Spare the Rich!
If you’re like me, you’ve just finished doing your taxes. You’ve grumbled, you’ve broken a few pencils, you’ve cursed the IRS for making these forms hard to use without a certified public accountant, you’ve exhausted your deductions and your patience both and now you have to write that check to the Department of Revenue. Ted Cruz campaigns on a platform to eliminate the IRS and you think that sounds about perfect. No taxes, no government, no headache next April 15th. Why not? A couple more beers and Ted’s got your vote.
No taxes for corporations ought to bring prices down to rockbottom, right? You hear every day how American companies have to move overseas or offshore to spare them the 35% tax on businesses. Zero taxes ought to keep them here. Course, 27 of the Fortune 500 don’t pay anything now so it won’t help them much. And we haven’t factored in the gov’t. subsidies and the local tax breaks and all the rest of corporate welfare … or incentives, if you prefer. For every dollar they spend on lobbyists, they average about $1400 in tax breaks. Not bad. Maybe next year you should hire a lobbyist.
Or a CPA… Boeing, that shining example of corporate job creators, got half a billion dollars over the past two years to stick around and make more jobs. Course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Too bad for us Washingtonians, but hey, we didn’t make them promise to keep their word. Kind of in too big a hurry to get the bill passed before they moved to Carolina.
Some of us Job Creators on the South End are considering making that same threat to the Legislature. Move our art studios and marijuana growing operations to Idaho, see what deals we can get to stick around and fuel the island economy. Wouldn’t take a quarter billion per year, maybe a tenth of that would do it. Course, once we get our corporate welfare check, not guaranteeing I’ll be making any more art. And if this blogsite suddenly goes dark, you’ll know the deal went down and my check made early retirement inevitable. Can you blame me any more than Boeing? If nothing else, you can rest assured I’ve created jobs for a virtual army of accountants to manage my affairs.