Study finds 29 corporations, including the five largest oil corporations, are now factoring in an as-yet-unpassed carbon tax into their future budget calculations. How far into the future we don't learn, as even a filibuster-proof Democratic Congress couldn't get it done in 2009 (and that was a very corporate-friendly bill). And at least one big oil corporation wants tax cuts in return, like they don't get enough already.
Forbes tax blogger Kelly Phillips Erb, in the middle of a post about one man's effort to get toilet paper exempted from sales taxes in Florida, writes the best paragraph I've ever seen about why folks consider the sales tax regressive. Key points (it's paragraph 8): "you generally use the same amount of squares whether you take home $10,000 per year or $100,000 per year" (also useful when discussing the flat tax) and "toilet paper isn't an 'opt-out' good," meaning you won't suddenly decide you can go without. If states have to have sales taxes, of course, they should be taxing things like truffle oil rather than toilet paper.
Scholar claims that workers have made a smaller share of U.S. income over the last thirty-plus years not because of technological innovation, but because of the decline of unions. Which matches my intuition, though Ms. Kristal also allows that employers have been "able to deploy new technologies in ways that spurred the decline of unions" to some degree. (Here is her full study, though it ain't on-the-john reading.)
The Center for Media and Democracy asks "Why is Google Funding Grover Norquist, Heritage Action, and ALEC?" Maybe it has something to do with hiring former Rep. Susan Molinari as a Vice President back in early 2012, but certainly it has something to do with Google stashing $33 billion offshore (per USPIRG). Google likes to play the we give to both sides card, though we don't really know that's true -- and we do know that there's really no "other side" to stashing your money overseas in order to avoid taxation, thus depriving us of schools, roads, and bridges, as well as teachers, police officers, and firefighters.
Finally, Patrick J. Deneen at The American Conservative notes how many right-wing commentators wish Pope Francis would talk more about abortion and less about economics -- without noting, of course, that the Pope's Evangelii Gaudium follows "a century-old tradition of Catholic social and economic teaching," and that commentators left and right never spoke out when the two previous Popes commented similarly on economic matters. I'm always glad to see a conservative talk about "maintaining an economic system premised upon limitless extraction" like that's a bad thing -- and I'm thrilled to see that notion joined with "a fostering of endless desires," since that's also a bad thing.
Comments