Microsoft Pushes For Public Education Funding While Avoiding State Taxes 173
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone loves taxes when it is someone else paying them.
Re:Everyone loves taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone loves taxes when it is someone else paying them.
I love taxes even when I'm paying them. What I don't love is people who want the benefits of public services and infrastructure (i.e. civilization) but don't want to pay for it.
Re:Everyone loves taxes (Score:5, Informative)
Same here. I am happy to pay my taxes, especially if it keeps the schools funded and keeps old folks out of the gutter. I am sick and tired of way too much of my taxes going to the military industrial complex while the rich multinational oil company's whose interests are served by such mis-adventures sit back and dodge their civic duty to pay their fare share like me.
Please increase my tax rate and properly fund our schools. I am tired of all the badly educated dumbasses, and it horrifies me to see kids only 10 years behind me have to rack up much more debt than I did to go to even a low end college.
Re:Everyone loves taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
Please increase my tax rate and properly fund our schools.
We have a political Q&A TV show here, and one time a politician was on there promoting his low tax policies because "no-one wants higher taxes" There was a collective groan from the studio audience and one guy responded, "I'll happily pay more tax if it means better services". This was followed by another, and another which drew applause. The general consensus is the "low tax" promise is purely a political gimmick. If you want quality health education and infrastructure services that most people want, then you have to pay for it, and you pay for it through taxes.
I paid over $70k in tax last year and will happily support higher tax rates dedicated to improving health, education and transport (not defence - $1Trillion on a illegal war? WTF? Those responsible for that should be hung for treason)
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That's not far from the situation in UK politics: The big three parties are all pledging to increase public spending in some highly popular areas, and all openly admit that this means higher taxes. They all propose to handle this by restructuring tax in order to make it more progressive: Rich-bashing is very popular here right now, and everyone is eager to vote for any politician who promises an end to tax-dodging millionaires and megacorps. The numbers don't really support this approach - there just aren't
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YOU can't be taken seriously because most of us out here know what $1TRILLION could have done for infrastructure and education. But no, we've got flag-waving racist imbeciles like you who want to piss it all away on odious shit, like killing brown people, and politicians who will pander to them and suck the cocks of the military industrial complex.
What you don't get is that you've been pick-pocketed to kill people.
Just shut the fuck up.
--
BMO
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Which is it? Are you trolling or an imbecile? My guess is a little of both but either appears obvious from your comment.
I'm not American so your comment about State an Federal is somewhat misguided. You probably feel pretty stupid right now eh bro?
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Please step away from the 50's and 60's, the "military-industrial" complex is way to small to effect the economy. DoD spend about $600 billion a year (of which about $300 Billion is spent on salaries, benefits, etc.) and that pales in comparison to the rest of the nearly $4 Trillion federal budget and won't budget the $17 Trillion U.S. economy. In fact, even large companies are doing all they can to get away from reliance on DoD because of uncertain funding and small ball funding.
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Please step away from the 50's and 60's, the "military-industrial" complex is way to small to effect the economy. DoD spend about $600 billion a year (of which about $300 Billion is spent on salaries, benefits, etc.) and that pales in comparison to the rest of the nearly $4 Trillion federal budget and won't budget the $17 Trillion U.S. economy. In fact, even large companies are doing all they can to get away from reliance on DoD because of uncertain funding and small ball funding.
According to Joe Stiglitz, who must know something about economics because he won a Nobel prize for it, the cost of the Iraq war was at least $3 trillion. That's $10,000 per capita. One of the big costs of the war turns out to be paying pensions and lifetime health care for military. http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
$3 trillion is about 2 years of all health care payments for everybody in the country. Medicare alone is about $500 billion a year, so the Iraq war cost 6 years of Medicare.
At one time I used to
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I love paying taxes when they go for public services and infrastructure (i.e. civilization), and not for bread and circuses giveaways that are simply an exercise in vote-buying slightly more subtle than packs of cigarettes.
