The Republican Tax Plan Scam

This just in:  The entire world, via the UNITED NATIONS, just voted to condemn the United State’s decision to move our embassy for Israel to Jerusalem.  Our response was “Screw you guys, I’m going home; and I’m taking my money with me.”

Trump has pissed off the entire world once again, but…I don’t want to talk about that right now.  I want to talk about the tax bill.

This can be pretty dry so I’m going to do it using highly interesting bullet points:

  1. There are 2 million unfilled jobs in the United States right now.
  2. Companies exist to make a profit….period.
  3. Companies choose where to build their factories on things such as: (1) where the raw material is, (2) where the market is, (3) where the best transportation is, (4) where a skilled workforce is and (5) where the cheapest labor is.
  4. The tax code has virtually no impact on location unless it represents a boost big enough to overcome the five points above…which it never does.
  5. Apple will not move production to the United States to save millions on taxes when they save billions on labor.
  6. Apple will not move it’s headquarters to the United States when it can pretend it’s in Ireland and pay virtually no taxes.
  7. Companies NEVER make hiring decisions based on the corporate tax rate.  I don’t think I can stress NEVER quite enough.  (Source, for 30 years, I’ve helped corporations make expansion and hiring decisions).
  8. Jobs are created by consumers. If you buy stuff, companies will make more.
  9. Jobs are not created by companies.  If they hire more people to build more vacuum cleaners it DOES NOT follow that we will buy more vacuum cleaners.  So they wait for consumers to send the message that more vacuum cleaners are needed…then the company hires more workers.
  10. Trickle Down Economics has never worked and is the most solidly disproven theory of all time…and the Republican Party is gambling our entire economy on this very theory.
  11. The Republican talking point on the tax deal is that “everyone gets a tax break.”
  12. The rational talking point is, “I get $1,000 and a millionaire get’s $2 million.  Yes, everyone got money but it was not equally distributed and it creates a $1.5 trillion dollar debt.”
  13. The last thing American companies want is for other companies to create jobs.  I was at a plant in Wisconsin last week.  They are hiring people for $14 and hour and giving them $1,000 extra if they last 3 months.  They do this because unemployment is so low there are no qualified people to fill the jobs we have now.
  14. American companies don’t want more jobs to be created but they love this tax break.  Why?  Because it does not create more jobs.  It just gives them more money; money that goes to buy back stock or give CEO’s bonuses.  They will not benevolently give the money to their employees because that reduces profits.
  15. The tax plan gets rid of the requirement that everyone buy insurance.  None of us balked when we required everyone to buy car insurance because we understood that the uninsured were what was causing prices to go up so fast.  Healthcare is no different.   Now that you don’t have to buy health insurance, prices will go up faster.
  16. The increased cap on the Estate Tax and the decrease in the rate of the top income earners is evidence that this plan is about paying back to rich donors.
  17. This is a tax plan that makes no sense.  We don’t need the jobs.  Corporations don’t need the money.  We create a $1.5 trillion dollar deficit so the GOP can come back next year and say, “We need to cut medicare and Social Security because spending is out of control.”
  18. Buy the time the inevitable recession sets in it will be early 2019.  The Republican Party will be out of power.  They will then blame the Democrats for the states of affairs they created with their tax vote yesterday.

Time to save the world.

Up, up and away…

Jim