http://www.nationofchange.org/print/16176

By Paul Buchheit

The betrayals come in many forms. Here are a few of the more outrageous,
and destructive, examples:



*Evasion: Corporations suddenly stopped meeting their tax responsibilities*


While corporate profits have doubled to $1.9 trillion in less than ten
years, the corporate income tax rate, which for thirty years hovered around
the 20-25% level, suddenly dropped to 10% after the recession. It has
remained there for three years.


We are seeing a manifestation of the Shock Doctrine. Corporations are using
the national emergency of the financial collapse to make a statement about
taxes, and a traumatized nation is too preoccupied to do anything about it.



*Delusion: Technology companies won't admit that much of their 'innovation'
is due to public assistance*


According to the report Funding a Revolution, government provided almost
half of basic research funds into the 1980s. Federal funding still
accounted for half of research in the communications industry as late as
1990. Even today, the federal government supports about 60 percent of the
research performed at universities.


Apple's first computer was introduced in the late 1970s. Apple still does
most of its product and research development in the United States, with
US-educated engineers and computer scientists.


Google's business is based on the Internet, which started as ARPANET, the
Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network
from the 1960s. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library
Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google
model.


Apple got its tax bill down to 9.8% last year. About 2/3 of its profits
remain overseas for tax avoidance purposes. Google, like Apple, avoids
taxes by moving most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the
Netherlands to Bermuda. Both Apple and Google, along with Microsoft and
Cisco, are lobbying for a repatriation tax holiday to allow billions of
overseas dollars to come home at a greatly reduced tax rate.


An Apple executive said: "We don't have an obligation to solve America's
problems." That may be true, but they do have an obligation to pay the
taxes that help America solve its problems.



*Desertion: The people who benefit most from government are renouncing
their citizenships to avoid taxes*


Perhaps the ultimate insult to America is to just quit on your country
after making a fortune off of it. In 2011 almost 1,800 Americans gave up
their citizenship to avoid taxes.


The wealthy benefit disproportionately from property and inheritance laws,
contracts, stock exchanges, favorable SEC regulations, the Small Business
Administration, patent and copyright and intellectual property laws, estate
planning, trust funds, Internet marketing, communications infrastructure,
highway maintenance, air traffic control, local and national security, and
60 years of research in technology and other industries.


A recent outrageous example is Facebook part-owner Eduardo Saverin, whose
family came to America from Brazil partly for safety reasons, and who
happened to land Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate at Harvard. Now after
falling into billions, he's decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship to
avoid taxes.



*Denial: Traders feel it's inappropriate to pay even a tiny tax on a
quadrillion dollars in sales*


A quadrillion dollars sounds like a fake amount. But it's all too real.
That's a thousand trillion dollars of derivatives transactions which, along
with the high-frequency computer-generated transactions (5,000 per second)
that make up over half of U.S. stock trades, contributed to a financial
meltdown and a $3 trillion bailout for reckless trading.


But there's no tax on these transactions.


While average Americans pay a 10% sales tax on necessities, millionaire
investors pay just a .00002% SEC fee (2 cents for every thousand dollars)
for a financial instrument. And their supporters claim, inexplicably after
the disastrous trading frenzy in 2008, that a tax would increase volatility.



*Illusion: The media leads us to believe we should all be cheering when the
stock market is booming*


Conservatives insultingly assure us that the "democratization of stock
ownership" is gradually making America more equal, as evidenced by the
flattening of wealth ownership among the richest 1% in recent years. So we
should all be excited about a rising stock market.


Here are the facts. Data from Edward Wolff confirms that from 1983 to 2007
the percentages of net worth and financial wealth for the top 1% remained
steady. But the percentages for the rest of the richest 5% increased by
almost 20%, while the percentages for the lowest 80% of the population
DECREASED by almost 20%.


In other words, the share of wealth owned by the top 1% leveled off because
the "democratization of stock ownership" spread the wealth among just 5% of
the population, those earning an average of $500,000 per year. A few people
-- 5 out of 100 -- got very rich, but everyone else lost ground.



Conclusion


The issues are difficult to address with Congress largely on the side of
the wealthy. At the very least:


(1) Eliminate the tax break on unearned income (capital gains). The richest
Americans, who own most of the stocks, should not pay a smaller tax than
everyone else.




(2) Implement a small financial transactions tax. It would be easy to
administer on computer trades, it would generate hundreds of billions of
dollars in revenue, and it would help guard against the reckless
speculation that devastated the financial markets and our country.



This article was published at NationofChange at:
http://www.nationofchange.org/how-ultra-rich-betray-america-1337616055. All
rights are reserved.


--
-Laye
==============================
"With fair speech thou might have thy will,
With it thou might thy self spoil."
--The R.M

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