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Microsoft Pushes For Public Education Funding While Avoiding State Taxes
theodp writes: After stressing how important the funding of Washington State education — particularly CS Ed — is to Microsoft, company general counsel Brad Smith encountered one of those awkward interview moments (audio at 28:25). GeekWire Radio: "So, would you ever consider ending that practice [ducking WA taxes by routing software licensing royalties through Nevada-based Microsoft Licensing, GP] in Nevada [to help improve WA education]?" Smith: "I think there are better ways for us to address the state's needs than that kind of step." Back in 2010, Smith, Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft Corporation joined forces to defeat Proposition I-1098, apparently deciding there were better ways to address the state's needs than a progressive income tax.
Everyone loves taxes when it is someone else paying them.
What do you can it when you put the costs of doing business off onto anyone and everyone else?
Profit!
What do you think they study in MBA school, civics?
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
“In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.”
Naomi Klein
Google pushesf for Public Education Funding While Avoiding Taxes
Apple pushes for Public Education Funding While Avoiding Taxes
Goldman Sachs pushes For Public Education Funding While Avoiding Taxes
ExxonMobil pushes For Public Education Funding While Avoiding Taxes
Koch Brothers pushes For Public Education Funding While Avoiding Taxes.
etc...
I'm all for capitalism but American capitalism was never about Rand's definition. It was about working hard and smart and being rewarded appropriately for your effort. It was OK to be rich as long as you earned it. What's currently going on though is a return to aristocracy rather than meritocracy.
People that richly benefited from our mixed economy are now going on to screw the rest of us because they are in a decision making role. Back in the 50s major CEOs made 50 times what an employee made. Today they are making 500 times. We even have companies like Warlmart that shamelessly depend on food stamps to subside their employees wages. At some point there is going to be major blow back if major corporation continue hoarding all the wealth by evading taxes and paying their employees crap. (as happened to Greece where their own government and elite screwed over their own countrymen)
In the Boyer lecture Rupert Murdoch delivered something like two years ago he was calling for increased state funding of education - this from a man who even changed nationality to avoid tax.
However it's a good idea even if the people who do not want to pay for it are pushing it.
That doesn't tell us anything about any sort of "ism", it just tells us the obvious that even when a monoculture, like selling oil, looks like the way to make everyone rich you can still get fucked over when the global market undercuts the cost you are spending to get it out of the ground.
It seems many people still do not understand that giving government more money cannot lead to better education or other social services. "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Low tax, small government, and more private schools and charter schools!
Please show me at least one example of a society at any time in history that survived for any length of time without some form of taxation. I think you will have to go back to just about the hunter-gatherer days to find an example. You can leave the country and revoke your citizenship if you want (Yes, we should make this easier to do), but in the mean time I suggest you propose a viable alternative before going all anarchist on us.
He makes sure that nobody else gets the big bucks, whenever possible, and he is accountable to the corporate entity, not to the society from which it resides.
Corporate interests care about the education of people that they need to yoke. Shareholders are the only citizens that really matter to a corporate charter.
Lawyer speak with forked tongue, as usual.
It's how the taxes are managed, not where the taxes comes from.
The budget system used by many states and countries is what leads to the waste of tax money.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Here is a useful resource consolidating the subisidies extorted by corporations.
http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker
Extracts from the Top 100 Parent Compnay list
1 Boeing $13.9 billion ... ... ... ...
2 Intel $5.9 billion
3 Alcoa $5.8 billion
19 Berkshire Hathaway $1.4 billion
22 Tesla Motors $1.3 billion
49 Goole $0.6 billion
77 Amazon $0.4 billion
Jobs Creators (TM) doing what the do best.
as you think. Most of the fed's budget is made up of taking care of old people (Medicare/Social Security) and the Military.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Just more personal "personal responsibility" politics that complete ignore reality. Goody. Where do I begin?
Not everyone has the chops to make it through college. Their brains don't work that way. But there's nothing for you in life if you don't make it through anymore thank to outsourcing and a complete lack of protection for local industry. How do these guys whose brains _can't_ comprehend AP credits galore compete with a guy in China working 70 hours a week breathing carcinogens?
Then there's the parents. Half the country goes out of it's way to keep people from opting out of parenthood in any other way than abstinence. Try being lower income and getting birth control or a vasectomy in Alabama and let me know how that works out for you. But once again, "Personal Responsibility" politics to the rescue! Ignore the fact that sex is a basic human drive on par with eating/breathing. Ignore the fact that when you're dirt poor with no hope it's hard to say no to the few sources of joy you have in your life. It's so much easier to look down on the little hussies and the dead beat dads, ain't it? It absolves you from the moral implications of abandoning 70%+ of the populace to their (very miserable) fate.
Schools can fix a _lot_ if we let them. Schools can and should act as parents when parents _can't_ because our God damned society didn't equip the parent with the skills and resources needed to do so. This doesn't mean schools _replace_ the parent either. It means they support the parent. This is what it means to have a society and civilization and not "I got mine, f**k you".
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/16/venezuela-now-has-toilet-paper-but-no-breast-implants.html.
Jokes aside, they did have shortages. The gov't saw the problem and reacted to it. Problem solved. You'll note no one's talking about their TP shortage anymore. See, that's kinda the idea behind socialism. You see a problem and then instead of waiting for some phantom invisible hand to solve it you actually _do_ something.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This idea is as ridiculous as the opposite extreme, which is imagining that giving the government more money will lead to better education and other social services.
You're both wrong.
I'll be the first to acknowledge that there are many organizational and institutional issues in government agencies which can blow through influxes of funds without any appreciable improvement in services. Yet it's equally true that there are government agencies and programs which run at efficiency levels which beggar private alternatives in comparison.
Tired aphorisms are never going to be an adequate substitute for an intelligent examination of the actual problems faced and a realistic appraisal of the various strengths and weakness offered by public and private approaches.
No relation to Happy Monkey
... "progressive" means "other people pay".