The building crane is once again our state bird

Not sure what to think of this:  It was announced this week that Toyota would be moving all it's US divisions....sales, marketing, engineering, and manufacturing....to my neighborhood here in the Dallas area.  They will be building a 70 acre office campus on Headquarters Drive in Plano, just down the street from K's company headquarters.  Four thousand jobs will be moving here.

This on top of six thousand jobs State Farm Insurance is bringing to their new 1.5M sq ft towers now under construction.  There are also a dozen or more 10 story +/- office towers under construction for smaller clients, too.

They say they're coming here because of our excellent "quality of life" (true) and relatively low cost of living (also true), affordable housing, etc.  But as I see it they could quickly turn all those categories around for the worst.  

Our housing costs have gone up 10% in the past 12 months.  The next 12 months could make that look tame.  If these huge relocations were spread out over time they could all be easily absorbed, but all at once, I'm afraid they might overwhelm us.

Your sense of civic pride gets all "chest poundie", but your brain says proceed with caution.  Oh well, I guess it's a problem many parts of the country would like to have.

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This, however, I know exactly what to think of:

Two Giant Banks, Seen as Immune, Become Targets

 

'Bout time:   It seems the Feds are finally getting serious about slapping the big banks down after letting them run roughshod over us for a decade. 

 

What the country's best dressed bankers will soon be wearing?

Some have been laundering money for Iran and others, while others have been setting up tax dodges for wealthy Americans looking to skip out on their taxes.  And many more are still hiding under their desks, waiting to see how long they'll be locked up*.

 

Yes!  The Feds are actually going after them on criminal charges, and not for just some hand-slap paltry fines.  Good!

 

The banks that exist today are NOT like the banks that worked so well for so long and made America great.  Maybe....just maybe they're about to learn they're not "too big to jail".  Now if we could just break them up into parts not "too big to fail".

  

Without the taxpayers safety net (read: blank check) maybe they'll learn to make prudent loans to prudent borrowers again.

 

S

 

* I doubt anyone will personally be put behind bars. Darn! 

 

 

And the Merry-Go-Round keeps turning....

Sadly, I wasn't shocked when I read in the paper this morning that Caterpillar Corp, the big heavy equipment manufacturer, has been dodging paying its US taxes.  Over the past 13 years they saved $2.4B  in taxes by funneling a lucrative portion of their business through a sham division set up in Switzerland.

It seems they paid PricewaterhouseCoopers $55M to show them how to slink their way around US tax laws.  I won't bore you with the details, but just know that it was all smoke and mirrors.  But it was all (apparently) legal.  And there's my complaint.  Businesses are paid to maximize profits and minimize taxes.  It's Congress, which enabled these shenanigans, that is supposed to represent US!

But big companies, aided by an army of lobbyists, own Congress, and it's Congress that writes the rules.  Want a unique tax break, a special deduction, permission to avoid taxes by something like....oh, I dunno....setting up a sham division in Switzerland?  A few quiet campaign contributions and your wish can come true.

So the Treasury gives up $2.4B here, $3B there, on and on, and to paraphrase the comical former Senator Everett Dirksen, "Before long you're talking real money." And this, boys and girls, is half of the reason we have the horrible government deficit we do.  

Trouble is, 100% of the effort to cut said deficit seems to involve cutting spending, some of it from places that don't need to be cut.  Why isn't 50% of our deficit cutting effort focused on stopping these sham tax dodges that result from all the Swiss cheese loopholes in our tax laws?

We need a clean-sheet-of-paper tax code re-write!  If you have a chance to talk to a congressional candidate, ask them if they will sponsor a bill to completely re-write our tax laws.  Accept only a "yes" or "no" answer.  If they try to lay a bunch of flowery BS on you (and they will), ask them again for a straight yes or no answer.  And record their answer and put it on YouTube.

Unfortunately, it seems the only way for an up-and-coming politician to gain the nomination of their party and tap in to the financial contributions that will enable them to get elected (and re-elected) is to show they are a "team player", that they will go along with what their senior party elders tell them to do.  

Like granting unique tax breaks, special deductions, and permission to avoid taxes by something like....oh, I dunno....setting up a sham division in Switzerland.

*sigh*

S

"Fight Organized Crime....Abolish The IRS"

That bumper sticker always made me chuckle.

Now they say the IRS has targeted Tea Party groups trying to set up as non-profit organizations, technically  known as 501(c)3 organizations after the IRS chapter/verse that defines them.  They want to get the IRS out of politics.

I say fair enough.  Why don't we take it a step farther and get politics out of 501(c)3's?  Did you know there are one million non-profit organizations on file with the gubment?  And that doesn't count the other half million with revenues of $25,000 or less that aren't required to jump through all the hoops.  And none, of course, pay taxes.

This all sounds like one giant tax dodge to me.  Sure, I can see the Cancer Society, Heart Association, food banks, etc. as legitimate non-profit organizations doing work for the public good.  But the Tea Party?  Or MoveOn.org?  If some rich guy wants to contribute to a political group, fine with me, but don't ask me to subsidize his bribe generosity.  This is essentially what's happening when a group gets 501(c)3 status.  

I say we need to severely tighten up the IRS definition of "non-profit".  In too many cases it's little more than a legal tax avoidance scam.  I could live like "The Donald" if I had just a fraction of what the IRS leaves on the table.

Put me in charge for a few months and I promise our tax coffers will soon be overflowing.  (Well....less low.)  And there will be a lot of formerly highly paid non-profit CEO's crying in their domestic beers.

S