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I love paying taxes when the country is run for the benefit of the people living there...
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Everyone loves the benefits of government-funded infrastructure if someone else is paying for them.
That's not entirely true. If you are in the top %0.001 of the population for income, you could feasibly pay for your own private infrastructure. You buy a plot of land, put a wall around it and hire a bunch of people to protect you, take care of you and cater to your needs. But your standard of living wouldn't actually be any objectively better than it is in contemporary America. In fact it would probably b
Re: Everyone loves taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Federal waste is a problem. Education funding is not part of that problem. In Washington State, two thirds of school funding comes from the state [wa.gov], and the tax Microsoft is ducking is state revenue. The Feds and bridges to nowhere have nothing to do with this, but MS is refusing to pay its share of the cost for services that it is demanding from the state. It would be one thing if they were using tax loopholes to avoid paying for something irrelevant to them, but the fact that they have their fingers in the pie and don't want to pay for it is as reprehensible as it gets.
Re: Everyone loves taxes (Score:1, Offtopic)
MS is paying to educate NV kids, where their license corp. is located. This is something current law allows, locating parts of your business anywhere you want - want to make that illegal?
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... but the fact that they have their fingers in the pie and don't want to pay for it is as reprehensible as it gets.
Microsoft is paying for a *LOT*--just via employees rather than corporate taxes. The benefits to Washington State from having MSFT located there are massive.
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Our world needs a unified tax code that applies evenly to everyone. No loopholes, no dodges. Everyone pays their share no matter how the company / individuals lives. My suggestion would be for the united states to make it simple. If you sell one product in the United states, you will pay US tax rates on your income. Period. If you have paid taxes somewhere else, you can deduct that amount from the amount you owe the US, but you cannot dodge paying those taxes somewhere. If a company doesn't like it, they are free to not sell products in the United states.
That is logical from several standpoints, but people's emotions prevent it.
People from a region want certain jobs, and they demand results from government leaders, not logic.
How can you get jobs? Entice businesses to move in or to form. How do you encourage business? Tax breaks and other government money. Money to entrepreneurs. Money to small businesses. Money to relocated or new offices.
In the short term that means results to the politicians, meaning re-election. In the short term it means more jobs.
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That's just it. Local government pays for things like schools, police, fire etc things that clearly a company needs to attract and protect people. Companies lobby like hell to allow them to build an office, get property tax exceptions, discounted power etc etc but ask them to pay for some of the infrastructure and services that their existence cause and they'll fight like hell.
There isn't nearly as much waste (Score:2)
Re: Everyone loves taxes (Score:4, Informative)
I went to public high school. I took advantage of what was offered and took calculus, AP credits galore, and more Latin than I learned in college. Sure, ninety percent of the students wasted their lives and learned nothing, but that wasn't the school's fault. The school sure as hell offered to teach those of us who had the personal responsibility and character not to fuck up for four years.
The problem isn't the schools but the population and the parents. Schools can't fix that. Schools can teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they can't teach sense, and they can't make the proverbial horse drink.
Re: Everyone loves taxes (Score:4)
The problem isn't the schools but the population and the parents. Schools can't fix that. Schools can teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they can't teach sense, and they can't make the proverbial horse drink.
I wish when I was faced with a difficult problem at work I could just say "my users can barely use their computer so its their fault they can't understand my UI". Or some other such nonsense.
Teachers do not have an easy job, but it is their job. The teaching profession needs to come up with real solutions to this, or outside organizations will. It is a very difficult problem so far more organizations will fail than succeed, but we will absolutely need to keep trying. And considering many countries have found ways to mitigate these problems it appears to be a very fixable problem. The funny thing is many of these countries just used good ideas they found from the US and simply instituted them on a national scale.
