For many people, there is a difference. Very few begrudge a person who starts a company, MAKES SOMETHING TANGIBLE and become rich for it. The contempt goes towards people who don't seem to do anything but push "paper and powerpoint" around and make billions for it. The impression is that Trump builds stuff and employs people(blue collar at that), regardless of if that is actually true.
The reason for that is because only morons support Trump. You can't expect much from those kinds of people.
I just got a pit in my stomach thinking about a second Palin VP run. That urchin grifter's entire endorsement tack is just some kind of cross-marketing between their respective reality TV reps.
Wow - just wow <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fvxDLKPz3T8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
The question is how to you manage corporations in a global free trade setting where companies can avoid taxes? Corporations are understandably profit driven...and not just profit driven, but increasing their capitalization. Because of that there is 0 incentive for them to pay labor any more than what they absolutely have to. That's where globalization and competition plays in. I am not sure what gov'ts can do to make companies pay their employees more. Especially with the influence corporations has on gov't. That influence is so strong, that you can't even reform the system. Seems both Republicans and democrats understand that politicians are on the take from corporations - people get that these CEO's are making crazy amounts of money while they are working at salaries squeezing them down. But the place to start is not the presidency - which has limited power. You need a Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders at every position in Congress - that's the only way you change the game. It's all about Congress. There needs to be a way for people to vote in leaders who make a pledge not to be influenced by corporate money and instead represent the interests of the people. And ironically - money to those candidates from a massive PAC built on that principle.
This is an area where I am probably to the right of Clinton, and most Democrats. I think there are some big problems with the US corporate tax system and also US taxes in regard to overseas earnings that actually incentive shifting operations off shore. My own thinking now is that reducing the corporate tax marginal rate while reducing loopholes might be a better way of getting corporations to bring back tax revenue to the US. I don't look at corporations as being the enemy. I view them as being necessary to conducting business in a modern economy. Corporations are essentially amoral entities but that doesn't mean that there isn't corporate responsibility and there has been a movement among many CEO's and boards to behave more responsibility. Shareholdes and consumers are helping to drive this but obviously there are limits and I wouldn't count on them to be the sole check on corporate behavior. I think the answer to deal with multinational corporations rather than raising trade barriers is to strengthen multilateral institutions. Even though the US is the largest economy just having the US reform isn't enough but we need accountability across the globe. This is also one of the reasons that I support Clinton over Sanders. Her experience as Secretary of State and also the very global ties of the Clinton Foundation that she is criticized in my own opinion make her uniquely qualified to deal with global issues regarding trade and multinationals. First off this belief that Donald Trump is going to be a friend to the 99% and take on globalism is very suspect when you consider that he has done a lot of overseas business. He has no problem engaging in licensing and other deals with developers and other businesses in places like the PRC or Dubai. His actions don't match his rhetoric. Even taking him at his word though I don't see his positions (if we can really call them that considering how vague they are) are going to help the US economy and think the reverse is more likely. The same with Sanders's proposals. The US economy is not something that can be just decoupled from the global economy. Slapping huge tariffs aren't going to suddenly bring back jobs or compel companies to reform their pay structure. What it will likely lead to is a precipitous rise in the cost of goods and a crisis in credit as some of our biggest trading partners who also are creditors of the US counter. The US economy is so entangled with those of the PRC, Europe and the rest of the Global economy that a trade war is essentially economic MAD. I will admit that there is need for reform and I don't have any good answers. The rhetoric from both Trump and Sanders though I find to be simplistic answers to very complicated issues.
Imagine if one year ago, I had made the prediction that the majority of Republican leadership (G.H.W. Bush, G. W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Romney, Ryan, Cruz, among others) weren't going to vote for the GOP nominee. Imagine if one year ago I had made the prediction Sarah Palin would be actively working to displace the current G.O.P. Speaker of the House. People would have called me a nutjob. I watched a replay of Bill Maher's "Real Time" from July 2015. In that episode, he asked Ann Coulter who she thought would be the nominee of the G.O.P. She stated at that point she thought it would be Trump. You should have heard the howls of laughter from the audience. Less than one year later....here we are. Time to drop out of the political process all together. I'm done.
I doubt it - most U.S. Corporations (the big ones) don't pay any or pay minimal tax already. Hard to incentivize with tax anyway when the biggest cost is labor. Many companies get a margin of 5% - so they pay 25% of 5% in tax - or basically 1% or around there of their revenue. Now labor is about 1/3 of your cost - 33%. If I can save 20% going overseas (it's much much more) than you are asking a company to give up 6-7% in costs to save to 1-2% in taxes. Math don't add up (don't try to do math on an airplane though). I certainly hope they aren't the enemy - I own a lot of stock. I personally gain by corporate profits. Most corporate responsibility programs are just a way to keep morale high and their brand looking a little less dirty. People care about his rhetoric, not his actions. He will get away with anything. He is getting away with it. Neither of them expect their policy positions to matter. In fact their success is proof that policy positions don't matter. This is an election of emotion and rhetoric, nothing more. And that's why Trump can win. People want it simple and straight - not nuanced positions. Fact is that everyone knows that Clinton isn't going to change things dramatically. So if you're unhappy with the way things are going (the working class) - Trump is a low-risk option. Try the guy who is a businessman and see if he can fix things.
