Paul Bucheit writes
You Owe Us, Corporations: Four Reasons Why and One Way to Pay:
The distorted belief that wealthy individuals and corporations are job creators has led to sizeable business subsidies and tax breaks. The biggest giveaway is often overlooked: corporations use our nation's plentiful resources, largely at no cost, to build their profits.
There are several factual and well-established reasons why corporations owe a great debt to the nation that has made them rich.
Our Tax Money Pays for Much of the Research
The majority (57 percent) of basic research, the essential startup work for products that don't yet yield profits, is paid for by our tax dollars. When ALL forms of research are included -- basic, applied, and developmental—approximately 30 percent comes from public money. In 2009 universities were still receiving ten times more science & engineering funding from government than from industry.
All of our technology, securities trading, medicine, infrastructure, and national security have their roots in public research and development. For a pageful of details look here. [...]
Fewer and Fewer People are Reaping the Benefits of Our National Productivity
Corporate profits are at their highest level in 85 years, doubling in the last ten years, and growing by 171 percent in the first half of the Obama presidency.
Despite a continuing growth in productivity in the last 35 years, wages have fallen dramatically, and technology has begun to diminish the need for warehouse workers, bank tellers, cashiers, travel agents, and a host of other middle-income positions. [...]
Corporations Use Our Resources but Avoid Their Taxes [...]
Corporations Have Stopped Investing in America [...]
A Progressive Solution: Dividends for All
In his book, With Liberty and Dividends For All, Peter Barnes argues for a system of dividends to all Americans for our co-owned national wealth. Because corporations have used our resources—research, infrastructure, environment, educational and legal systems—to develop technologies that are gradually reducing the need for human involvement, and because all of us have contributed to our national productivity, either directly or through our parents and grandparents, we all deserve to benefit.
As Barnes states, "The sum of wealth created by nature, our ancestors, and our economy as a whole is what I here call co-owned wealth. Some, including myself, have called it shared wealth, the commons, or common wealth. Whatever we call it, it's the goose that lays almost all the eggs of private wealth."
Precedent exists in the successful and widely popular Alaska Permanent Fund.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—If energy and climate change are matters of national security, why aren't we spending like it?
President Barack Obama's speech on energy and national security today contained some good and some not so good. Unfortunately, it also contained nothing really new. Rather it was a reprise of his speech a year ago, withtweaking around the edges. But that time the go-ahead for more oil drilling was supposed to be in exchange for a cap-and-trade deal. This time, no trade-off, just more drilling. As Ezra Klein wrote:
Unfortunately, it’s not a very good plan, even if it may be very good politics. It says less about how we’ll solve our energy problems than how we’ve resigned ourselves to not solving them.
Energy security is shorthand for “oil we drill here” as opposed to “oil that gets shipped here.” So the first part of the plan is all about expanding domestic production of some of the very fuel we need to be weaning ourselves off of.
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What is being proposed to make us less foreign oil dependent is more domestic drilling despite the fact that the U.S. consumes 20 percent of world oil output but only has 2 percent of world reserves. Plus, continued reliance on environmentally disastrous (but heavily subsidized) corn ethanol as well as the prospect of alternative biofuels.
Plus, more efficiency in oil-fueled vehicles. Plus, "clean coal" to make electricity to power the electric cars the President has said he wants a million of on the road within four years. Plus, more nukes just as soon as the quick-and-dirty comprehensive review of existing nukes "proves" nothing like what happened in Japan can happen here, and problems like waste disposal and overcrowded spent fuel pools are shunted aside. Plus, more vehicle efficiency. Plus, solar and wind.
Too much of the wrong approach and not enough of the right one.
Tweet of the Day
Fox News will itemize every fuel dollar cost of the President's Kenya trip and claim Michelle brought 15,000 friends. Can't wait for it.
— @JeffersonObama
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, another in-depth look from the
HuffPo at how St. Louis County municipalities wring dollars from their poorest residents. A new water tax brings out the Irish penchant for old-school methods of protest. From the world of self-fulfilling prophecy: GA "patriot" plants bombs in a local park to scare neighbors into worrying about terrorism. Scott Walker's a front-runner? Time for some outrageous dark money stories, then! As an added bonus, learn again how no law can bind the rich! One last look back at that oddball Starbucks "Race Together" campaign, through the lens of wage theft. A very good point!
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