News Corps Makes Corporate Welfare a Sport

Get your brain around this one -

Call it the gift that keeps on giving (if one is a corporation that is): the US Tax system, so effective at extracting income tax from America's working class, is just as "effective" at redistributing said income tax at the corporate level. Case in point: News Corp, which after generating $10.4 billion in profits over the past 4 years, and which would have been expected to pay the IRS $3.6 billion at the statutory corporate tax rate, instead received $4.6 billion back from Uncle Sam. Bottom line: Murdoch's corporation had a cash paid tax rate of -46% between 2007 and 2010. The culrpit: two little somethings called Deferred Tax Assets and Net Operating Loss Carry-forwards.

The Real Effect
Now, I don't blame News Corps for gaming working the system to their advantage, but can we please stop with the double standards in this country?

To start, funds are fungible. How does one prove that one dollar went here and then went there? Quite a difficult thing to prove at times. As a matter of fact, 'money laundering' becomes a way to 'game' the system and get what you want, somewhat legally. But should we be surprised at such behavior? If something is not illegal, it is legal and yet our laws become more and more obtuse, enforceable on the whims of a despotic madman who feels that we've taken more then our share because we spent the money on something he disagrees with. Isn't this the point of free-market capitalism? That an individual is free from intervention and able to use his resources as he sees fit?

Yet, if an individual receives money from the government, who coincidentally seems to be the only one with money left, we are told that we must comply with hundreds of thousands of bureaucratic regulations and dictates. If  we deliberately chose something else, let alone slip up, we risk imprisonment. But we are not able to dictate to our captors how they get that money in the first place, else once again we risk imprisonment.

Do a little experiment once and compare that to the budget authority for the SNAP program. (Food stamps). The profits of one company equal a significant percentage (in the neighborhood of 5%) of the budget for food for 1/7 of the ENTIRE NATION.

The problem then becomes that neither side wants to part with their blood money. The left cannot fathom allowing individuals to make stupid choices themselves so they attempt to force the correct ones. The right having joined the party is simply blind to the fact that this is not business in this country but in truth oligarchical fascism a-la Coca-Cola.

The solution? End the fascism. Bring the money back to the earners. Allow them to experience the pain AND the pleasure of their choices.