Replies to post #501113 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[newmedman]

you got what you wanted, isn't it time to shut the fuck up and see how this all plays out?

shit from 5-10 years ago is all you have on your mind. Did you ever consider blaming yourself for your problems? I know it's hard, it was hard for me but I realized that the only person who holds up himself is me.

You can stop now if you wanted to but you won't and the more you blame other people for your demise the more you look like a fucking fool.

[blackhawks]

Dubya apparently didn't get in the way of that redistribution and he gave us the Great Recession. Clinton gave us a strong economy and a budget surplus.

What did Trump do to redress the redistribution? What do you think he will do about it?

[janice shell]

That was under Mr Bill Clinton as was opening the door to those free trade agreements....... Dems never looked back

I see. The Bushes had no part in it.

Now then, are you familiar with David McCormick, the guy who may have beat Bob Casey for the Senate?

McCormick joined Bridgewater Associates in 2009 as its president.[9] He became co-CEO in 2017,[18] and was responsible for overseeing the firm's management and liaising with institutional investors.[19][20]

In December 2019, it was announced that McCormick would become the sole CEO of Bridgewater in 2020, marking the end of a 10-year management transition of the firm.[21][2] As head of Bridgewater, McCormick had raised 8 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) for a private fund in China by November 2021.[22] In late 2021, while McCormick was mulling a run for a United States Senate seat in Pennsylvania, he began to distance himself from Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio and his defenses of China's human rights policies, openly rebuking him during company calls.[22] Bridgewater also shorted some iconic Pennsylvania companies, including US Steel and Hershey, under his leadership, which became a central talking point of his 2024 Senate campaign.[23]

McCormick left Bridgewater on January 3, 2022, and was replaced by Mark Bertolini and Nir Bar Dea as co-CEOs.[24]

Now would you say McCormick is a member of the "elite"? He's very well educated, too. A West Point graduate, and then got a Ph.D from Princeton.

You seem to have great difficulty recognizing elite people who are not Democrats. Amazingly, I haven't heard back about what you consider Trump, his grifting kids, his associates, and Elon Musk to be...

[fuagf]

B402, Who started it all you could say -- Nixon’s Foreign Policy

President Nixon pursued two important policies that both culminated in 1972. In February he visited Beijing, setting in motion normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China. In May, he traveled to the Soviet Union and signed agreements that contained the results of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks (SALT I), and new negotiations were begun to extend further arms control and disarmament measures.
Nixon's Visit to China

These developments marked the beginning of a period of “détente” in line with a general tendency among Americans to favor a lower profile in world affairs after the Vietnam War, which finally ended in 1975 with the last withdrawal of U.S. personnel. While improvements in relations with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China signaled a possible thaw in the Cold War, they did not lead to general improvement in the international climate. The international economy experienced considerable instability, leading to a significant modification of the international financial system in place since the end of World War II.

During the Nixon Administration, international scientific, technological, and environmental issues grew in prominence. In October 1973, Congress passed legislation creating the Bureau of Oceans and International Environments and Scientific Affairs (OES), to handle environmental issues, weather, oceans, Antarctic affairs, atmosphere, fisheries, wildlife conservation, health, and population matters. The Department had difficulty filling the new Assistant Secretary position until January 1975, when the former Atomic Energy Commissioner, Dixie Lee Ray, took the job. However, she resigned six months later claiming that OES was not playing a significant policy role.

Although Secretary Rogers still had broad responsibility for foreign policy, including Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and international organizations, the Department of State resented its exclusion from key policy decisions, and the Secretary continually fought to make his views known.

https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/nixon-foreignpolicy

[fuagf]

B402 - Does the Republican tax law encourage outsourcing?


A truck passes the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. The company announced last
week that the plant will close. (John Minchillo/AP)

By Jeff Stein
December 5, 2018 at 12:28 p.m. EST

General Motors’ decision last week to stop production at five plants in North America and lay off 15 percent of its salaried workforce has renewed partisan debate over whether the Republican tax law passed last fall encourages companies to ship their jobs overseas.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), widely viewed as a 2020 presidential contender, argued on Twitter that the GOP tax law encourages GM to outsource and that “no one in Washington should be surprised.” Congressional Republicans denied that was the case, saying that nothing in their legislation promotes moving jobs overseas.

“It’s purely a partisan attack to blame GM’s decision on the new tax law,” said Nicole Hager, a spokeswoman for Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), one of the law’s lead architects. “We’re already seeing tax reform work: Multinational companies are bringing home jobs and investment.”

GM to lay off 15 percent of salaried workers, halt production at five plants in U.S. and Canada
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/26/gm-lay-off-percent-salaried-workers-halt-production-five-plants-us-canada/?utm_term=.2d6b5cc29dda&itid=lk_interstitial_manual_6

The political crossfire over the car company’s announcement may not be surprising, but it comes amid a broader debate among economists, academics and tax experts over the extent to which President Trump’s signature tax law more broadly encourages U.S. companies to outsource.

Most experts interviewed by The Washington Post said it is impossible to know precisely what motivated GM’s layoffs without firsthand knowledge of the company’s motivations, noting that an array of factors was probably involved in the decision.

