Dear America,
About that corporate cash on hand...
Of the $1.9 trillion that American corporations are hoarding, it seems that Apple has about $60 billion. The profits Apple has taken on its devices have made that massive bank account possible...along with shipping the jobs making them to China. The New York Times reported a couple of years ago that, while Apple did save money by shipping those jobs abroad, the total savings came to about $5 per piece of equipment sold by Apple at its dedicated stores by its "geniuses," who further compromise the labor market by working obscene hours for $14 a piece. Apparently, Apple's marketing--including its marketing to the labor force by which it seems to have convinced a bunch of young people that it is an honor to work at an Apple store and they shouldn't be thinking about how little money they make--is superb, and its former CEO, the conscienceless Steve Jobs, had no problem sacrificing a portion of his country's economy in the form of 30,000 jobs so as to enrich himself When asked by his president what it would take to bring those jobs back to the United States, Jobs famously said, nothing. They're not coming back. But as he was saying that, Apple was padding its balance sheet far beyond what was needed for the security of the company, and even after the economy stabilized, it continued to sit idle, as it does today, when it could be invested in something that might stimulate the economy, like expansion of Apple's manufacturing facilities here. Meanwhile, companies like GE have declared that their tax liabilities were $0 on account of sheltering profits in foreign subsidiaries' overseas bank accounts and have continued to blackmail states and municipalities in which they are located with complaints about state taxes...moving from state to state and from one sop to another. In fact, GE has just notified the State of Connecticut that it is leaving, going who knows where for who knows what kind of inducement, which Connecticut will match when it runs out in order to get GE back.
And speaking of taxes, reducing them, for corporations in particular, is the primary domestic goal of the Republican Party, including Paul Ryan specifically, whose fealty to the "Atlas Shrugged" doctrine of his patron thinker, Ayn Rand, is both blind and seemingly mindless of the fact that of course the novel worked out the way Rand's philosophy would have predicted. It was a novel, as in, work of fiction. The theory is that if you reduce taxes for business in particular, the money saved by them trickles down in the form of jobs, which pay wages, which get spent and increase tax revenues at least as much as the tax breaks for businesses cost. But even if that calculus--that tax savings are directly convertible to wages and thus more tax revenue--there is the problem of the first step: inducing businesses to spend that newly available capital. It devolves to this question that the Democrats should be asking Republicans. If tax cuts lead to more capital spending, why isn't the capital corporations already have being spent? With the embarrassment of wealth that American corporations are enjoying, and that they have been enjoying in ever greater amounts as the recession wore the rest of us down, how can we rely on corporations to "do the right thing," so to speak.
This goes back to an issue I have been raising for some time; with so much to confront the Republicans with, why aren't Democrats confronting them with it. When The President gave his State of the Union speech, why didn't he say that one of the ways to flatten the egregious economic hills and valleys of our inequitable balance of wealth would be to cut taxes for the working people of the country at the expense of increased taxes for corporations rather than decreased taxes for them. And then, of course, there is the question of why we need to subsidize the investments of the 1% by allowing them to pay half what the rest of us pay on the returns of their investments as far as marginal rates are concerned. Those seem like legitimate questions to ask Paul Ryan, for example, and even the press could ask them. After all, according to conservatives, and Republicans in particular, it is their ox that is always being gored by the press, yet, these hard questions never seem to get asked. Why isn't Scott Pelley sitting down with Ryan for an interview as he has with President Obama? Why has "60 Minutes" allowed proponents of the Republican concocted "scandal" that was Benghazi, which has been investigated by five separate congressional commissions without producing an iota of culpability for anything but mistaking for a few days the nature of the murders at the consulate to be part of a protest rather than a naked act of terror, and even in that regard the national reaction to the story was, so what. Yet CBS covered it more than once, but never asked Paul Ryan how he was going to get corporations to spend all those tax refunds that he is so obsessed about.
The claim that the media are biased liberally seems to me to be absurd, yet I concede that, if I think the media are pussyfooting around the Republicans and conservatives think that it is the Democrats who are getting all the softball questions, there may well be a balance in there somewhere. I used to say as a lawyer, and many lawyers say this, if you settle a case and no one is happy, it's probably a fair settlement. But if we settle for a president and a Speaker of the House, does that mean that the country will be governed fairly? I don't think I want to take that chance.
Your friend,
Mike
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