents money from concentrating into individual's hands - socialism (eg, cooperatives).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:16PM
There are cases where democracy could be at least more difficult to capture. Basically, if democracy is local enough, it gets to be harder for someone with enough money to pay off enough people. After all, if Bill Gates had to pay off 20 million people to lower his tax bill, it probably wouldn't be worth it. The only way that could make sense is if we used a sort of binary tree to 'vote up' power, with the ability to recall that power locally. That is to say, if each representative represented 10k people (call these the local reps), and every 5-100* of them voted for one representative (national reps). If 10% of the local reps get recalled or when 10% are voted out of office, there is an automatic revote on the national rep that the locals are represented by. The local representatives would be able to talk with just about anyone they represent and wouldn't need insane campaign budgets. Money would matter, but not by much since you could go door to door to talk to everyone. Gerrymandering would still be a problem, but it could be done algorithmically, like requiring square shapes for selecting the people and auto-redistricting when the 10k figure redoubles or on elections. I don't disagree how we have built the system, it will automatically corrupt given enough time. The system I propose has possible ways of corrupting too, but I think with enough people thinking about it, we could at least solve todays forms of corruption.