Taxes and the deep blue sea

Remember back a few weeks when I wrote about corporations and taxes?  I read an interesting article in the SUN the other day.

According to a pay study in the US, 25 of the top 100 CEOs in the US were paid more by their companies than their companies paid in taxes.   And many of  those same companies paid more in lobbying fees than in taxes.

Stated another way... What?!!!

Book available at mysteriesofcanada.com

Two-thirds of the firms studied kept their taxes low by utilizing offshore subsidiaries in tax havens such as Bermuda, Singapore and Luxembourg. The remaining companies benefited from accelerated depreciation.

The LOOPHOLES are so big you could drive a Boeing aircraft with GE engines right through them.

Boeing paid CEO Jim McNerney $13.8 million, sent in $13 million in federal income taxes, and spent $20.8 million on lobbying and campaign spending while General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt earned $15.2 million in 2010, while the company got a $3.3 billion federal tax refund and invested $41.8 million in lobbying and political campaigns.

I wonder what a similar study in Canada would reveal?

The Current Economic Morass - Could it be avoided? - Part 1

Yes and No is the easy answer.  Let's take the No first.

Taxes, as we know them, were first imposed in the early 20th century to fund the government during the First World War.  They were supposed to be a temporary measure but, as with most thing government touches, temporary become permanent.  Take for example the temporary building erected for National Defense in 1939 near the Parliament Building.  At the time, C.D Howe, stated that, "two years after the War nobody would know the temporary buildings had existed".  Take a walk up by the Supreme Court if you want to see the temporary building today.

Back to taxes.  When government gets money, they spend money.  Some would say it is their job while others say that it is their obsession.  Spending money is like a drug for some, not just government, so I lean towards obsession.  If government wanted to avoid this economic morass, one thing they could have done was spend less.  Do we really need to be dropping million dollar bombs in Libya?  Do we really need to subsidize the Oil Sands to the tune of $2 billion per year?

But there is another side to taxes and that is the collection of them to feed the obsession.  It is estimated that the Canadian tax code, with regulations, contains over 2 million words.  Compare that to the bible with just over 774,000 words.  It takes scholars a lifetime to memorize the bible.  What does that say for us mortal taxpayers?  Get rid of the loopholes and flatten the tax to a single rate, please.

In Part 2 we will explore other issues affecting the Current Economic Morass.