Where's the Presidential Debate on GM's Crony Capitalism? GM paid $904M more in taxes to China than the US in 2015








In the 1950s, General Motors President Charles Wilson famously said: “What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”

You might do a double take on that comment after you venture a look at GM’s current remarkably low tax bill.

A dive into GM’s filings with the Securities & Exchange Commission reveals that while the carmaker makes nearly all of its profits in the U.S., it pays virtually no U.S. federal, state or local taxes. The carmaker paid just $5 million in federal taxes last year, its SEC filings show. For its total federal, state and local bill, all in, it booked zero taxes, the filings show. Meantime, in 2015, GM paid more than $908 million in taxes to China, due to its profits from its joint ventures there, the filings show (see here:https://www.gm.com/content/dam/gm/en_us/english/Group4/InvestorsPDFDocuments/10-K.pdf).


GM’s historically low tax bill has flown under the radar screen in this presidential election season, when candidates from both parties offer ideas on reforming the corporate tax code. While the White House has railed against loopholes for big corporations, Democrat candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders continue to stump for getting companies to pay their “fair share,” and the GOP candidates largely push for lower tax rates.

Ask yourself, how come the candidates aren’t debating how the GM bailout is a textbook case of crony capitalism? A bailout in which taxpayers paid millions of dollars in “advisory” fees to companies like Evercore Partners to arrange, and given that GM is paying more in annual taxes in China than it is paying in the U.S.?

All in, GM got a $51 billion bailout, for which it refused to pay back some $10.5 billion to U.S. taxpayers, since that $10.5 billion hit arose from the Treasury Dept.’s losses on the automaker’s stock when it sold the shares in late 2013 (the bailout took the form of a loan and a 61% equity stake in GM by the Treasury Dept.).

The bailout was an “investment,” President Barack Obama insisted at the time, adding that it would cost taxpayers “not a dime.” The White House also held up the GM bailout as an example of how to battle China’s ascendancy in manufacturing, even though GM was mastering the art of outsourcing its new vehicle development and global export operations to the Middle Kingdom—to the point where it has been touting the fact it will be the first U.S. carmaker to actually import and sell one of its Chinese-made SUVs, the Buick Envision, back into the U.S. this year (http://www.wsj.com/articles/gm-to-import-chinese-made-buick-suv-1447349781?mg=id-wsj). It’s estimated China plans to increase production in China by 65% through 2020.

The reason for GM’s low tax bill: A big fat tax break in the bailout. This sweetheart deal from the Obama Administration let GM deduct $45.4 billion in costs going forward, against current year taxes, even though it discharged those sums in bankruptcy.

The $45.4 billion included things like its losses in the years before GM entered bankruptcy, costs for its pensions and post-retirement benefits, as well as costs for its equipment and factories. That means the actual cost of GM’s bailout to taxpayers is much higher, likely on the order of nearly $75 billion, tax experts note.

Update: After this report was published on Thursday, General Motors made the following statement to FOX Business Network: “GM adheres to all applicable federal, state and local tax laws and regulations. Since 2009, we have also made significant investments in the U.S. – totaling approximately $17.8 billion – which have created approximately 6,250 new jobs and secured another 20,700 positions.”


http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2016/03/31/wheres-presidential-debate-on-gms-crony-capitalism.html


 

Our concern over the size of government goes deeper than tax policy or the federal budget deficit. .  Size flows from the problems with representation:  representatives have an incentive to grow government because it enlarges the realm of their own power and gives them more resources from which to reward supporters. Ironically, Madison explicitly lobbied for largeness of population and landmass because he believed that largeness would protect America against the dangers of democracy.  With hindsight, we can see America’s largeness would call forth a large and powerful government to govern it.

Additionally, because of the disconnect between citizens and their government, it is easier to see that bigness is itself a more basic threat to self-government than any specific policy or tool.  The growth of government is a danger to self-government not because the state is on the verge of abrogating the constitution and installing a socialist junta, but because the raw size of the government crowds out private initiative and supplants opportunities for individual participation–and once individuals stop taking initiative, they will actually need a larger government to shore up an increasingly brittle civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville described this reciprocal cause-and-effect with remarkable and prophetic insight.  “The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help.  That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.”  Tocqueville believed the growth of government, even if for benign purposes, was threatening to liberty because it subtly undermined the cultural underpinnings of a healthy democracy.  “The morals and intelligence of a democratic people would be in as much danger as its commerce and industry if ever a government wholly usurped the place of private associations.”  Taking over retirement insurance, health care, the banking system or the auto industry isn’t just bad economics:  it teaches people an unhealthy dependence on the public doll, which may then force the government to continue running private industry as people forget the skill of doing it themselves.

But government cannot recreate by fiat the culture of democracy that its own programs undermine.  “A government, by itself, is equally incapable of refreshing the circulation of feelings and ideas among a great people, as it is of controlling every industrial undertaking.”  The effort itself takes government beyond its rightful sphere.  “Once it leaves the sphere of politics to launch out on this new track, it will, even without intending this, exercise an intolerable tyranny.  For a government can only dictate precise rules.  It imposes the sentiments and ideas which it favors, and it is never easy to tell the difference between its advice and its commands.”Once the government arrogates to itself the responsibility to nudge citizens into good behavior and foster good habits, it is acting less like a democratic government and more like a church—a church with armed police, tax collectors, and an army.

This is, Tocqueville believed, a new kind of oppression, different from the cruel tyrants of the ancient world.  Despotism in America “would be more widespread and milder; it would degrade men rather than torment them.” American tyranny will not rob and kill people.  It would be “absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle.”  It appears benign, but has the subtly dangerous effect of engendering a culture of dependency.  “It would resemble parental authority if, father-like, it tried to prepare its charges for a man’s life, but on the contrary, it only tried to keep them in perpetual childhood.”  It grows so large and powerful that it does not just push out the private sector; it pushes out individual agency.  “It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, makes rules for their testaments, and divides their inheritances.  Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?  Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties.”  It does not kill men, but it does kill their spirits.