Oh boy, where do I start? (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
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I agree post secondary can be a waste for many maybe most people. There is a reason why people say I'm crazy smart for example, and pretty much by definition if I'm doing it that means the majority of people probably can't. The assumption that everyone has a right to go to university and that that will magically roll back the clock to the 60's when only a couple countries mattered is silly. That said there are a lot of skilled(ish) jobs that require some education to do (mechanics, plumbing, electrical, etc
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In this context, "Kids are being graduated from HS without knowing how to read and write." is grammatically correct. Admittedly, it may be more difficult than necessary to parse correctly; however, it is the teachers that are graduating the students from high school. So, kids are being graduated from high school [by their teachers] without knowing how to read and write. The use of the passive voice in this case puts extra emphasis that they were not deserving to receive a diploma.
Source: I was awarded my hi
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I constantly make stupid typos when posting, even after proof reading it. I put it down to seeing what I want to see, which is why I get somebody else to proof read something important. As I'm a pedant it really annoys me when I notice them after clicking submit.
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At the very least he didn't bother to proof read what he wrote.
He is not writing a dissertation, he is posting on an Internet forum. Even professional editors let errors into articles and books, so holding up people writing responses in their spare time to a higher standard than professional writers is a bit daft.
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Growing up i had a school teacher for a neighbor. She worked for a district other than where I went to school. Every year around June she would start passing out reams of paper, art supplies, pencils, markers, entire rolls of construction paper and all kinds of consumables used in school. The reason was because inventory counted against the next year's budget and leftovers would decrease the budget making them fight for more funding.
I didn't care at the time. Most people didn't care either that i know of.
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Re: Everyone loves taxes (Score:4, Informative)
You must have grown up a long time ago, in a school district far away. Today teachers have to buy their own supplies, out of their own personal funds.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new... [nydailynews.com]
Teachers spending $500 out of own pockets for kids' school supplies: union poll
Pens, paper — the basics — are what hard-pressed teachers are laying out their own cash for, says the union. City educrats, with a $24 billion education budget, say, 'hard-working teachers should not have to pay for supplies.'
BY Ben Chapman
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, March 2, 2014, 6:54 PM
City schools are so strapped that teachers are buying the basics with their own money, a teachers union poll released Monday shows.
On average, public school teachers will spend almost $500 of their own cash this year on pens, paper and other instructional materials.
Even with its $24 billion education budget, the city doesn't always deliver the basics, teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said.
"It was the teachers who were holding the schools together -- with the tape that they bought, it seems," Mulgrew said.
Roughly half of 800 randomly selected teachers who responded to the 2013 survey said that their schools do not have a curriculum for the state's tougher new Common Core standards.
Teachers also said the Internet connections in half of their schools were either too slow or too unreliable to support instruction.
City educrats said they were working to get teachers a cash infusion.
"Hard-working teachers should not have to pay for supplies out of their own pockets," said Department spokesman Marcus Liem.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story... [go.com]
Teachers Spend Own Money for Supplies
Aug. 31
By Maria F. Durand
Bruce Hogue is always looking for ways to make teaching science more interesting.
But the money he uses for the boxes of Cheerios, Bran Flakes and Total needed for one his experiments usually comes out of his pocket.
“As a science teacher, I have an official budget, but that is usually gone by the beginning of the year,” says Hogue, who works in suburban Denver. “When I want to do a science lab, I usually pay for it all on my own.”
Hogue is one of the millions of teachers across the country who are shelling out their own hard-earned cash to pay for books, pens, pencils and other basic supplies that schools have provided in the past.
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I grew up in the 70's and early 80's.
Of course I'm not sure what you are trying to get at with the rest of your post. Are you suggesting that every school district within the United States is government by the same loons as one or two school districts in a specific state? Do you realize that it is the state's job to fund schools and often the local political s
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Your second link is even more interesting. There you present a teacher who is crying that because he wants to run outside the box and accepted lesson plans, he has to purchase supplies to do so on his own. Sure it would be nice if everything was free, but it's sort of his own doing there.