It's like marvel's civil war but Palin and Ryan are like a lone wonder twin versus Aquaman, cartoon version mind you...
Can she just shut her mouth and live in the corner of Alaska she came from? O swear, it is beyond hypocritical to criticize the clintons for profiting off of politics (which I criticize them for too), when her entire career has done that, including her daughter who became a spokesperson for abstinence and has had 2 kids out of wedlock with 2 separate fathers . Again, criticize Obama's parenting skills but fail to recognize your own. Blame your son beating the **** out of his gf on PTSD and Obama but overlook your role. Actually, just give her honey boo boo or w.e's spot on that channel trump supporters avidly watch.
**** the GOP. I have no appreciation for today's Republican Party at all. They deserve everything that's happening to them after the wreck they made of this country.
If Trump's candidacy was being accompanied by a wave of similar (and competitive) candidates for Congress and state offices, I'd be more willing to declare the GOP dead. From what I can tell, however, that isn't happening. Perhaps a wave of pro-Trump candidates will emerge in next few elections, but until that occurs, the GOP establishment is still very much alive. I think we're more likely to see a truly major change in the GOP (and the Dems as well) once the bulk of the Baby Boomers start to die off. So much of the political dialogue still revolves around their needs and beliefs (particularly the Reaganism politics that many of them still buy into). Additionally, we'll see major shifts as the country becomes majority minority, and the GOP will have to change to earn these voters. To a certain extent, the rise of Trump is largely a reaction to the anticipation of these inevitable changes.
Yes and no. In the last 30 years, productivity rises, yet wages are stagnant. Why? [rQUOTEr] The arguments that the corporate lobbyists are making—about how badly business will be hurt—just don’t add up. What is adding up instead are the trillions of dollars in corporate profits and stock gains that corporations have made over the same decades that your hours climbed and your wages fell. From 1950 to 1980, during the good old days of U.S. economic might—the era in which the Great American Middle Class was created—corporate profits averaged a healthy 6 percent of GDP. But since then, corporate profits have doubled to more than 12 percent of GDP. That’s about a trillion dollars more a year in profit. And since then, wages as a percentage of GDP have fallen, you guessed it, by about the same 6 percent or 7 percent of GDP. Coincidence? Probably not. What very few Americans seem to understand is that that extra trillion dollars isn’t profit because it had to be, or needs to be or should be. That extra trillion dollars is profit because powerful people like me prefer it to be. It could have been spent on your wages. Or it could have gone into discounts to you, the consumer. We capitalists will tell you that our increasing profits are the result of some complex economic force with the immutability and righteousness of divine law. But the truth is, it is simply a result of a difference in negotiating power. As in, we have it. And you don’t. more[/rQUOTEr] Globalisation did reduce the cost of living in trade goods like home appliances and TVs. Could the American people have had the best of both worlds? Who knows? Not a fan of the all is doomed rhetoric, but I do share your anger of past results. It's not only Reganomics but also Bill's neoliberalist policies that have spread out the pain from early 90's stagnation and before. We're feeling the effects of Greenspan era Fed meddling that resulted in asset bubbles dating as far back as the first Dot Com bust, housing bust, and the panic of the shadow banking system. In between them are several commodities booms and busts like speculator rats jumping on and off ships en masse such as oil, gold, forex carry trades, and muni bonds. Lather, rinse, repeat and call it a practice for "marshaling up liquidity". I guess it's unfair to blame our current situation solely upon Greenspan and the like. At the time, it produced numbers that gave hope and job growth. That doesn't work anymore. We should really have more discussion of whether it has to be thrown out (populist sentiment) or retweaked to make it mature with the current needs of the people (European style corporate controls and constraints) Being against Neoliberalism* not necessarily about "killing globalism or closing our borders" but rather the reduction or elimination of "pay to play politics", closing loopholes like the corporate taxation policy for overseas profits, and closing loopholes for offshore accounts. These are logistically possible with current means, but dead in the water politically. It's not because politics is dead because it's bought and sold, but rather the same distrust and cynicism that causes people to be turned off by government is willfully playing into voting in the devil you know (ie. Congress has terribly low approval ratings but my congress(wo)man is fighting for me!). Conservatives and the GOP are repellently nastier with that stigma because they champion dysfunction and defunding of "big government" out of distrust and of simplicity for spiraling trillion dollar deficits while knowingly or unknowingly ripping apart the fabric of Federal safety nets designed to give people a leg up on success or second chances. Their (and the Clintons) idea of deregulation is to privatize something like prisons in order to move it off public books (most notably pensions and liability), yet at the same time pour even more money to these regional third party monopolies in order to look tough on crime and tough against superpredators. This is a working model. The current Bush-Palin play-doh