NOW WATCH THE BANKSTER-OWNED GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY
PARTNER (again) WITH TRUMP TO DEFEAT ANY BILL THAT WOULD CURTAIL WALL STREET’S
PLUNDER
In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Senator
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and
middle-class Americans.
Elizabeth
Warren drafting legislation to reverse ‘mega-mergers’
Seth Wenig / Associated Press
By ERIC NEWCOMER AND JOSHUA BRUSTEINBLOOMBERG
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is drafting a bill that
would call on regulators to retroactively review about two decades of “mega
mergers” and ban such deals going forward.
Warren’s staff recently circulated a proposal for sweeping
anti-monopoly legislation, which would deliver on a presidential campaign
promise to check the power of Big Tech and other industries. Although the
Trump administration is currently exploring their own antitrust probes, the
proposal is likely to face resistance from lawmakers.
According to a draft of the bill reviewed by Bloomberg, the
proposal would expand antitrust law beyond the so-called consumer welfare
standard, an approach that has driven antitrust policy since the 1970s. Under
the current framework, the federal government evaluates mergers primarily based
on potential harm to consumers through higher prices or decreased quality. The
new bill would direct the government to also consider the impact on
entrepreneurs, innovation, privacy and workers.
Warren’s bill, tentatively titled the Anti-Monopoly and
Competition Restoration Act, would also ban non-compete and no-poaching
agreements for workers and protect the rights of gig economy workers, such as
drivers for Uber Technologies Inc., to organize.
A draft of Warren’s bill was included in an email Monday
from Spencer Waller, the director of the Institute for Consumer Antitrust
Studies at Loyola University Chicago. Waller urged fellow academics to sign a
petition supporting it. He said Warren was working on the bill with Rep. David
Cicilline (D-R.I.), the most prominent voice on antitrust issues in the House.
Waller declined to comment on the email.
Representatives for Cicilline and Warren declined to
comment. The existence of the bill and Warren’s support of it were reported
earlier this week by the technology publication the Information.
In Washington, there is some support across the political
spectrum for increased antitrust scrutiny of large technology companies.
Warren positioned herself as a leader on the issue this year while campaigning
on a plan to break up Big Tech. She has repeatedly called for unwinding
Facebook Inc.’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, along with Google’s
purchase of YouTube and advertising platform DoubleClick.
It’s not clear when a bill would be introduced or whether it
would move forward in its current form. Cicilline has said he would not
introduce antitrust legislation until he concludes an antitrust investigation
for the House Judiciary Committee in early 2020.
Amy Klobuchar, a senator from Minnesota who’s also vying for
the Democratic nomination, has pushed legislation covering similar ground.
Klobuchar plans to introduce additional antitrust legislation soon, according
to a person familiar with the matter who wasn’t authorized to discuss the plans
and asked not to be identified.
Any proposal would face significant hurdles to becoming
law, and Warren’s version could be particularly problematic because it promotes
the idea that antitrust enforcement is equivalent to being against big
business, said Barak Orbach, a law professor at the University of Arizona who
received a draft of the bill. “The way I read it is that Elizabeth Warren is
trying to make a political statement in the course of her campaign,” Orbach said.
“It’s likely to have negative effects on antitrust enforcement, so I just don’t
see the upside other than for the campaign.”
The bill proposes a ban on mergers in which one company has
annual revenue of more $40 billion, or in which both companies have sales
exceeding $15 billion, except under certain exceptions, such as when a company
is in immediate danger of insolvency. That would seemingly put a freeze on many
acquisitions for Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., Facebook, Microsoft Corp. and
dozens of other companies. The bill would also place new limitations on smaller
mergers.
Chris Sagers, a law professor at Cleveland State University,
said the proposal would serve as an effective check on corporate power. “I
don’t think you’ll have new antitrust policy until Congress says the courts
have incorrectly interpreted the statutes,” he said. “Someone has to do what
Elizabeth Warren is doing.”
(Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic
presidential nomination. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg
LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
FNC’s
Carlson Rips ‘Vicious’ Billionaire Paul Singer for ‘Vulture Capitalism’ Tactics
JEFF POOR
During his Tuesday broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Tucker
Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson took a highly critical look at
billionaire hedge fund manager and political financier Paul Singer’s practices,
which have made him a wealthy man.
Carlson reminded viewers of the circumstances throughout the
country in an age where the industrial sector thrived but now barely resembles
that era.
What has led to that, according to the Fox News host, is, in
part, Singer’s practice of purchasing distressed companies, remaking them in a
way that includes outsourcing the labor and selling them at a profit but at the
expense of a company’s original employees.
“[T]he model is ruthless economic efficiency: Buy a
distressed company, outsource the jobs, liquidate the valuable assets, fire
middle management, and once the smoke has cleared, dump what remains to the
highest bidder, often in Asia,” Carlson explained. “It has happened around the
country. It has made a small number of people phenomenally rich. One of them is
a New York-based hedge fund manager called Paul Singer, who, according to
Forbes, has amassed a personal fortune of more than $3 billion.”
Carlson offered automotive parts supplier Delphi as an
example.
“During the last financial crisis, a consortium of
hedge
funds, including Singer’s Elliott
Management, purchased Delphi,” he said. “With
Singer and the other funds at the helm, the
company took billions of dollars in
government
bailouts. Obama’s auto-czar compared the tactics
to extortion. Once
they had the bailout money, the
funds moved most of Delphi’s jobs overseas, and
then either cut retiree pensions entirely or shifted
the costs to taxpayers.”
“With lighter financial commitments at home and cheap
factories abroad, Delphi’s stock soared,” he continued. “According to
investigative reporter Greg Palast, of the 29 Delphi plants in operation when
the hedge funds started buying Delphi debt, only four were still operating in
the United States by 2012. Tens of thousands of unionized and white-collar
workers lost their jobs. Paul Singer’s hedge fund cashed out for more than a
billion dollars.”
Another example that Carlson highlighted was Singer’s
involvement with outdoors retailer Cabela’s and how Singer’s practices
decimated the town of Sidney, NE.
“In October 2015, Singer’s hedge fund disclosed an 11% stake
in Cabela’s and set about pushing the board to sell the company,” he said. “Cabela’s management, fearing a long and
costly fight with Singer, announced it would look for a buyer. At the time,
Cabela’s was healthy. The company was posting nearly $2 billion a year in gross
profits, off $4 billion in revenue. There was no immediate need to sell. But
they did anyway. One year after Singer entered the equation, Bass Pro Shops
announced the purchase of Cabela’s. The company’s stock price surged. Within a
week, Singer cashed out. He’d bought the stock for $38 a share. He sold it for
$63. His hedge fund made at least $90 million upfront, and likely more over
time.”
But in Sidney, Nebraska, it was a very different story,”
Carlson continued. “The residents of Sidney didn’t get rich. Just the opposite.
Their community was destroyed. The town lost nearly 2,000 jobs. A heartbreakingly
familiar cascade began: people left, property values collapsed, and then people
couldn’t leave. They were trapped there. One of the last thriving small towns
in America went under. We recently sent two producers to Sidney, to survey the
wreckage and consider what happened. Our producers talked to more than a dozen
former Cabela’s employees. Almost all of them refused to speak on camera,
fearful of legal retribution from the famously vicious Paul Singer.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
Oligarchs
such as Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers and young
people could escape the control of both big-business parties and threaten the
capitalist system itself.
A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the
environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a
massive further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. His
personal wealth has more than tripled since he first became mayor in January of
2002.
Billionaire
ex-NYC Mayor Bloomberg takes steps to run for Democratic nomination
The New York Times reported Thursday that Michael Bloomberg,
the billionaire ex-mayor of New York, is taking steps toward running for the
Democratic Party 2020 presidential nomination.
The newspaper cited Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson as saying:
“Mike believes that Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to our
nation. We need to finish the job and ensure that Trump is defeated—but Mike is
increasingly concerned that the current field of candidates is not well
positioned to do that.”