What you call "outside the box" is known in affluent districts, and in other countries, as "teaching science."
I later met Soviet emigres who had better-equipped high schools than I did. No wonder they beat us into space. No wonder Sergei Brinn created Google.
Re: Everyone loves taxes (Score:2)
Re:Everyone loves taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, sure it is popular to claim that the government wastes money
It goes back to the Proxmire Golden Fleece Awards where a Senator from Wisconsin would claim to have identified horrendous wastes of money, while the state that he represented (Wisconsin) raked in billions of dollars in milk and cheese subsidies.
Between that and claims of 'Welfare Queens', the political right has played a distraction game to subvert programs like education while lining their pockets with money going to defense contractors and industries in their own backyards
FWIW, education is not a waste, neither are any number of programs that make for a healthier, smarter and more capable workforce. Companies like MS claim that they cannot find the 'right' resources here and that they have to bring in workers from overseas, while they simultaneously subvert the American worker by shortchanging us all when they find ways to avoid paying their taxes
Americans who are not billionaires or corporations need to stop buying into the BS propaganda and start demanding that companies pay their fair share
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Sure, sure it is popular to claim that the government wastes money It goes back to the Proxmire Golden Fleece Awards where a Senator from Wisconsin would claim to have identified horrendous wastes of money,
It's way older than that. In the early 1800s people were complaining that government was wasting money on canal infrastructure projects, digging canals so shipping could travel across the US. People complained that the canals could have been dug much more cheaply by the private sector.
Most of the arguments we have in politics go back all the way to the beginning in one form or another. It's kind of amazing.
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You mean the canals that today sit unused?
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Re:Everyone loves taxes (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean because they eventually were superseded by the railways system enabled by government-run eminent domain and land grant schemes, followed by the government-planned and funded Interstate highway system and then the advanced civil aviation system that itself could never have existed without extensive subsidization and support by the federal and state governments? You know, after the canals fostered American commerce and growth for well over a century?
Yeah, the government does nothing but waste taxpayer money.
You mean the canals that today sit unused?
Re:Everyone loves taxes (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the canals that today sit unused?
He means canals like the Erie Canal that turned New York City into the largest port in the U.S., by opening the western U.S. to international commerce. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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... It goes back to the Proxmire Golden Fleece Awards where a Senator from Wisconsin would claim to have identified horrendous wastes of money, while the state that he represented (Wisconsin) raked in billions of dollars in milk and cheese subsidies.
Between that and claims of 'Welfare Queens', the political right has played a distraction game to subvert programs like education while lining their pockets with money ...
Just wanted to mention that Sen. Proxmire was a Democrat.
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And? The Democrats are also a right-wing party, have been for many decades. They're just slightly more centrist than the Republicans.
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As a side note, the common refrain that 'the U.S. left is "right-wing" compared to the "rest of the world"' conveniently ignores the large percentage of Islamically-controlled countries in the world.
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Incidentally, I just today read an article about some Finnish developers with experience developing big game titles in Silicon Valley. They had been thinking about where to set up their own business, and they chose to return to Finland. The reason to this is that despite pay being much higher in the US, the cost of living can also be high and things like daycare and education for kids are both superior and cost-effective here, despite them being paid through taxes. They even argued that the infrastructure w
Re: Everyone loves taxes (Score:1)
Having said all that, the state (and feds) need to reign in spending, stop abuse and get back to being a government, not a sociology project.(I saw something where thousands of people are collecting social security under names of people who are dead as just one example, the bridge to no where is another).
Your examples are private individuals engaging in fraud and one single bridge? When there is significant issues with underfunding for highway construction and Social Security as a whole has reduced poverty among seniors in a demonstrated fashion?
Maybe you should think a little more about your complaints?
(Though the most recent thing about Social Security I saw was people paying into it under other people's numbers, for various reasons.)
