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October 27, 2011

#GOP, #Dems both love corporate tax cheats

And are also stupidly naive about what already tax-cheating big biz will do with this money:

From the AP:
The House voted in near lockstep Thursday to repeal a law aimed at compelling government contractors to pay all their taxes, sparking squabbling over which party was doing the most to create jobs but leaving economists underwhelmed that much of anything had been achieved.
 
By 405-16, lawmakers voted to annul a 5-year-old law requiring federal, state and many local governments to withhold 3 percent of their payments to contractors until their taxes are paid. That measure was enacted by a Republican Congress and President George W. Bush in response to investigations showing that thousands of government contractors owed billions in back taxes. It is to go into effect in 2013.
 
Today's politicians are more concerned about the stubbornly high unemployment rate of 9.1 percent, the fury over economic inequity voiced by Occupy Wall Street protestors and the approach of next year's presidential and congressional elections.
That has left people in both parties, including President Barack Obama, saying the withholding should be scrapped because it would erode the cash that contractors have to hire more workers. Republicans were eager to categorize the bill as part of their year-long effort to attack government regulations as millstones on corporate America.
These contractors will instead pocket this money, just like the back taxes they haven't paid. Anybody with brains knows that. That said, to riff on Ben Franklin, when you surrender guts for security, you'll have neither, and you'll lose your brains to boot.

Speaking of, politics got involved:
Democrats acknowledged that the withholding law would do more harm than good, but they insisted that Republicans could hardly stake claim to being job saviors.
You could still not vote for the measure.And the story notes that the Dem-majority Senate may approve the same bill.

It's things like this that lead Occupy Wall Street supporters to reject marching in lockstep with Democrats. Especially when this is being paid for by tightening some Medicare standards.

And, if the MSM's shill from Moody's love it, we really should be skeptical:
"We're just codifying what's being done anyway," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics. "It's not as though we're changing something that would mean more money flowing."
Kind of like Gramm-Leach-Bliley just codified too big to fail banks, eh?

1 comment:

  1. And from what I see in the NPS, government goes a long way to help support "small businesses" with preferences for contracts etc.. It kind of pisses me off hearing how government is somehow a fetter on small businesses when I see that govt. is some of these businesses bread and butter. I wonder how many of the owners are ideologically reactionary right wingers bitching about big government while collecting their contract payments.

    ReplyDelete

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