Bloomberg reportedly filed on Friday to run in the March 3
Alabama Democratic primary. That contest, one of 14 taking place on what is
known as “Super Tuesday,” has the earliest filing deadline of any state
primary. The next deadline is November 13 for the New Hampshire primary, which
is the second contest in the primary season, following the Iowa caucuses in
February.
Press reports say Bloomberg has not made a final decision on
whether he will join the current field of 16 Democratic aspirants. But his move
marks a reversal of statements he made last March ruling out a presidential
bid.
As a practical matter, there appears to be little chance of
Bloomberg winning the nomination for himself. He would not appear in any debate
because his campaign would be entirely self-financed and therefore would not
meet the requirement of 200,000-plus individual donors to qualify. Press
reports indicate that he would not seriously compete in the four initial
contests in February—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina—where he
has no campaign organization and voting begins in less than 90 days.
But he could run in the March 3–17 primaries, which will
choose nearly two-thirds of the total number of delegates to the Democratic
National Convention. Using his vast fortune for campaign advertising, he could
possibly win a sufficient number of delegates to give him leverage in the event
of a negotiated or brokered nomination. He would use it to block the nomination
of Warren or Sanders.
The very fact that a potential run by a multibillionaire
ex-politician garners immediate media attention and is instantly seen as
credible testifies to the immense power exercised by the corporate-financial
aristocracy over American politics.
Whether or not he decides to run,
Bloomberg’s move is clearly calculated to shift the Democratic campaign further
to the right.
The statement issued by Wolfson is an expression of
skepticism toward the prospects of the current leading “centrist” in the Democratic
field, former Vice President Joe Biden. While Biden still holds a lead over
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in national polls, his margin has shrunk
and he is faltering in the initial primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden’s slump and the rise of Warren, who is competing with
Sanders to capture growing anti-capitalist sentiment on the basis of demagogic
promises and channel it back behind the Democratic Party, is increasing the
fears within the ruling elite of a rising tide of working-class struggle.
Oligarchs such as Bloomberg are petrified that social opposition among workers
and young people could escape the control of both big-business parties and
threaten the capitalist system itself.
It is not Warren or Sanders who concern figures such as
Bloomberg, Bill Gates and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, all of whom have attacked
calls by the two candidates for tax increases on multimillionaires and
billionaires. These long-time Democratic Party operatives are known quantities
with solid records in defense of the profit system and the global interests of
US imperialism. Rather, the oligarchs fear the rising wave of strikes and
protests in the US and internationally that these “left”-talking Democrats are
seeking to contain and dissipate.
They see in proposals for social reforms paid for by
increased taxes on the rich an intolerable infringement on their prerogatives.
They also see a danger of fueling popular expectations and encouraging social
unrest. They want to block any expression in the 2020 elections of popular
anger over social inequality.
Particularly since Warren released her “Medicare for all”
plan last Friday, the outpouring of negative comments and warnings from
corporate executives and media pundits has increased. In the plan, which Warren
is well aware will never be passed by either big-business party, she calls for
a 6 percent tax on all wealth over $1 billion to fund a government-paid and
government-run universal health insurance program.
Dimon complained on the financial cable channel CNBC this
week that Warren “uses some pretty harsh words” about the rich, which “some
would say vilifies successful people.”
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of
$108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington
Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal
and other proposed reforms) said Wednesday, “I do think if you tax too much you
do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do
innovative companies—I do think you risk that.”
Last January, Bloomberg, whose net worth is $53 billion, said
an earlier proposal by Warren to tax wealth above $50 million at two percent
was “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s antisocialist propaganda, he
warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity”
and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”
New York Times columnist and multimillionaire financier
Steven Rattner published an op-ed piece this week headlined “The Warren Way Is
the Wrong Way.” Defending the “free enterprise system,” he wrote: “Thanks for
providing us, Ms. Warren, with yet more evidence that a Warren presidency is a
terrifying prospect, one brought closer by your surge in the polls… Many of
America’s global champions, like banks and tech giants, would be dismembered.