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Commercial trucks already pay more in fuel taxes. The problem is the money is diluted and used for none road uses like state pensions, mandatory union scale wages, bike paths and residential roads that trucks are never allowed to drive on any ways.
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Nothing remotely proportional to the greater amount of damage they do though - if I recall correctly road damage scales with the 4th power of the weight of the vehicle, the first page I found when looking to confirm that referred to a study suggesting a single 18-wheeler does as much road damage as 9600 cars. I guarantee you that their fuel taxes are not high enough to pay their fare share of road maintenance costs.
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It doesn't have to be proportional but yes, it works out to about 4 times as much being paid per mile driven than regular cars. And no, the damage is not staved off if commercial vehicles were not allowed to drive on the roads. HOV lanes tend to only last a year or two longer than the other portions of the highways. This is because the roads are not designed to last 200 years and the asphalt breaks down due to standing, starting, and stopping. The biggest factor in road life is accidents by far.
I do not kno
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>but yes, it works out to about 4 times as much being paid per mile driven than regular cars
How is that a "but"? Did you possibly misread? I said 4th power, not 4x as much. At 4x the per-mile tax rate, a 18-wheeler is still only paying for 1/2400 of it's proportional share of road wear and tear costs. And yes, standing, starting and stopping does damage to the roads. And it does much more damage when you're talking about commercial vehicle. No, restricting roads to lightwieght personal vehicles wou
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No, I didn't misread, I dismissed your
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the point is stupid though. It's like saying we have $100 to purchase groceries this month but because Junior didn't contribute his 25% that he eats, we will be perfectly fine with spending it on beer and smokes instead. Trucks pay more, maybe not as much as you want, but there is more than enough money coll
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That does not solve anything when the funds are fungible. Increased revenue designated for a specific purpose will displace general revenue which can then be allocated to pork projects. Lotteries used for educational funding are a good example of this.
Re:Everyone loves taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, the Slashdot story is disingenuous (shocking!) when it brings up Microsoft's opposition to Washington proposition I-1098 [ballotpedia.org] a couple years back. Yes, Ballmer was a big contributor against the initiative but it was widely unpopular across the entire state, failing at the polls by a 2-to-1 margin [bizjournals.com].
Quick recap on what that was for non-Washington residents: WA is one of seven US states with no personal income tax. Sales taxes vary by locality, but in general they are higher than average in WA in order to make up for the lack of a sales tax (in Seattle, for example, sales tax is nearly 10%).
I-1098 proposed that individuals making more than $200K/year or families making $400K/year pay a state income tax, with a higher rate applying to those above $500K/$1M. Given WA's economically skewed demographics, the tax would hit many in the greater Seattle area (around the top 3% including Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, Google, Nintendo etc. employees), while outside Seattle it would be more like the top .01%.
Interestingly, Bill Gates was a visible I-1098 supporter, while Steve Ballmer was a major opponent. But keep in mind the above: the demographics of Washington State are such that had this been an issue of just Microsoft and other big corps fighting it, or "rich Seattle" against the rest of the state which is not so full of rich techies, it would have won handily. Instead, it lost by a 64-36 ratio because voters across the entire state, including a majority of Democrats, thought it was a backdoor way to introduce a state income tax whose threshold would conveniently be lowered by the state legislature whenever it found itself in a money crunch [socialistworker.org].
So long story short - it may very well be true that Microsoft is dodging state taxes that it should be paying. If so, it should definitely be held to account. However, the fact that Ballmer or Microsoft supported a widely popular anti-state income tax initiative is not related to whether the company is shirking its tax duties.
Re:Everyone loves taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
The pacific northwest is beholdent to a few large companies that use their importance to exert some scary influence on the politics. When these issues come up Microsoft has threatened to move overseas, or to other states. The voters and state/local government falls in line. Same with Boeing, which has moved a lot out of Washington even after getting just about special treatment they could ask for.
