Posted on 12/02/2016 3:09:18 PM PST by EveningStar
One particularly tough and indigestible nugget of talk-radio stupidity afflicting the guts of conservatism is the idea that there is some sort of fundamental difference between bribing a business with tax cuts and bribing it with a wheelbarrow full of cash. The Trump-Pence bailout of Carrier’s operations in Indiana provides an illustrative case...
Republicans might have had a little bit of a point in the question of general tax cuts: A tax cut and spending are different things, even if the budgetary effects are exactly the same.
But in the matter of industry-specific or firm-specific tax benefits of the sort extended to Carrier in Indiana, they do not have a leg to stand on. These are straight-up corporate welfare, ethically and fiscally indistinguishable from shipping containers full of $100 bills...
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Obvious answer: ZERO
Exactly. Businesses should shut up and get taxed out of business. Wait that would be stupid. Why don’t all businesses threaten to leave until repressive taxes and regulations are removed. Conservatives should support examples of low taxes being good for jobs and workers.
Letting carrier keep more of their money is not a wrong.
I have no use for Kevin W. generally and they have been on the wrong side of history all year—but he is right here.
That’s the whole point of his article—pointing out that they aren’t different.
Crony capitalism is ugly and wrong.
Exactly.
Freepers here seem to get so kneejerk in supporting Trump (who I am very glad won and is going to be president) that they turn themselves inside out trying to defend the indefensible.
No, no and no—special deals that give particular companies favored by pols in power are not good deals for taxpayers—ever. They are unfair and they distort the free market, which is the better judge of which companies succeed.
Not everything is about economics.
Many things of great importance are not.
The purposes of the US government are: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.
In a perfect world I agree, but we live in a complicated world. While I don’t agree with the Bail out of GM & Chrysler, imagine the economic destruction if they went bankrupt.
Tax breaks are legal, and states often grant them to attract businesses. The cost per person of these tax breaks over the 10 year period are way less than would be spent giving these people unemployment benefits.
In addition, the money less people earn will help to keep the local economy going, and tax revenue from state sales tax etc.
Besides, Corporations don’t really pay taxes, as they simply pass those costs on to their customers.
No, the destruction if they had gone bankrupt would not have been great. Their assets and production would have been picked up by other, likely more efficient, companies who would have hired pretty much the same workers.
That’s what I concluded also, although I generally don’t like these deals.
“Thought leaders” rarely stick around to clean up the messes they make. Those in the sausage factory called reality make dozens of tradeoffs between the ideal and the actual every day.
So the moral of the article is that conservatives should think tax cuts are bad. Wait..... What ?
No one said it was wrong. Nor would it be for other companies ... even ones who haven’t threatened to move to another country.
But, the analysis you posted is an example of a good return on investment. Contrast that with the "green jobs" that literally poured money into the pockets of Democrat donors, in exchange for a handful of jobs -- at $1M+ per job.
And in this case, Trump and Pence were limited in what they could do in a short time, before they even take office.
Someone else posted that Carrier had already been offered this incentive, and they declined. What changed? I would say the prospect of a resurgence of the US economy.
We had a Carrier A/C at our previous house. I plan to replace our units at this house with a Carrier when they die.
Sorry, while I agree with you about Carrier, GM & Chrysler are bad examples.
If they had gone through a normal Chapter 11 bankruptcy, they would have been able to renegotiate one of their biggest costs: labor. Instead, secured bondholders (who legally had first claim on any assets) were screwed, so that Obama could give stock to the UAW.
GM and Chrysler just kicked the can down the road again, and you can expect to see GM in trouble again. Chrysler is now owned by Fiat, so perhaps they will avoid a repeat.
Yes, an orderly bankruptcy would have affected more employees. But, avoiding it was at the expense of pension funds and IRAs that held what were thought to be investment-grade bonds.
I can’t blame companies for outsourcing with the taxes and regs we have here and the damn unions. Let’s not attack them like some occupy wall street guy, the culprits are the democratic party and big labor. Cut the taxes and regs they passed and an amazing pro-buisness climate will bloom and more jobs will stay here,
GM looks like it will be ok. FCA is either going to merge with another car company or fail. There is over supply in the industry and FCA is the sickest car company.
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