model is to get elected and run up fabulous debts and white elephants loaded with conflicts of interests (the kind that makes old school liberals envious). When everything collapses either through asset bubbles popping and/or an inability to pay, the tried and true play is reply that "it was proof all along that big government does. not. work." I'm all for making the government more efficient, but even if we cleave funding by half, the US government will still be big. It's not a line or ethos to work with. This sounds like an "I told you so" or an emotional plea for action in the form of doomsaying demagoguery. I don't believe this is inevitable. I agree that it's mostly depends on how lazy and apathetic the voting republic will be and whether populist anger will continue to magnify against cooler heads and better reason. This is a constant challenge of democracies. The millennial generation, despite criticisms from the even-more-selfish-and-entitled Baby Boomers and the justifiably-indignant Gen Xers, are optimistic thinkers and could potentially be among the least violent generations in American history. Maybe it's because we're too lazy to care, but regardless of whether we care or don't put too much heart into it, we'll have to deal with it. It's the most meaningful challenge of the last 30 years. China better get busy making babies before they'll implode from the weight of little emperors(eses) supporting four elderly people or it's outflows to a still developing social safety net. If empty cities and roads to nowhere from a rising Eastern power sound familiar, so should lost decades of youths whom have no power, freedom, and lost creative authority to influence their futures. Not taken into account is the rise of the "other half" of the population who will have cheap access to the world's collective knowledge in the next five years. This is beyond BRIC and Mexico-Indonesia-S.Korea-Turkey, and we'll see more in the next 10 years. First as consumers, then as producers, and finally as equal innovators. We're at a point where multinationals are flexing their weight beyond standard ideas of borders where enough people from all countries are beginning to feel its pain. The sheen of idealizing corporations that everyone bought for the last two decades has faded. During that Greenspan era, the American public felt that corporations were nimbler than the government to solve society's problems (in Silly Valley this remains true...), and that the church of Wall Street with it's holy altar the Federal Reserve would pull out new tricks and innovations to feed five thousand by securitizing five loaves and two fishes. Don't get me wrong, capital financing has enriched modern society, but to give everyone participating lavish multimillion dollar bonuses when only 5% among them really know how it works is not my idea of "fair compensation". It's not that I want to kill corporations or tear them down. I don't see or treat them as people or in some haloed status, rather they should be looked accordingly as transparent tools rather than complex instruments of divine faith and freedom. Some would reply that public companies have compliance standards for transparency, but the goal and aim should be to slash the army of accountants designed to cook the books by eliminating purposely labyrinthe tax laws. From the coming global gilded age of inequality, I hope we don't respond in a spirit of everyone for themselves and where it's okay to rob Peter to pay Paul. In that sense, it'd be more about having the best Passport, if one can meet that barrier of entry. The other way would be about forming international consensus about how multinationals can operate within its umbrella so that they can't hide and shuffle their dealings. This would mean the death of Delaware-style tax states. A metaphor for this is the current twisted situation of cities using taxpayer funding for building stadiums and parking lots in order to keep sports teams. In some cases, the sports teams keep the stadium or own some favorable leasing policy for the duration that stadium is viable, thus guaranteeing profits and billion dollar team evaluations that are entirely privatized with nothing subsidized to the public. This ridiculous policy is tolerated and considered normal by the voting public because of the tangible fear of the team relocating and becoming "that city" like LA was with the NFL for the last two decades. To make this sound reasonable to skeptical voters, projections are given to display "future economic impacts" the team contributes to the city despite the fact that it was the city that supported the team's rise in the first place. There will always be wannabe cities lurking in the corner doing whatever it takes, but none of this makes any sense in terms of fairness if you need to subsidize a private company tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, bond financing and interest payments that would've supported real local businesses and entrepreneurs rather than lower paying service class industries catered around the sports team. Hell, if the city was built up with proper infrastructure, jobs planning and investment, teams would beg to go to that city instead of the reverse where it inevitably feels like a race to the bottom. One can misconstrue this metaphor as a statement to forcibly anchor all franchises to their cities, but it goes back to that Nick Hanauer editorial: “We capitalists will tell you that our increasing profits are the result of some complex economic force with the immutability and righteousness of divine law. But the truth is, it is simply a result of a difference in negotiating power. As in, we have it. And you don’t.” *Neoliberalism is an ambiguous code word that's used by many. I found this interesting podcast about it, which has a fair debate about its pros and cons...
