Why is the deficit so big? It could be because billion dollar companies are robbing the U.S. Treasury blind.

One of the reasons you and I and other ordinary American citizens are taxed so much and still live in a country with a huge Federal deficit is because multi-billion dollar American corporations are taxed so little.

They move money around — around Europe and the Caribbean — to make their tax liabilities disappear.

According to Bloomberg news, Google and other U.S. corporations are ripping off the taxpayer to the tune of $60 billion. Now Facebook is about to follow. And there are still others.

The Tea Party and Republican wingnut solution is to cut or eliminate Social Security and Medicare, Federal payments to the states, money for infrastructure and everything else that once made America work.

The smarter solution would be to cut the tax loopholes that let the big corporate thieves get away with this stuff. But Republicans in Congress won't let it happen. If you want to get mad as hell at something, get mad as hell at that.

P.S. An earlier version of this post contained an error attributing the whole $60 billion to Google. That has been corrected. Thank you to those who pointed it out. However, no thanks to those fearful (or furious) souls who declare that if the American people try to collect what they're owed by the corporations, the corporations will leave the country. That's like saying, "If we try to stop that band of bandits, they'll burn down our village and rape our women." I agree the corporations will try to leave the country, just as so many have moved their manufacturing plants out of the country and thrown Americans out of jobs so the factories can pay paupers' wages. So I'm glad you brought the matter iup. We can stop this.

We need to urge Congress to pass criminal laws that would fine companies the equivalent of the wages and taxes they escape by moving overseas. If they want to sell goods here, or do business here, they can employ Americans and pay American taxes here. You say they'll stop doing business in this huge market if we try. Fine. I can guarantee you that some entrepreneurial (and honest) Americans will rush in to fill the vacuum.

But...but...but the right-wingnuts will complain that if companies pay American wages and pay American taxes, prices in America would go up. I agree. That's the price we pay for full employment and a growing economy, rather than unemployment and a dying economy. Which would you rather: Have a job or pay an extra dime for a bag of carrots? (I can hardly wait for some genius to do the math and tell me it's not a dime, it's 17 cents.)

P.P.S. My policy is to allow any post that is not libelous or outrageously, formidably obscene. However, I do screen for those things, and I only do so once or twice a day. So if you don't find your post here for a while, be patient. It'll show up. Probably.

Bonehead

The presidential election didn’t stop the conservative crazies. They’re coming out of the woodwork again.

Congressman John Boehner — formerly an upholder of the Bush borrow-and-spend program that helped run the United States into the ground — is now criticizing Obama for a borrow-and-spend program.

This is just when, thanks to the previous administration, we have no other choice if we ever want to dig ourselves out of the financial mess we're in.

And since tax-cuts for the rich were great for the rich but ultimately didn’t do much for the economy — just look where we were before Bush got elected and where we are now, after the Bush tax cuts — bonehead Boehner is avocating…well, you almost guessed it!

Boehner wants tax cuts that would lower tax rates while essentially giving nothing to the poor and unemployed. Yet it's the poor and jobless who would have no choice but to pour their money into the economy as fast as more comfortable citizens have shunted their tax refunds to the banks in the past.

I’m not wildly enamored of the currently evolving Obama program either. It tries to make nice to too many uncooperative forces, including the likes of economic obstructionists like Congressman Boehner.

On the other hand, at least the Obama tax cuts and credits for the struggling middle class and poor will quickly inject some money into the economy, as will a program of infrastructure repair. However…

Here's what we need most

We’ve got to start thinking long term. Highway repairs are just another temporary palliative.

Yes, we need to repair infrastructure. Desperately. But we also need the equivalent of the space program of the 1960s and the Manhattan Project in the 1940s to create new American technological advances, prosperity and new industries. Otherwise, 20 nears from now, in our ever-weakening “service economy,” we’ll all still be grubbing a living by taking in our neighbors' laundry and flipping each others’ hamburgers.

Parts of this got talked about during the election campaign. Why, oh why, has it almost gone away?

We need programs to fund nonprofit laboratories in universities and governmental facilities, from which the technologies (and the technical innovators) of the future will emerge.

We need to educate the engineers and architects who can build not only the cars and transportation systems of the future, but also the homes and offices and (let us pray) factories of the future.

