FlaviusAetius

Perhaps some discussion of what to do about this is needed. Is it bringing back jobs by repatriating overseas profits of big corporations and giving them massive tax breaks on that money if they build factories in the poor areas - or is it to tax corporations and the rich further and distribute that money in the form of more welfare benefits? I'm raising the question, not expressing an opinion. I'm also assuming that the two approaches are incompatible.

​The surging ranks of America's ultrapoor - CBS News

zargof

Or option three of Bernie's New New Deal: Tax the rich and rebuild infrastructure. Gives people jobs and fixes all the crumbling roads and bridges. Win win (unless you're rich).

FlaviusAetius

Rebuilding the infrastructure requires that workers be paid "prevailing wage," which means union scale, and implies that the jobs will go to union workers (they will see to it). Not sure this would help the "surging poor" in the pools of poverty-stricken America in Appalachia and the inner cities.

I had been thinking of bringing hundreds, thousands of light industry factories, placed into the poverty pools to provide jobs to millions of these poor. Some of your suggestions, if incorporated into WPA-type programs (as suggested by the article) might help, but all those "shovel-ready" jobs are temporary anyway. Not like factory jobs providing on-going work making products protected by tariffs (one of Bernie's suggestions). How to get private enterprise to fund the re-industrialization of America is the real question - unless you're thinking of the Chinese Communist economic model, which really isn't working out so well.

Giantaxe

One reason companies don't repatriate profits is that the corporate tax rate is so high compared to many other western countries. And the major reason it's so high is that lobbyists have succeeded in riddling the tax code with exceptions and tax breaks for the companies that have the $$$ to "bribe" Congress. So you have a situation where some companies pay little or no tax on their profits thanks to those exceptions, whereas others get stung. It's crazy.

sir_eccles

Yeah we should just not bother improving infrastructure because those jobs are temporary? What utter short sighted nonsense. Did you ever think improving the infrastructure might attract new factories and new private industry?

It's like the environmental argument. What if we clean up the environment and stop polluting for nothing!

Anian

If there is more work than workers, then they hire more people. There isn't a hard limit on the number of people allowed in the unions. There's always an amount of infrastructure that needs updating, in fact there is quite a few years of backlog in most areas, even inner cities. The less that is done now, the more that needs to be done later. Calling that kind of continuous work "temporary" is just silly.

FlaviusAetius

No one said anything about not bothering with improving the infrastructure - so that's a phony argument.

The problem is that any such package becomes a political football. Obama's $787 bn stimulus package in 2010 was spent mostly on tax credits, child care stuff, funding for schools, shoring up municipal pension funds and so on. It sort of worked, but the actual funds ALLOCATED (not spent) for infrastructure were as follows:
• $46 billion for transportation and mass transit projects.
• $31 billion to modernize federal buildings.
• $6 billion in water projects

A relative drop in the bucket - and even Obama admitted that there weren't as many "shovel-ready" jobs as he thought.

Sure, improving the infrastructure MIGHT attract the factories, but the main reason the overseas profits aren't coming home is because of our noncompetitive tax rates. Companies are using that money to buy foreign companies, and in some cases trying to fold themselves into those companies to escape our tax rates. But any effort to reduce those tax rates to bring the money home gets demagogued to death by the usual suspects. "Tax-cuts for the rich" etc.

Oakvillian

I think your last paragraph is a little bit back-to-front.
US companies are taxed very heavily, compared to many other "western" democratic nations. That is why so many multinationals choose to manipulate their numbers - mostly just about within the letter, if not the spirit, of the law - in order to keep the bulk of their profits out of the hands of the US tax man.

One reason corporate taxes are so high is that personal taxes, particularly on the earnings (note, earnings, not income...) of the very rich, are ludicrously low. Taxing the rich to an appropriate degree would enable the various levels of government to lower corporate tax rates and still function without bankrupting themselves.

The demagoguing-to-the-death happens, especially on the GOP side of the aisles, whenever proposals emerge to re-balance the tax burden between corporations and individuals, or to prevent employment remuneration from non-salary components being classified as income, and so on. I'm not sure who is proposing "tax cuts for the rich," perhaps I missed that?

sir_eccles

GOP base: Obama wasn't born in US, but Cruz was | MSNBC

Ok, let me get this straight. They asked Republicans if Obama was born in the US and only 29% said yes (correctly recognizing Hawaii is in fact a state in the Union). They then asked if Ted Cruz was born in the US and 40% think the Canadian province of Alberta is a state in the Union.

These people vote, why don't you?

FlaviusAetius

But, but, I thought...

Yeah, well I lived in Alberta as a kid for 3 years, and when we moved to the States it seemed to me as though Alberta must have been one of the States...wasn't it?

RoadWarriorFromLP

Calgary is just another Houston suburb, eh?

zargof

I wouldn't like to call the GOP the party of ignorance, but when one of their presidential candidates isn't sure if Obama is a Christian or not, well it's hard not to.

Scott Walker is still unsure whether Obama is Christian - The Washington Post

Giantaxe

He is just pandering to his "base". No excuse for that, of course. Same as when he says building a border wall with Canada is a "legitimate issue".

sir_eccles

I hate that "pandering to the base" has become the excuse to lie or be racist or bigoted. We've seen too often that "a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth".

FlaviusAetius

I guess everyone - at least all the smart people - contributing to this OP is agreed that NO Republican is qualified to take part in the governance of this country. They're all stupid, bigoted, racist, nativist, "gun nuts" (nod to RoadWarrior), homophobes, waging endless war on women, liars, cheats, rich, hate the poor, closet National Socialists, etc, etc, etc.

Now that that's settled, can we also agree that ALL Democrats are honest, transparent, non-bigoted, non-racist, right on all the issues, i.e. the environment, global warming, LBGT rights, women's rights, black-lives-matter, the need to tax the rich so they contribute their "fair share," etc, etc etc.

Is this site not really a branch of Daily Kos and/or Move-on.org?

What's there to talk about?