Oh we’re definitely through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, in an alternative universe (insert your favorite quip for an upside down world here ____). Yep, the Koch Bros and some of their corporate cronies have a sad about some of the house corporate welfare tax plan. But don’t for a second think that the good witch of the North has all of a sudden waved her magic wand and given the Koch’s the slightest touch of empathy. No, not at all.
Trump has control of a giant economic pizza and the corporate rats are scrambling to get the biggest slices and steal everyone else’s slice. Here’s how Bloomberg describes the rat scrum to make corporations great again.
Charles and David Koch, slammed a key element of the House Republicans’ plan to overhaul corporate taxes, saying it would raise prices for American consumers and “could be devastating” to the economy.
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The proposal, which is generally known by the term “border adjustments,” would “adversely impact American consumers by forcing them to pay higher prices on products produced in and goods imported to the U.S. that they use every single day,” the company said in the statement.
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But its opposition to border adjustments is the most politically prominent yet in a swelling chorus of corporate voices concerned that the proposal would damage companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that rely on imported goods to sell products at low cost.
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Koch Industries… would benefit from the change because it produces many products domestically, according to its statement, which was released by Koch’s lobbying arm, Koch Companies Public Sector LLC. However, “the long term consequences to the economy and the American consumer could be devastating,” the statement said.
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The World Trade Organization, whose members include the U.S., might conclude that the new approach is applying the adjustments to a direct tax, which isn’t allowed, rather than to an indirect tax, like a value-added tax, which is permitted.
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“It’s going to slam clothing manufacturers hugely,” said Peter Barnes, an international tax lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington and a former senior tax lawyer at General Electric Co. Prices for U.S. consumers on everything from t-shirts to imported cars would increase by 15 percent to 20 percent, he said.
Yesterday the GOP punched American workers, and now they’re going after some of their corporate cronies. We’re all going to suffer because some voters and all the non voters handed our democracy over to an authoritarian Kleptocracy, but we might find a touch of entertainment watching the corporate and oligarch rats fight over the slices of swamp pizza that Trump and the GOP made from the last scraps of American dignity.