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sweatshops have been a known problem for almost 40 years.

If you define "problem" as multinationals paying 40% higher in average wages than local firms, and the differential is higher in low-income countries of Asia and Latin America.

But now with robots allowing manufacturing to return to developed countries, workers in developing countries do not have to work in "sweatshops" and can return to earning under $1 day toiling in the heat of summer and cold of winter wading through rice paddies just barely living above subsistence.

When I googled ' "corporate tax rates", usa, graph ' I, too, got the Wikipedia that makes it look like the USA has very high corporate tax rates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world

But I also got this link, a discussion of statutory tax rates, vs effective tax rates (after all the deductions and other tax reliefs had been subtracted): http://seekingalpha.com/article/92485-statutory-vs-effective-tax-rates ...which concludes that "the US is a corporate tax haven". That may be going a little overboard the other way, because what I found telling was this comparison of how much of the total tax income of various countries came from corporate tax (the rest from personal incomes taxes, basically):

http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/2229/Corporate_tax_warning.html ...which shows the US to be about median for developed countries. (Looks like Germany is the real tax haven.)

By the way, terrific comedy about how if Microsoft won't move, somebody else will start up a company with maybe over 10 percent monetary advantage due to lower taxes elsewhere, and thereby out-compete MS from the market. "...you can't stop the free market". Dude, the entire anti-trust action was about how Microsoft is no longer subject to the free market. Hell, you can produce superior products and give them away for FREE and not out-compete Microsoft. So some little tax break isn't going to make a tiny bit of difference to their market share.

Microsoft probably wouldn't be where it is today if it had started in another country. They got access to a large, young, very educated workforce and were able to sell to the world's largest government and corporations as a local, patriotic choice. Try, just try, selling the US military in particular, any foreign-based product. Alas, it takes a lot of tax money to support that that large government, that huge, well-funded military, provide the schools and superhighways that train and transport that smart workforce. People who imagine taxes as a national drain rather than a national investment (generally by cherry-picking the least-defensible 1% of budget items as pork while ignoring the 99% that goes to very defensible schools, roads, etc) always imagine that the circumstances of their success are some kind of natural resource that was "just there". No, those circumstances were expensively built and expensively maintained, and recently, that's been done with borrowed money, and it's time to pay up.

People like Ballmer, of course, know all this. Ballmer is bluffing. Call him on it.

http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/77/The_income_taxes_people_really_pay.html

"The average production worker in Sweden pays no income tax at all to the central government."

The personal exemption is a tenth higher that the average income. So unless you are doing better than most your taxes are in the form of sales tax and other flat taxes or fixed fees.

Taxes should only be used for things that are better done by a government than a business (like defense, legislation, judicial, etc.). Government is not optimal for all areas of life.

If taxes are considered stealing, such "big" government has failed to prove accountability and voters should vote.

btw, here's a sorted list of "stealing" levels just fyi: http://www.oecdobserver.org/images//1313.photo.jpg

You stated we are not capable of mega engineering. This is false. We are capable of scaling our energy collection out as far as we need with technology that is over 30 years old, and with that capacity, we can pursue whatever mega engineering projects we want.

The problem is that we can't feasibly remove the CO2 and other greenhouse gases, GHGs, we have already released no matter how much the energy capacity is expanded. We could try to scrub the atmosphere but how much energy would it require to reduce GHGs?

Our biggest threats are population control and wasteful use of our non-renewable resources.

A way to reduce, er control, the population is to increase education, equality, and economic opportunities. As education and gender equality improve people's economic opportunities improve as well and the more people earn the less they reproduce, ie the birth rate declines. In the "Western World" or First World if it wasn't for immigration the population would be declining.

Good, that works for us too. BTW, I hope you enjoy those 61% tax brackets.

Clearly you have never been to France the country practically shuts down over the summer - well everywhere except the beaches!

Their thirty-five hour week isn't a critisism of course, more something for us Brits to aspire too! ;-)

...ntry, but they do not know how good they live as some of them have also never go out..

Agreed. For all it's faults - of which there are many - this is still a "green and pleasant land". The fact that the main political parties are generally hard to tell apart indicates to me that we really don't have any significant problems, we like to pretend we do (the usual mantra, Schools, Hospitals etc), but really lets get a sense of perspective!

What is Sweden's secret? Progressive taxation. Average production workers in Sweden pay no income tax to their central government because the bottom bracket starts about a tenth above the average production worker's salary. The Swedish tax rate is typically about 57% of income earned above that base. Sweden only has two central government tax brackets: 0% and 25%, so their "federal" taxes are actually closer to the "flat tax" than ours are in the U.S. The additional 32% or so varies by local jurisdiction, as does the income bracket at which it takes effect.

The problem in the U.S. is that top-bracket income earners (including corporations, medium-sized businesses, and most of the top 1% rich, excluding some of the prominent top rich in the media spotlight) pay a huge amount of money in order to help elect government officials who will keep the top tax brackets low. This effectivly "saves" them an even larger amount of money, except for the externalities like crime rate, debt, and property values. We used to have regulations providing equal air time for federal candidates, but Reagan's FCC did away with those, so most candidates today, even most nationally prominent Democrats, sure know which side of their bread is buttered on. There are some notable exceptions, however.