Private equity, which plays a useful role in driving business efficiency, would
be effectively eliminated.”
Rattner was appointed by Obama to head his Auto Task Force in
2009, where he imposed an across-the-board 50 percent pay cut on new-hires at
GM and Chrysler, along with thousands of layoffs and cuts in retiree benefits.
He was forced to leave his post on the auto panel when he was cited on
corruption charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bloomberg’s political career has demonstrated the fundamental
identity between the two corporate-controlled parties that comprise the US
two-party system. He has changed parties almost like he changes business suits.
Bloomberg was a Democrat until 2001, when he reregistered as
a Republican to run for mayor of New York City because he could not win the
Democratic primary. He was reelected as a Republican in 2005, reregistered as
an independent in 2007, and won reelection in 2009, in a campaign in which he
spent $70 million, a staggering sum for a mayoral race. He remained an
independent until October 2018, when he reregistered as a Democrat, although he
endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and had a primetime speaking role at the
Democratic National Convention.
Besides spending more than $200 million of his own money to
get elected three times in New York, he poured over $110 million into the 2018
Democratic campaign to help the Democrats take control of the House of
Representatives, and he has pledged to spend $500 million in the 2020
elections.
A liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion and the
environment, as mayor of New York, the home of Wall Street, Bloomberg oversaw a
massive further redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. His
personal wealth has more than tripled since he first became mayor in January of
2002.
Bloomberg viciously attacked city workers, imposing a
five-year wage freeze after the 2008 financial crisis, demanding cuts in
pensions and health care for retirees, eliminating more than 6,000 teaching
positions, closing 20 fire companies and slashing youth programs, homeless
services, elder-care programs, continuing education programs, libraries and
cultural organizations.
He continued the brutal “stop and frisk” policing policy
imposed by his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, and imposed concessions on school
bus strikers who struck in 2013.
This is the man praised by Christopher Hahn, a former aide to
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, on Fox News’ “The Ingraham
Angle” program. Hahn, now a “liberal” radio host, called Bloomberg an
“excellent mayor for the city of New York,” and added that he “might be just
what the doctor ordered to shake this thing up right now.”
Watchdog
Accuses Silicon Valley Giants of Dodging $100 Billion in Taxes
AFP Photo/Alex Wong
LUCAS NOLAN
Six of the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe have
been accused of dodging $100 billion in taxes by a British tax watchdog.
CNBC reports that six major Silicon Valley tech firms have
been accused of having a combined “tax gap” of $100 billion over the past ten
years according to an analysis by a British tax organization. Fair Tax Mark, a
British organization that certifies businesses for proper tax conduct, examined
the global tax payments of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and
Microsoft from 2010 to 2019.
The research analyzed the company’s 10-K filings submitted to
the U.S. government by the tech giants. Fair Tax Mark looked at tax provisions,
which is the amount that companies set aside in their financial reports to pay
taxes, and compared these with the amount of money that the companies actually
paid to the government, called cash taxes. Researchers found that over the past
ten years, the gap between the tax provision set out by the tech firms and the
taxes they actually paid was approximately $100.2 billion.
The report also claimed that the profits were “shifted to tax
havens, especially Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.” The
researchers noted that most of the tax shortfall “almost certainly arose
outside the United States,” with tax charges from countries outside the United
States coming to 8.4 percent of the companies’ profits overseas.
Paul Monaghan, CEO of Fair Tax Mark, discussed the report
with CNBC stating: “The amount of tax being paid by these businesses is $100
billion less than reported in their accounts.” The report noted that Amazon was
the worst offender of the six tech firms. The report alleged that Amazon paid
$3.4 billion in income taxes since 2010, noting that the cash tax paid by
Amazon amounted to 12.7 percent of its profit for the decade despite the
corporate tax rate being set at 35 percent for seven of the past ten years.
President Donald Trump cut the corporate tax rate to 21 percent in 2017.