Down here in Orygun, Intel and Nike do the same thing. Nike's headquarters is surrounded by Beaverton, but is not part of it because they they have made huge threats to leave if the city tries to annex it into the city, which would result in higher property taxes to help pay for the city services they already benefit from. Intel got a very sweet package during their recent expansion. It is a massive race to the bottom to get and keep these big employers. It is sickening. The rest of us in the area get to pay higher taxes to make up the shortfall, and we have the threat hanging over us that they can crash the local economy and housing prices with it if they make good on their threats.
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all their customers pay taxes
they are directly responsible for a lot of tax money to the state
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You mean like Microsoft pushing everyone else to spend more money funding schools so they can make more money on the students that graduate from those schools?
And when you say "arguing they shouldnt have to pay," (sic), does that include corporations like Microsoft arguing that they shouldn't have to pay state taxes?
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get back to being a government, not a sociology project.
What does this even mean? Isn't any government a sociology project?
we all see government waste every single day, why would anyone want to give them more money?
Waste is everywhere. In fact, Americans in general are the moste wasteful people in the world. Just look at their energy consumption and refuse production per capita. Just because government is wasteful doesn't mean that we should just abandon it completely. Many of our government services (protection, education, utilities, law enforcement...) we don't have a more efficient alternative for. Yes, you can privatize them, but only at the expens
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no new taxes until government waste is reigned in.
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So, following your logic, the Eisenhower should never have started the interstate highway system since it wasn't part of the bare basics. Come to it, we should halt all federally funded cancer research since that's not a basic either. And Grandma can come and live with you, affording her is not a government bare basic. Neither is the EPA and all those emission controls, a round of mercury for everyone. Airline safety can be left to the airlines, auto safety to the car companies, drug safety to the drug comp
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Washington would still get the lion's share of Microsoft-based taxes since the lion's share of employees live there, and are well-paid.
In other news:
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.
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"Washington would still get the lion's share of Microsoft-based taxes since the lion's share of employees live there, and are well-paid."
What a crock of crap.
My tax responsibility is mine, not my employers. Employers cannot skip out on their taxes just because they have employees who don't have that kind of opportunity. I don't get to argue my way out of responsibility for taxes just because my checker at the grocery store has to pay her taxes. We are all in this together, it is not fair for big enough e
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They don't just threaten. Have you seen how much of IBM is run out of mainland China these days?
Re: Everyone loves taxes (Score:3)
Re:Not true (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Inflation is an inherent part of our money system. Interest is what creates inflation. 95%+ of this is created by the banks through mortgages.
The other few percent is partially done by governments and is mostly needed to compensate for population and economy growth.
This is true for most economies, only some Arabic ones have a somewhat different system, because return-on-investment is illegal there because of religious reasons. Most of the world used to work that way until the late middle ages.
Most things to
Definitions count! (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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Re:Definitions count! (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately most business ethics as taught these days highlight the need to return value to the shareholders over most everything else
They like to highlight ideas like, "how would you feel if your grandmother saw this on the front page", or "think how the cost of criminal prosecution would hurt your company", while simultaneously propagandizing grandma to believe that being a tax cheat is like the Founders of the country, or subverting Congress to reduce the punishments associated with their crimes
If grandma is pleased that you are a tax cheat, and the fines for being one are negligible, there is no barrier in the current world of 'business ethics' to doing it
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I believe the word that fits is a fiduciary duty. And I'm glad the op said value not profit because they are not always the same thing.
Re: Definitions count! (Score:3, Insightful)
"republican-controlled media" - good one.
MS is paying taxes in NV, where the licensing corp is located.
It is not right to say MS isn't paying taxes, it simply is avoiding Washigton State's higher tax rate. I bet if Washington state lowered it's tax rate to equal Nevada's MS would consider relocating MS licensing group back to Washington State... How about it Washington state, do you want the tax revenues or the talking point against MS?
