Amazon’s Jeff Bezos recently came out in favor of jacking up the corporate tax rate. Some leftwing pundits are acting like this is some kind of magnanimous gesture. “See!”, they say. “Even Jeff Bezos, owner of one of the largest corporations on the planet sees the need for higher corporate taxes. Bezos understands that sacrificing a little of his own personal wealth will make the world a better place for us all! Why can’t you greedy right wingers be more like Bezos???”
Of course, anyone who pays close attention realizes that isn’t how the system works at all. Higher corporate taxes won’t hurt the huge mega-corporations like Amazon. Amazon has an army of accountants, lawyers, and lobbyists to make sure they won’t get dinged by the IRS. So who will get slammed by higher corporate taxes? Amazon’s competitors, naturally. The one’s that can’t afford to hire a full time Harvard-educated staff to work on tax avoidance. Higher corporate taxes make it extremely difficult for small to medium-sized companies to compete with well-connected crony capitalist monoliths like Amazon. Far from noble sacrifice, what Jeff Bezos is advocating for is solidification of his own monopoly. And all he will be expected to give in return is some campaign donations to the “right” candidates and to use his company to promote WOKE! causes.
America’s creep toward socialism is manifesting itself as a weird blurring of the lines between politics and business. Mega-corporations like this sleazy symbiotic relationship because it increases profits and shields them from competition. The politicians like it because it is a massive source of funding and they can use corporate America to push their agendas. Regular Americans are the one’s who get screwed. Nobody elected Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg to anything. The fact they have so much power to bend society to their whims is an extremely disturbing development.
Before Trump, America had the highest corporate tax rate of any major economy. By far. And it was a job killer. Another feature of the mega-corporations is they have global footprints. It is quite easy for them to switch operations to lower cost countries when it suits them. They still make their billions regardless. If they have to lay off American workers to do it, then so be it. Barak Obama famously mocked Trump for saying he would bring back manufacturing to the United States. To a progressive ideologue like Obama, those jobs were gone for good. And though he is too politically savvy to ever admit it out loud, Obama didn’t want those jobs back anyways. It was good for the emerging countries to have those lower-skilled jobs. And America had plenty of wealth already, anyways. Redistributive change shouldn’t stop at the border. At least according to the progressives.
“What magic wand does he have?”, Obama taunted. Turns out Trump didn’t need a magic wand. All he needed to do was remove the onerous tax rate, cut down on the mountain of unnecessary regulations, and negotiate new trade deals that let American companies compete on an even playing field. That didn’t take a genius to figure out. And Obama isn’t an idiot. Fact is, he knew how to bring manufacturing back all along. What Obama really meant was, those jobs were never coming back without sacrificing his progressive political agenda. A compromise he would never even consider making.
Now we have Obama’s dim-witted sock puppet, Joe Biden, back in the White House. And he is giving every indication that he intends to return to the failed policies of the past. Joe has already indicated he wants to jack the corporate tax rate back up, and he recently said that there was “no evidence” that high corporate taxes kill jobs. Unlike Obama, Joe Biden actually is a drooling idiot. So he may well believe what he is saying. Not that he would care if he understood the harm he was causing to working class families. With the progressive propaganda department (i.e. MSM) running cover, he knows he will never take the blame.
The Biden effect is already starting to show like in a recent decision by Ford to move operations to Mexico. Sleazy Joe, or more likely the puppet master’s pulling his strings, are working overtime to make his promise of a “long, dark winter” come true for American workers.