GM executives have said the changes reflect their push to focus on self-driving cars, electric vehicles and more-efficient trucks, crossovers and SUVs. The New York Times has noted .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/business/general-motors-cutbacks.html .. that the downsizing comes amid a decline in consumer interest in smaller and midsize cars. A spokeswoman for the company did not return a request for comment about the GOP tax law’s impact on GM’s decision.

Trump promised ‘America First’ would keep jobs here. But the tax plan might push them overseas.

The 2017 Republican tax law transformed how the U.S. tax code applies to multinational corporations and their subsidiaries, slashing the tax burdens companies face on both their national and their foreign earnings. To conservative economists, and even some liberals who opposed the law overall, these changes have in fact reduced the incentives to outsource.

These experts said the status quo before the tax overhaul included its own incentives that promoted outsourcing and noted that the law slashed the U.S. corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent — which should encourage more, not less, domestic investment.

But other left-leaning and some nonpartisan economists defended Brown’s assertion, pointing to the law’s dramatic cuts in the amount of U.S. taxes paid by multinational firms on their foreign subsidiaries. To these experts, the Republican tax law created an enormous new incentive to look offshore by lowering the taxable income of companies with more assets overseas. These critics also noted that, beyond exempting much of these companies’ foreign earnings from taxes, the law created a new tax rate on foreign income that’s only half that paid domestically — a “50 percent off coupon,” as Brown has termed it.

‘Chaos breeds chaos’: Trump’s erratic and false claims roil the globe. Again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/chaos-breeds-chaos-trumps-erratic-and-false-claims-roil-markets-again/2018/12/04/824506fa-f7ff-11e8-863c-9e2f864d47e7_story.html?utm_term=.9f3ad60eb06f&itid=lk_interstitial_manual_18

The debate has big implications for U.S. politics as well as the global economy, as companies try to assess how the approximately year-old GOP law affects their overall financial incentives, according to tax experts.

Before the tax law, U.S. companies’ overseas earnings were, at least in theory, taxed at 35 percent — the same rate they were taxed domestically. This practice of charging the same tax on domestic and international earnings is called a “worldwide tax system.”

Conservatives argued this structure encouraged American firms to move their headquarters abroad, since many other developed nations do not impose this double tax on both domestic and foreign earnings. They also said it led many firms to indefinitely postpone bringing their earnings back home, since they could avoid the double tax by keeping their money outside the United States.

“There are many criticisms one could legitimately level at the tax law, but I don’t think it’s a really generally held view, even among Democrats, that it strengthened overall company incentives to move offshore,” said Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in tax issues.

The GOP tax law shifted the United States to a “territorial tax system,” which exempts most companies' foreign earnings from U.S. taxes. But the new system is also subject to criticism from those who say it promotes outsourcing.

In 2014, the average rate that American companies paid to those foreign countries where they were operating was between 10.5 percent and 15 percent, lower than the current U.S. corporate tax rate of 21 percent, said Stephen Shay, a former international tax official at the Treasury Department who now teaches at Harvard University. That means, for U.S. companies, earnings on domestic profits are taxed at a significantly higher rate than earnings on foreign profits — which critics say is a clear incentive to outsource.

The GOP tax law also included a complicated new rule to try to prevent companies from gaming the new system to secure lower taxes. This new rule includes a provision that says companies can escape U.S. corporate taxes if their foreign earnings are smaller than 10 percent of their “tangible” foreign assets. The provision is intended to stop companies from artificially shifting their money overseas. But skeptics say it could backfire in a big way, because companies can lower their taxable income by increasing the amount of production they do outside the United States. In other words, according to critics, it’s a direct financial incentive to outsource.

“These multinational firms are going to want to stay below the 10 percent threshold, because that means the U.S. tax system won’t touch their foreign earnings,” said Matt Gardner, a tax expert at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank. “If you move a whole factory overseas, that sharply increases what they can earn without paying U.S. taxes.”

Shay said that Brown may be understating the extent to which the GOP tax law encourages companies to outsource. U.S. companies have proved to be very good at preventing foreign countries from increasing taxes on their subsidiaries, Shay said.

Still, other economists caution that it’s hard to imagine that these new incentives already explain corporate behavior such as GM’s. The Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department, for instance, are still determining the exact parameters of the tax law’s international provisions. Ernie Tedeschi, an economist in President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department, said the Trump administration’s other economic policies, such as his imposition of tariffs, were more likely to have affected GM’s decision.

“If GM’s decision had anything to do with U.S. tax policy, it’s much more likely it was the tariffs influencing it,” Tedeschi said.

Brown, who has been more supportive of some tariffs than other lawmakers, questioned that assertion. "The math simply doesn’t add up. GM has spent $10 billion on stock buy backs since 2015,” said Brown spokeswoman Jennifer Donohue. "That’s ten times what the tariffs supposedly cost them.”

Jeff Stein is the White House economics reporter for The Washington Post. He was a crime reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard and, in 2014, founded the local news nonprofit the Ithaca Voice in Upstate New York. He was also a reporter for Vox.
follow on X @jstein_wapo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/05/does-republican-tax-law-encourage-outsourcing/