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The Democratic party is significantly to the right of the main "conservative" party in just about every other country in the developed world, and still just about every major media outlet, MSNBC included attempts to stake out a position somewhere between the Dems and the Republicans. Yet somehow this absurd notion of a "liberal media" persists. The mainstream media in this country ranges from merely conservative to radical, lunatic right (fox).
There is no liberal media in the U.S. And for that matter, there
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Nevada's corporate tax rate is 0%. That works for a state that is propped up by high roller Japanese business men at the craps table. It doesn't work for Washington State which has a 'real' economy.
Microsoft needs the benefits of a 'real' state economy like Washington's where people can work and live outside of the gaming or US Airforce industry but they want the tax rate of a state who is willing to lose money on every other industry.
Re: Definitions count! (Score:5, Insightful)
And then Nevada lowers its tax rate to get it back, and then it's Washington's turn again, the end result being that Microsoft pays a nominal tax if any at all. And since that means other people and companies must pay more to make up the difference, their effective tax rate goes up, they do the same, and ultimately all tax burden gets concentrated on those too poor to move. But of course they can't pay, so the state must cut education, infrastructure maintenance, law enforcement, etc. And that, in turn, makes the state an even less attractive location for business.
It's simply another manifestation of the illness that's killing capitalism. But at least the process of decay is fascinating to watch, as pathological patterns become the norm and eat away the structure of society. Sooner or later it's frayed enough that some crisis launches the final domino effect of collapse.
Washington state wants to survive, just like any living thing [wikipedia.org]. Unfortunately, being a cultural organism rather than biological one limits its options, since it must be careful not to discredit the very mythology that justifies its own existence. And in the US, the mythology of the nation has been tightly coupled with the mythology of capitalism. Untangling them or altering capitalism to less toxic form is a job for the prophetic archetype; Washington state can do little but play for time and hope one appears before it runs out.
Of course, the whole reason prophets are so rare is because you always run the risk of being one of those things found wanting and cast out, but at some point the prevalent mythology of the society has been exhausted of its possibilities so there's little choice except to get a new one or die.
Alternatively (Score:5, Informative)
“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
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
They're out of toilet paper, just like the Soviets.
Or the US:
http://priceonomics.com/the-gr... [priceonomics.com]
Re:Alternatively (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, now it's breast implants (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Alternatively (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm happy as the next guy to pillory Halliburton, which deserves little but scorn for its shocking profiteering in US government contracts. But you probably don't want want to cite dated Chavezista leftie Froot-Loops talking about how the rapidly disintegrating [businessinsider.com] former Venezuelan economy [forbes.com] is a model for anything except citizen outrage [economist.com].
Just ask the folks living in the former Socialist Paradise where condoms now cost $755/pack on the black market [newsweek.com] because the Bolivar is worth less than toilet paper and it turned out that Chavez was mortgaging his country's future to buy temporary popularity with oil dollars [investopedia.com].
Re: (Score:3)
How did that end up?
Chavez is entombed and inflation was running at 69% as of December.
Monoculture (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
See Russia right now, along with the desperate efforts of some Gulf states to diversify before the oil runs out.
Re: (Score:2)
We need a banking system reform though.
Re: (Score:2)
As opposed to.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Also Rupert Murdoch of Fox etc (Score:2)
However it's a good idea even if the people who do not want to pay for it are pushing it.
Government is not the solution, but the problem. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
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 a
That's why he gets paid the big bucks (Score:2)
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.
you don't understand ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I'd favor some sort of carefully crafted state-level constitutional amendment to create income taxes. But with it earmarked for education.
Why would you want to give more money to a system that's almost totally failed, and unfit for purpose?
Modern schools were designed in 19th century Prussia to churn out compliant factory workers and soldiers, and most Western nations adopted similar systems after the 1% of the time saw how successful they were at making them money and keeping them in power. They're anachronistic nonsense in the 21st century.
Re: (Score:2)
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.