As usual, the left is wondering whether corporations pay their “fair share.”  This time, it seems they may have a point.  As Time magazine reported yesterday, a recent Wall Street Journal study of Congressional Budget Office statistics showed that American corporations paid an effective tax rate of 12.1% last year.  That’s the lowest number in four decades, despite a nominal tax rate that runs 35%, second only to Japan’s 39.5%; if you include state corporate taxes, America is now number one in the world.

So why the low effective tax rate?  According to both the Journal and Time, it’s due to a corporate tax break set into the stimulus package, which allowed corporations to use an accounting trick: they could take write-offs on capital investments all at once rather than over time.  Typically, you take a tax write-off as the value of a good depreciates – if you buy a computer, it loses value over time, and you write that in your tax returns.  Under the stimulus package, you were allowed to basically write off the whole purchase.  The result was huge write-offs for corporations.

Now, normally, this wouldn’t be a bad thing.

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When the Occupy movement launched a few weeks ago, they immediately got a boost from Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream.

We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity.

And now, in Ben and Jerry’s home state of Vermont, another senseless #Occupy-related tragedy has occurred.

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — A 35-year-old man was shot and gravely wounded Thursday in an Occupy Wall Street encampment in Vermont’s largest city, police said.

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“He was my buddy,” Joe Edwards, of Burlington, said of the victim, who had been at the encampment for about a week. Edwards, sitting on a bench in the park about two hours after the shooting, said he did not know the victim’s full name.

The encampment has been in the park since Oct. 28. The city had threatened to evict the protesters because the park is closed from midnight until 6 a.m., but city officials made special accommodation for the protesters.

Almost two dozen tents have remained in the park, and the number of protesters has varied.

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I was watching coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests the other day and couldn’t help but laugh at how pitiful the whole ordeal has become. It’s almost become a cliché to note how the protesters go on and on about big business when they sport corporate swag such as iPads and Rolexes. Now, the burnout kids who started the protests are being co-opted by labor unions, the type of  people who are so charismatic and idealistic they have to pay demonstrators to march with them.

Despite the sympathetic — even fawning — media coverage they’ve received, the message of Occupy Wall Street protesters isn’t being taken seriously by America. Take, for instance, a manifesto posted online by an early O.W.S. participant. This is the most laughable lefty pipe dream list ever. Here are a few of the demands:

Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Put more simply, they want free healthcare because saving money for emergencies will cut into their nachos budget. They lack the basic self-awareness to understand that cutting into the profits of hospitals will destroy the healthcare industry’s ability to improve equipment and competitively compensate the best doctors and nurses, thus giving incentive for doctors to leave their trade due to lower wages and higher work loads. (more…)

The Occupy Wall Street protesters say they’re demonstrating against capitalism. Sure they are…

In January of 2011, Facebook was valued at $50 Billion dollars.

In February of 2011, Twitter was valued at $10 Billion.

In March of 2011, YouTube was valued at $36 Billion and Google was valued at $190 Billion.

None of these companies would exist without capitalism, but the anti-capitalist leftists currently occupying Wall Street will never, ever protest these companies. They’re even organizing their protests through their websites.

Why is the left’s hatred of capitalism so selective? Google is a publicly traded corporation; its executives feed off the so-called profiteering of Wall Street just as deliberately as Goldman Sachs or any of their other boogeyman du jour. And if we’re talking how these corporations make profits, why doesn’t the left get asbent out of shape over Google and Facebook selling their personal information to marketers as they do with banks charging interest on loans? (more…)

This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved a rule that is designed to make it much easier for large shareholders to force out corporate directors. The rule allows a big shareholder to nominate his own board slate and have those its board nominees listed on a company-mailed “proxy” ballot alongside the candidates favored by management.On one hand, the rule seems pretty reasonable, why shouldn’t the average shareholder have a choice in who to vote for? Its the American way.This rule, however has nothing to do with the average shareholder, in fact it probably guarantees the average shareholder will have less to say about the direction of the company.

The new SEC rule gives an investor or group of investors owning at least 3% of a company’s stock for at least three years the right to place its candidates on the company’s ballot. Who fits into this category? Generally we are talking about institutional investors (like state retirement plans)  and union pension funds. As a consequence corporate America will now be beholden to state politicians who only care about where their next vote is coming from, and Union Leaders who in many cases are promoting Socialism rather than Capitalism.

Even President Obama, whose decisions usually favor big labor is opposed to the new rule:

Barney Frank and his House colleagues are standing strong against a White House effort to block shareholders from having proxy access to governance issues in corporations in which they have a stake. Investors, pension funds and labor unions reacted with alarm when Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) introduced the Senate proposal that would effectively deny so-called “proxy access.” The provision had not been approved by either the Senate or the House and several sources, both in Congress and in the industry, said the White House is pushing the measure. The White House proposal would require a shareholder to hold a five percent stake in order to have proxy access — a level met by virtually no institutional investors.

Corporate Directors are supposed to make decisions based on what is best for the company, and its shareholders(even if its not the best thing for the company’s employees).  Union sponsored directors will be tied to their small constituency, union members. America could be nearing the day when  a corporate director telling a negotiating manager, give the unions what they want or you are fired!

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The Democrats are trying to cram through another special-interest piece of legislation, which they are calling (depending on the audience) either a tax-extenders bill or a stimulus bill. But they’ve been having trouble getting enough votes for this motley collection of welfare-state provisions and special-interest tax breaks, in part because of the public’s growing hostility to wasteful and corrupt Washington spending. The proposal finally has been approved by the House, but only after the leadership made some (mostly cosmetic) changes to  get the votes of a sufficient number of gullible “Blue Dog” Democrats.

The Blue Dogs claim to be fans of fiscal responsibility, but they look at the issue through a very distorted lens. As the Obamacare vote demonstrated, they will vote for big and bloated government so long as the new spending is “offset” – at least on paper – by big tax hikes. This is one of the reasons why Pelosi & Co included billions of dollars in corporate tax hikes in the tax-extenders/stimulus legislation.

What the Democrats (either the blue or pink variety) apparently don’t understand, though, is that corporations don’t pay taxes. Yes, companies often write checks to the IRS, but all corporate taxes are really a burden on workers, consumers, and shareholders. Moreover, in a world where jobs and investment can cross borders looking for better tax policy, a high corporate tax rate is a huge competitive liability for a nation. These are some of the main points in this video on corporate taxation.

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