The report stated: “The company is growing its market
domination across the globe on the back of revenues that are largely untaxed
and can unfairly undercut local businesses that take a more responsible
approach.” A spokesperson for Amazon told CNBC in a statement:
Amazon represents about 1% of global retail, with larger
competitors everywhere we operate, and had a 24% effective tax rate on profits
from 2010-2018. Amazon is primarily a retailer where profit margins are low, so
comparisons to technology companies with operating profit margins of closer to
50% is not rational. Governments write the tax laws and Amazon is doing the
very thing they encourage companies to do — paying all taxes due while also
investing many billions in creating jobs and infrastructure. Coupled with low
margins, this investment will naturally result in a lower cash tax rate.
Facebook had the second-biggest tax gap with the cash tax it
paid representing 10.2 percent of the profit it made over the decade. A
spokesperson for Facebook told CNBC:
In 2018 we paid $3.8 billion in corporation tax globally and
our effective tax rate over the last five years is more than 20%. Under current
rules we pay the vast majority of the tax we owe in the U.S. as that is where
the bulk of our functions, assets and risks are located. Ultimately these are
decisions for governments and we support the OECD process which is looking at
new international tax rules for the digital economy.
Google ranked third with its taxes amounting to 15.8 percent
of its profits with its foreign tax charge amounting to 7.1 percent. A Google
spokesperson told CNBC that the report form Fair Tax Mark “ignores the reality
of today’s complicated international tax system and distorts the facts
documented in our regulatory filings.”
The company added: “Like other multinational companies, we
pay the vast majority — more than 80% — of our corporate income tax in our home
country. As we have said before, we strongly support the OECD’s work to end the
current uncertainty and develop new tax principles.”
Netflix ranked fourth in the list handing over 15.8 percent
of its profit while Apple ranked fifth with a tax rate of 17.1 percent. Apple
told CNBC in a statement:
As the largest taxpayer in the world, we know the important
role tax payments play in society. We pay all that we owe according to tax laws
and local customs wherever we operate, and since 2008 Apple’s corporate taxes
alone have totaled over $100 billion.
Microsoft paid the highest tax rate of 16.8 percent with a
spokesperson telling CNBC: “Microsoft is fully compliant with all local laws
and regulations in every country in which we operate. We serve customers in
countries all over the world and our tax structure reflects that global
footprint.”
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues
of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or
email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
Is Corporate
America Selling Out Our Country?
Tucker
Carlson and Neil Patel
Within hours of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt
began summoning the heads of American industry to Washington. Roosevelt knew
the country would need an unprecedented buildup of planes, ships, and other war
materiel. Without hesitation, American companies responded. Ford, Packard,
Chrysler, 3M, Hormel, General Mills, Pillsbury, Cargill, Boeing, and many other
major U.S. companies gave their all to the war effort. At Roosevelt's request,
the president of General Motors even left his company to oversee the war
production effort as a lieutenant general in the U.S. Army. Roosevelt's initial
request for 50,000 new airplanes per year was openly mocked by the Germans as
outlandishly high and impossible to achieve. But the mighty U.S. industrial
base roared to life and pulled it off. By war's end, the United States was
producing 100,000 warplanes a year. U.S. industry literally transformed itself
to save our country. It's fair to wonder if our current CEOs would do the same.
Would American companies in a new globalized economy drop
everything for their country? Do American companies even consider themselves
American anymore? The Daily Caller News Foundation asked 19 of the biggest
names in corporate America if they saw themselves as "American"
companies. It shouldn't be a very hard question to answer. But 10 of the 19 --
including Amazon, Apple, Chevron and General Electric -- refused to answer
altogether. The others mostly gave weasel answers. Only General Motors and the
bank JPMorgan Chase were willing to clearly identify as American institutions.
And even with them, the actual record is cause for concern.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel brought this issue to
light recently when he accused Google of "seemingly treasonous"
behavior for cozying up to the communist Chinese government. Amazingly, Google
has been working on a censored search engine: Project Dragonfly, built for the
Chinese government and designed to keep the Chinese people from seeing the free
flow of information. At the same time, Google refused to work with the U.S.
military. Thiel suggested that the FBI and CIA should investigate Google, which
seems like a good place to start. More broadly, though, can we really call Google
an American company?
