From another unlikely source...

W. Kiernan WKiernan at concentric.net
Thu Aug 5 15:48:37 PDT 1999


Tom Lehman wrote:
>
> http://www.msnbc.com/news/296923.asp
>
> Tax breaks for the rich and the super-rich and their corporations.

If you haven't checked out this article, you'll want to know that it comes from the Wall Street Journal Online, and it discusses facts like, for example, that out of $4.61-billion in General Motors's world-wide profits for 1998, they paid 0.8 percent, $36-million, in U.S. taxes.

I saw this link in Tom's post and I clicked on it, and I read the article. I found it pretty aggravating, though no surprise, that I should pay a far larger proportion of my middle-class wages in Federal taxes than GM does of their corporate profits. Of course you'd expect an attitude like that from a guy with an 18" x 24" portrait of Karl Marx hanging on the wall right over the desk in his office.

Well, I was busy doing some other stuff for a while, and that page was still up in my browser. In my office there's another guy, Bill Kent, with the same initials as I've got. He is the son of the CEO, who also owns most of this company; he is also a vice-president. Though you might suspect he owes his position to family ties, he's still a competent and hardworking guy, too. As you might expect from a pretty-rich guy and second-generation exec, he's a Republican, an adherer to the business branch, as opposed to the religious-right branch of the party. (I sometimes refer to him as "my evil doppelganger.")

About a half hour later I'm talking to the alternate WDK about the Florida state sales tax we have to pay on stuff we buy from mail-order vendors, and he suddenly volunteers, "Say, you wanna get pissed off, you should read this article in the Wall Street Journal today about these huge corporations that basically don't pay any tax at all. We (he's talking about the company) have to pay 35% Federal tax on our company profits, yet these gigantic multinational companies get away with paying practically nothing at all," etc., etc., and he's actually pretty hot about it. Then he goes on to complain, "And that tax cut bill those idiots just passed in Congress gives those Fortune 500 companies even more tax breaks; tax breaks that we, a small business, can't take advantage of!" It turns out he read the exact same article as I had up on my screen.

OK, it's just one anecdotal instance, but it looks like the Repug Congressional bias in favor of big-big-big business is so blatant that it even manages to piss off small-business supporters of their party. The Repugs have for years prospered by various low schemes which drive a wedge between, for example, working-class whites and working-class blacks. I'd enjoy seeing their Democrat opponents turn the tables on them, by pitting big-business interests against small-business interests. Also, possibly if the Dems made a campaign issue out of it, they could suck more of those all-important campaign contributions out of small businesses next year.

Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net



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