Burger King plans to buy the Canadian donut/coffee chain Tim Hortons -- so it can reincorporate as a Canadian corporation and pay less money in U.S. taxes. The move already has American customers declaring they'll never buy a Whopper again, but I feel compelled to ask: if corporations have the "rights of personhood," how then do corporations get to buy one another, given that people have the right not to be bought by other people?
I didn't know this, either, but apparently an obscure section of the Affordable Care Act prevents health insurance corporations from deducting more than $500,000 of a CEO's salary from their tax bill. Whether it's "performance pay" or not, no less. The writer hopes this'll spread to all corporations -- I'm more a fan of the 91% tax bracket myself, but if closing the performance pay loophole has the same effect, I'll be happy to say I was wrong.
The state of Pennsylvania strikes a deal with the Obama Administration to expand Medicaid to 500,000 residents. Pennsylvania will get to charge premiums to these residents, who probably thought their taxes were already paying for it, but the state can charge only 2% of a resident's income, and only if that resident makes from 100 and 133 percent of the federal poverty line. So Tom Corbett can tell the voters he got the expansion done, which won't placate the liberals who've been telling him to do that for years -- and explaining that his big win was getting to charge people for it will only excite those who are already voting for him.
Vanity Fair notes that Time-Warner's massive internet outage on Wednesday, affecting most of their customers, reminds us that monopolists can't be trusted to deliver even decent service. And it comes at a perfect time -- when Comcast wants to buy Time-Warner and create one even bigger corporations controlling even more of America's broadband. Comcast is no doubt preparing PR releases saying see? Let us buy them so we can improve their customer service! But as we know, that would be a little like asking the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers to buy the 2008 Detroit Lions so the former can "improve" the latter.
Finally, Mitch McConnell says who, me? at charges that he's willing to risk a government shutdown to get what he wants if Republicans win the Senate. He even said "I am the guy that gets us out of shutdowns," a claim which no doubt caused Paul Ryan to lift an eyebrow. But if he's just signaled his willingness to fold like a house of cards if Mr. Obama dares him to, I don't know why I should look upon him more kindly.
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