Google and many other U.S.-based companies have operations,
sales, and customers all over the world. They think of themselves globally.
They value the bottom line above all. A dollar made in China is the same as a
dollar made in America.
The question for America is whether this is sustainable.
Every big company has a Washington office dedicated to influencing U.S.
government policy and regulation. With our increasingly powerful government and
regulatory regime, it's smart for companies to do this, and there is nothing
wrong with it in theory. But now that corporate America is pushing Washington
for its often globalist positions instead of for policies that benefit
Americans, we may have a real crisis on our hands.
We're not talking about just a few corporate offices.
Washington is completely dominated by corporate America. Big companies fund the
influential trade associations all over Washington and hire lobbyists all over
Congress and the regulatory agencies. These lobbyists understand our
increasingly complex labyrinth of regulations. And they are often writing the
laws Congress enacts.
Think tanks are supposed to be independently analyzing and
commenting on our policies. But who do you think funds the think tanks in
Washington? Corporate America dominates in this sphere as well. When they want
a new law or to stop a law or regulation they don't like, these companies go
even further, hiring public relations firms and ad agencies to convince us of
their positions. All of this is a multibillion-dollar business.
Lately, when senators and representatives leave Congress,
they go to work for the corporate influence machine. Over two-thirds of the
congresspersons who retired or lost their seats this last election cycle is now
corporate lobbyists. That's a record level. A seat in Congress has become an
extended tryout for a high-paying corporate influence job.
All of this would be of less concern if corporate interests
still aligned with actual American interests, but those days seem to have ended
sometime between the great industrial ramp-up for World War II and Google's
recent siding with communist China over the U.S. military. Where does this
leave the American people?
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against
‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires
JOHN BINDER
The Republican Party
must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate
power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy,
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and
middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less
and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and
American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new
ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you
shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people
don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in
their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town …
they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give
their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to
kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and
big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has
happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other
sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business …
whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address.
[Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like
former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have
helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the
nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has
enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the
bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal
rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest
Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
How Would A Wealth Tax
Work?
Warren's two-cent wealth tax on people with over $50 million in
wealth is one of her signature policy issues, and one that draws big cheers on
the stump.
Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
A few weeks ago, Elizabeth Warren made huge news with her plan
to finance "Medicare for All." But as part of it, the Massachusetts
senator made a big change to one of her other major policy goals: she boosted
the size of the wealth tax she wants to impose on the very rich: The top rate
went from 3% to 6%, giving her trillions more dollars in theoretical revenue to
fund the sweeping program.
Warren popularized a wealth tax early this year, and now, she
and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are the chief proponents of it on the campaign
trail. We've compiled comprehensive information here on the basics of a wealth
tax:
Tracking The
Issues In The 2020 Election
What is a wealth tax?
It's an annual tax on the net wealth a person holds — so, their
assets minus their debts. Not just the income they bring in each year.
On the one hand, you can think of it as something like the
property taxes people pay on their homes, but applied to all their wealth above
a certain level. This is, in fact, a major way that Elizabeth Warren sells her
wealth tax in her stump speech.
But then, on the other hand, it would be a new type of tax for
the federal government to levy — property taxes are usually imposed at the
local level, and estate taxes, while on wealth, are only imposed at death.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren unveiled her wealth tax
proposal in January. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders followed suit in September.
That said,
candidates including Joe Biden, Cory Booker, and Julian Castro are proposing
other ways to tax wealthy Americans' assets, as the Wall Street Journal's
Richard Rubin explained in August. However, we're going to focus here
on those annual wealth taxes Sanders and Warren have proposed.
(One
additional fun fact: in 1999, Donald Trump proposed a one-time, 14.5% wealth tax
on all people with net worths of $10 million or more — or around $15.3 million
in today's dollars. That's a higher rate and a lower wealth threshold than
either Warren or Sanders are proposing... but then, it was also proposed as a
one-time tax.)
