General Electric paid an effective tax of TWO PERCENT over the past decade!
We are being looted from the inside out and people still fall for this.
If using public services to make billions of private profit is not evil, I don't know what is.
...all this, and making profit using public services is the epitome of evil to you?
That's about as useful as comparing a sporting team to the one that always finishes bottom of the ladder... it just confirms you're doing fine, when in fact you are not.
What I was saying was, in the context of a developed nation like The United States, using public money for private profit is evil, and if it were not done, the average standard of living would increase and poverty (which is an enormous problem in the US) would decrease.
In the context of a first world country, doing that is very evil.
> What I was saying was
No, what you actually said was that if that wasn't evil, you don't know what is. Which is an incredulous thing to say.
> using public money for private profit is evil
I see, so no government contracts should exist, or they should only go to non-profits. They're using public money for private profit, after all.
> if it were not done, the average standard of living would increase and poverty would decrease.
Unprovable.
Even if you managed to alter the tax code and bring in five times as much corporate taxes, you would only get us out of deficit spending, assuming no other drop in revenue or increase in spending. We would still have 15 trillion in federal debt.
All deficit spending last year consisted of the latter. In bad times, the these payouts naturally/automatically increase. For example, let's take the SNAP (food stamp program) - when the recession hit, more people lost their jobs and had to apply for food stamps. So even if the government didn't change the requirements for applying for SNAP, the SNAP program had to spend more. The narrative that Obama chose to spend more on food stamps because he has an affinity for spending is misleading. If anything, he (and Congress) chose not to cut the SNAP program.
Of course, SNAP is a bad example to begin with, because it doesn't make up that much of the federal budget. Medicare, on the other hand, does, and its costs are rising because health care costs in general are rising. Medicare's costs to the government are rising no faster than private health insurance companies' costs to individuals.
I think if you managed to increase corporate tax revenue five-fold, we would spend more, because political capital now via spent dollars is more effective (politically) than long-term doom and gloom over an increasing debt.
WTF