Quoting: phillyjabroni
My point is that we spend more than the next (3) countries and we aren't the "smartest" in the world. We are around 20th or something.
Health care here needs to be reformed. Allow it to be on the market and competition will lower the prices. While it may be unconventional, it needs to be started sooner rather than later.
The tax should be proprietary, not progressive, something that Adam Smith and Bentham agreed with.
CEOs that use shareholder money to pad their wallets is theft. CEOs making tons of money from the market is not.
Right, it's not
called theft, and that's because of the super advantageous US tax structure. Lemme use an example, a simple one: Enron. Kinder Morgan. I'll explain.
We all know what Enron is. Energy company, caught red handed, major tax fraud scandal, leading to their CEO serving a big time jail sentence.
Enron created a child company in the 90's, called Enron Liquids Pipeline LLP. This company was created for the sole purpose of being a tax shelter, which is a financial arrangement made to avoid or minimize taxes for the parent company. Enron used this in many ways. Don't want to get too into details, but for example, there is something called a Natural Resource Tax or something? In which corporations which makes 90% or more of their profit in the oil industry, become exempt from paying corporate taxes. So guess what, no taxes for Enron! Or project Tanya; this was based on duplicating deductions between different Enron companies. In short, they would collect the same loss twice. Project Tanya resulted in U.S. federal tax savings $66 million.
In 1995, Enron began to do a series of transactions that, according to the U.S. Joint Staff Committee on Taxation, this was designed to "satisfy the literal requirements of the corporate tax laws, yet produce results that were not contemplated by Congress and not warranted from a tax policy perspective. Several of the projects were structured to duplicate and accelerate tax deductions." Basically, they did illegal stuff in a legal way.
Among the notable people conducting these thefts, yes thefts, from the government, was Richard Kinder, an Enron executive at the time. William Morgan, another Enron executive, was also instrumental in these frauds.
And in 1997, with the company going down in a major tax scandal, Enron Liquids Pipeline LLP was bought, and renamed into Kinder Morgan, after being purchased by....Richard Kinder, their current CEO, and William Morgan...
It goes to show how corrupt companies are. The man in charge of your pipelines was the guy who stole money from your government. How does that make you feel?
In addition, it gets worse. In their board of directors, out of the nine board members, SIX were Enron employees. A seventh member was Michael Morgan, who was William Morgan’s son. Also, ALL of the 141 employees of Enron Liquids Pipeline, L.P got the same jobs at Kinder Morgan at the same salary
My point is: while this company is now called “Kinder Morgan”, their entire “new” company is filled with Enron employees. If you have read about the Enron scandal, you would know why this is a serious problem.
Skip to 2015: the tax rules are slightly and merely becoming better, so Kinder Morgan decides to change its structure to continue to avoid paying taxes. In August 2015, Rich Kinder announced in a conference call to investors that Kinder Morgan would go through a major makeover and a change in corporate structure. Kinder called the deal as a “tax shelter”. He went on to say, "From the purchase price alone, including the step up, we will realize over 20 billion dollars in cash tax savings over the next 14 years." So, Kinder Morgan avoids paying $1.4 billion per years for the next 20 years in the U.S.
After this conference call, Rich Kinder made $800 million the next day. I wonder why....
As a Canadian, this concerns me massively as well. In Canada, we have this thing called the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which Kinder Morgan had previosuly bought, and wants to expand. The project is terrible for a number of reasons: it kills jobs, kills the environment, and causes a major risk of an oil spill. But worst of all, is how Kinder Morgan is not paying any taxes to us. Like, none.
Kinder Morgan Canada president Ian Anderson informed analysts Texas last January that, despite generating an annual average of $172 million from the Trans Mountain system, Kinder Morgan has only payed an annual average of $1.5 million in provincial and federal corporate taxes over the past five years. All of the money they didn’t pay goes to its U.S. market, or shall I say to the pockets of CEO Kinder.
Jabroni, if you dont have a problem with CEOs like Kinder and his companies ruining our economies, I don't have anything else to say to you.