How much would I have to pay?
You most
likely wouldn't have to pay it. Sanders' tax would only affect people with
wealth of over $32 million, and Warren's tax would affect only people with $50
million and over.
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That means that this year, Sanders' plan would affect around
182,000 people, and Warren's plan would affect 70,000, according to estimates
from Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two economists who back a wealth tax and
did revenue estimates for Warren and Sanders' campaigns.
But if you
do happen to be a multimillionaire, how much you pay would differ between these
two plans. Warren's has two tax brackets: 2% for people with $50 million or
more in assets and 6% for assets above $1 billion. (Initially, Warren had
proposed a 3% tax for people with wealth of over $1 billion, but then she
bumped that to 6% when she released her plan to pay for single-payer health care.)
Sanders, meanwhile, has eight brackets. He would start at a 1%
tax on wealth over $32 million, and gradually bump up to 8% for wealth above
$10 billion.
How unequal is wealth
distribution in the U.S.?
Very. And proposing a wealth tax is the most aggressive way
these candidates are trying to address that.
Data from the Federal Reserve shows that the top 1% owned
nearly one-quarter of all U.S. household wealth 30 years ago...and now owns
nearly one-third. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of people have gone from 3.7% of
the wealth in 1989 to 1.9% today.
And indeed,
wealth inequality is so much bigger than income inequality. As of 2016, the median family income in the U.S. was nearly
$65,000 — not quite one-third of what the 90th percentile household had. But
the median family wealth was around one-twelfth of the 90th-percentile family,
with nearly $1.2 million. (The ratio for the 10th-percentile household to
90th-percentile is far more gaping — the 10th-percentile family has -$950 in
wealth.)
The racial wealth divides are particularly gaping. As of 2016,
the median white family held nearly five times the wealth of the median
Hispanic family and more than six times the median black family.
On top of that, wealth inequality tends to be self-reinforcing —
people make money off their wealth (via returns on whatever investments they've
made), giving themselves more wealth.
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In pitching
his wealth tax, Sanders emphasizes cutting billionaires down to size. As he told the New York Times, "I don't think that billionaires
should exist." (Warren has said she disagrees with this.)
And indeed, his top rate is 8% — which means it would be more
effective than Warren's top 6% rate at eroding billionaires' fortunes over
time.
The S&P
500's average return between 1957 and 2018 was around
8%, according to Investopedia — so an 8% wealth tax would wipe out that kind of
investement gain (whereas a 6% tax would vastly reduce it).
How do Americans feel about a
wealth tax?
A wealth tax
polls very well — including among Republicans. In July, a poll from the New York Times and Survey Monkey found that two-thirds of
all Americans, including 55% of Republicans, approved of a 2% wealth tax on all
people with wealth over $50 million.
As far as
how the people paying the tax would feel, opinions are split. On the one hand,
20 self-identified members of the top 0.1% in June published an open letter calling for a
"moderate" wealth tax.
But then, there are of course some wealthy Americans who are not
nearly as sanguine about this type of tax.
Perhaps most famously (or infamously, depending on how you look
at it), billionaire investor Leon Cooperman has been vocally opposed to
Warren's tax proposal.
"What
is wrong with billionaires? You can become a billionaire by developing products
and services that people will pay for," Cooperman told Politico. "I believe in a
progressive income tax and the rich paying more." But he added that this
is an attack on "the American dream."
Of course, opposition from rich Americans just reinforces
Warren's messaging, which she acknowledged when she retweeted a CNBC clip about
Wall Street titans opposing her candidacy.
"I'm Elizabeth Warren, and I approve this message,"
she wrote.
I'm Elizabeth Warren and I approve this
message. twitter.com/CNBC/status/11…
Would it bring
in the money that the candidates say it would?
Well, first
things first. Some tax experts argue that it would be
unconstitutional. So: it very well might not look like anything. (For their
part, Warren's office has released a series of letters from legal experts asserting
that such a tax would be constitutional.)