The all-powerful nanny state does not stop at engendering a culture of dependency among individuals.  It seeks complete control over society through “administrative despotism.”

The all-powerful nanny state does not stop at engendering a culture of dependency among individuals.  It seeks complete control over society through “administrative despotism.”   Tocqueville feared the potential of the regulatory state to smother innovation and energy.  “It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd.  It does not break men’s wills, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.”  Big government undermines public-mindedness.  “Administrative centralization only serves to enervate the peoples that submit to it, because it constantly tends to diminish their civic spirit,” as Tocqueville put it.

[...]


http://thefederalist.com/2014/02/21/how-tocqueville-anticipated-our-culture-of-dependency/

W Bush's brain: Don't vote for TRUMP. Vote for [    ]








GOP Elites for the steal–
Karl Rove says a “fresh face” in Cleveland might just be the thing we need to turn this election around.
The Examiner reported:

    One thing that unites many supporters of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is the suspicion that party elders might try to hand the Republican presidential nomination to another candidate if neither Trump nor Cruz arrives in Cleveland with the 1,237 delegates required to win.

Important voices in the conservative world have voiced such concerns. Rush Limbaugh, for one, has speculated that the Republican establishment will try to “install whoever they want” at a contested convention. (Limbaugh guessed such a final choice might be Jeb Bush or Paul Ryan.)

Now Karl Rove, a man many view as the physical embodiment of the establishment, has poured gallons of fuel on the Republican fire. Appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Thursday evening, Rove said a “fresh face” chosen at the convention might turn the GOP’s fortunes around and win in November.

    If we have somebody who we think has, has been battle-tested, and has strong conservative principles and the ability to articulate them, and they are nominated at this convention, there will be a lot of acrimony from the people who were seeking the nomination. But if it’s somebody who has, you know, has those convictions that they can express in a compelling way, we could come out of the convention in relatively strong position … And a fresh face might be the thing that could give us a chance to turn this election and win in November against Hillary.


http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/04/gop-elite-karl-rove-says-fresh-face-convention-might-best-party/


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TRUMP is no friend of the GOPe

#TheChalkening: Old Row’s quest to make Liberals cringe


For the past week, wimpy college students at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia have been screaming bloody murder at the sight of Donald Trump’s name on their sidewalks. These students have gone before James Wagner, president of Emory, and petitioned to keep anything Donald Trump out of Emory. These students have asked for safe spaces and counseling for those ‘traumatized’ by these chalkings. In response, James Wagner wrote this on one of the sidewalks next to the anti-Trump petitioners:




























 

Why would one of them be targeted by them, if he is one of them?

GOP: 565M for negative campaign against TRUMP so far.


 

Good night and God bless

 

A lot of sci-fi authors are socialists.


Big fan of TNG but, again, this works because everything happens inside a tribe shaped as a starship. Everything needed can be replicated at will. Almost infinite magic energy. Money is banned. Wars gone. The only fat people are crazy looking aliens. The only goal is to explore forever with a crew and a mission and no family, or very little.

No room for the dreamers, or just a few. No room for a king or a prince. We have a captain, a supreme leader... Etc, etc...

Yep. TNG is the perfect definition of socialism in space.

 

 

The establishment will be on the DNA splicing table. And this is not just in the USA...

Etymology and meaning

Islam is a verbal noun originating from the triliteral root s-l-m which forms a large class of words mostly relating to concepts of wholeness, submission, safeness and peace.[25] In a religious context it means "voluntary submission to God".[26][27] Islām is the verbal noun of Form IV of the root, and means "submission" or "surrender". Muslim, the word for an adherent of Islam, is the active participle of the same verb form, and means "one who submits" or "one who surrenders". Believers demonstrate submission to God by serving God, following his commands, and rejecting polytheism. The word sometimes has distinct connotations in its various occurrences in the Qur'an. In some verses, there is stress on the quality of Islam as an internal conviction: "Whomsoever God desires to guide, He opens his heart to Islam."[28] Islam, by its own inner logic, embraces every possible facet of existence, for God has named Himself al-Muḥīṭ, the All-Embracing.[29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam#Etymology_and_meaning

Every single step, the attacks, crisis, faux pas, foxnews kelly -TRUMP wars, all are written in his book. He said this much himself. No secrets.

The hubris was for the GOPe not to read the book.


 

So capitalism builds the starship. The centralized computer in it will be in charge of all the multiple groups of mega pods with 150 humans in them...

 

Maybe you've just cracked the code for the law of diminishing returns for socialism: 150 humans.


 

Capitalism is about the maximizing the stuff you have, replacing it with better, smaller, cheaper, faster stuff.  By the time we'll be ready to hope from solar systems to solar systems, the cost per human will be as much as a round trip ticket on a greyhound bus.

By that time capitalism may not even be called capitalism anymore. But socialism is not compatible with star trekking because of its lack of vision in the future.

560+ millions of TRUMP hubris bashing, non stop. From the GOP. They are contemplating cheating him because they could not stop him. That tells me he is the real man for DNA level splicing of the system.

The nature of man should not be overlooked either. A lot of people have no respect for life or the planet. Some people are truly George Soros evil...

You still believe this thread is about terrorism or hurting other people. Check out post #2 made so long ago. No one is against the internet. A lot of people are against the message of some because they do not believe others can express themselves freely, even if they are physically 1000s of miles apart.

That is a problem my friend.