We’re taking a break – my wife and I – so no blog next week from yours truly. (Aw, shucks – you didn’t have to say that.) We’re cruising to watch glaciers calving and whales doing whatever they do, where it’s sunny 24/7 – if it’s not raining, or snowing.
We were shopping for gloves and such when it occurred to me (shopping drives me crazy) that corporations pay almost no income taxes – compared with their contributions before WWII. In those days, my dad complained, corporations paid nearly a third of all the taxes collected by Uncle Sam. They’re down to paying less than 10 percent these days.
Who let corporations off the hook, and why? Corporations are said to be like people, sort of. Not my kind of people. Today, individual Americans, ordinary people, pay 90 percent of the government’s tax revenues! Didn’t President Obama promise to make corporations pay their fair share? Even Senator McCain complains – I wish my dad could hear him.
Some conservatives want to get rid of corporate taxes altogether. Now there’s an idea – let the proletariat pay for everything: roads and highways, parks and wilderness areas, public education, any wars that come along, biological research – why should corporations have to contribute? Let’s rely on corporate greed to solve our problems. We’ll just go to church and pray for Google, Apple, Verizon, and the elite leaders of industry, banking, and Wall Street who are too big to fail – and too smart to pay taxes.
I shouldn’t complain. It’s my own fault, really – I’m not rich. If I had spent more time accumulating money instead of wasting time in the Air Force, going to college, getting married, buying a house, trying to start-up a business, and raising a really great kid … I could have shipped my savings offshore, paid my employees peanuts, and lied my head off to the IRS. What was I thinking?
I could be shopping for stocks and bonds … I could be a corporation!
See y’all.