But. OK. Let's say it is passed and put into place. There is a
lot of debate about how realistic the campaigns' revenue estimates are. In
part, figuring out revenue estimations is a problem of imperfect information.
"Knowing how much wealth there is in the country is
something of a challenge because we don't have perfect data on that," says
Janet Holtzblatt, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
The handful of sources for this data — the Federal Reserve, the
Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans — are all imperfect in their own ways.
And on top of that, estimating revenue requires attempting to guess how much
the rich will succeed in evading such a tax.
Saez and Zucman cite evasion estimates as low as 1 to 3% in some
European countries. And then there was Switzerland, where a 1% wealth tax
lowered reported wealth by up to 34%.
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What would the rate be in the U.S.? Saez and Zucman averaged
these together to come up with a 15% "leakage rate" to score Warren's
proposal, and they used a similar rate, 16%, for Sanders' proposal.
But that may
well be very off. Indeed, it's one aspect of their estimates that former
Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the Wharton School's Natasha Sarin
criticizes in a Washington Post op-ed that said
Saez and Zucman's revenue estimates were far too high.
Without
getting too deep into the math here, the back and forth has emphasized just how difficult
it is to create good (and widely agreed-upon) estimates for such a massive
policy change.
How would the IRS even know how
much people's assets are worth?
This is another big question as to how well a wealth tax would
fare.
"The thing to remember is that really wealthy people don't
hold all their assets in easy-to-value areas like stocks and bonds," said
John Koskinen, former commissioner of the IRS. "A lot of them have artwork
that's worth a lot of money. A lot of them have investments in privately held
corporations or in investment vehicles that do not give regular
valuations."
This would
require substantially ramping up IRS resources, Koskinen says. The agency has seen its workforce shrink by nearly 16% between 2013 and 2018, and its budget
also has been cut considerably.
It would also require figuring out how exactly to calculate
those valuations, when the balances of bank accounts can vary over a year, not
to mention the fluctuating values of things like stocks and artwork.
These are not necessarily insurmountable hurdles, but they are
examples of the amount of regulatory and logistical work that would have to be
done to implement such a tax.
"It doesn't self execute as if people just file a sheet of
paper and then pay a tax," Koskinen said.
And then
there's the fact that the wealthy have massive arsenals for avoiding tax.
"The wealthy are different from us in that they have the
resources to hire the best lawyers," says Holtzblatt. She adds that the
higher the tax, the more avoidance there's likely to be. "You also see an
additional reduction for each 1% increase in the rate. And that's likely to
increase a ton because tax lawyers get more savvy. They get more
sophisticated."
The campaigns have their own ideas of how to keep avoidance in
check. The Sanders campaign has said it wants to create a "national wealth
registry and significant additional third party reporting requirements."
The campaign
also argued to NPR that the IRS already has tools in place to measure wealth
via the estate tax. This includes coming up with even difficult-to-calculate
valuations — for example, an Art Advisory Panel meets regularly to assess the
values of expensive artworks.
Warren's campaign likewise proposes "a significant increase
in the IRS enforcement budget," as well as a "minimum audit
rate" for wealthy taxpayers and an "exit tax" to discourage the
wealthy from expatriating.
Saez and Zucman have also proposed a number of enforcement
measures, including having financial institutions report wealth data to the
IRS, obtaining real estate values from local governments, and using state
databases to obtain the values of vehicles.
Has it worked elsewhere?
As of 1990, 12 OECD countries had wealth taxes in place. Now,
three do.
And this is
a statistic that wealth tax opponents often point to as evidence against wealth
taxes. There were a few reasons why these countries repealed these taxes, as
NPR's Greg Rosalsky reported in March: they were tough to
enforce, they led to rich people fleeing the country, and they didn't bring in
a lot of revenue.
But then, the campaigns have their proposals for increased
enforcement. As Warren told Rosalsky, "I specifically designed this
proposal to account for lessons learned from wealth taxes in other
countries."
And unlike the wealth taxes in several European countries, the
thresholds for Warren and Sanders' taxes start in the tens of millions, meaning
they'd only be imposed on the richest of the rich.
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