Let America become the world’s leader in developing and manufacturing wind turbines rather than coal plants.

Let’s be innovators in making power-generating light cells rather than buzz-generating celebrity gossip.

Let’s pioneer more energy-efficient and less toxic ways to dispose of waste.

Instead of developing new and improved anthrax strains for germ warfare, how about putting government scientists to work on anti-malarial drugs to replace the ones that are losing effectiveness against new strains of the disease? Let’s have a government push to create a truly effective an AIDS vaccine. And better (and cheaper) anti-cancer drugs.

Now that we can begin thinking seriously about stem cell research again, how about a government-funded push at universities to become stem cell innovators?

Better teachers, free college tuition

How about a government-funded program to train and pay for a legion of well-paid and inspirational science teachers —a program that will not only increase employment in the near future, but also supply well-trained Americans to develop new technologies? If we attract the most innovative minds to education, not only will education in this nation become better but fewer people will spend their time devising arcane and mischievous financial derivative training programs.

How about a free — yes, that’s free — college tuition program. It’s outrageous, for example, that a Ph.D or M.D. finishes his or her education carrying a debt big enough to mortgage a McMansion. Little wonder some of the smartest young graduates have been headed to Wall Street where they were able to pay back these crushing debts quickly — and ultimately at the expense of the nation.

Free (and all right, dirt cheap) city and state colleges helped make the United States the 20th Century’s most innovative nation. Then, late last century, we started charging more and more for tuition and insisting that more and more students borrow the money to get their degrees. Now we’re a nation of increasingly desperate, debt-ridden money-grubbers.

Yes, fix the roads. Yes, fix all the infrastructure. We need to do that. But listen up: all that won’t really fix the economy until we also fix our thinking.

Is it time for U.S. tax policy gently to encourage a little bit of population control?

You’re looking at not-the-most-recent photograph of Jim Bob Duggar and his family, of Arkansas.

It’s out-of-date because since this photograph was taken last year, the Duggar’s have given birth to yet another child. So now they have 18 kids in all.

I became aware of the family while watching The Today Show on December 22. I have to admit, I really like the kids. They were polite, bright, friendly, positive, enthusiastic and organized. I can’t help but wish them well.

That said, I’d like to take the Duggar parents on a tour of the damage that overpopulation is doing to our planet and our nation.

For example:

According to the World Bank and the United Nations, from 1 to 2 billion humans are now malnourished, indicating a combination of insufficient food, low incomes, and inadequate distribution of food. This is the largest number of hungry humans ever recorded in history

Based on their evaluations of available natural resources, scientists of the Royal Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences have issued a joint statement reinforcing the concern about the growing imbalance between the world's population and the resources that support human lives…

The continued production of an adequate food supply is directly dependent on ample fertile land, fresh water, energy, plus the maintenance of biodiversity. As the human population grows, the requirements for these resources also grow. Even if these resources are never depleted, on a per capita basis they will decline significantly because they must be divided among more people…

Big deal, you might say. The Dugars are not hungry. They live in a large, debt-free home. They haven’t even made an impact on their local school system, since they’re all home-schooled.

Wait until you see this family’s
carbon footprint and water consumption

But wait a second. Want to think about energy and water consumption alone? According to MSNBC, one of the many media organizations that has done admiring feature stories about the family…

The family estimates it has used 90,000 diapers and launders 200 loads of clothes each month in a row of industrial-size washers and dryers….Transportation is facilitated by nine vehicles, led by a 21-passenger bus.

Beginning to get the picture?

When should Americans say,
“not on my tax dollar?”

This country, as well it ought, has encouraged stable families through its tax policies — with child tax credits and other tax deductions for dependents. I’m for that in general. I’m even for increasing the tax deduction for families, most especially struggling families with low incomes — up to a point.

That point is reached when people start having more than “replacement children” — the two kids needed eventually to replace their parents. After that, the government ought to be saying, “Listen, the number of children you want to drop on this planet is your business, at least for now, but we refuse to let you make it ours. Reproduce all you want, but don’t ask your fellow citizens to help finance this irresponsible behavior of yours.”

If we fail to do that, future generations might eventually have to start placing a “birth tax” on each child after the second one. That, or responsible citizens will have to starve along with the irresponsible ones.

Incidentally, the Duggar family’s website states that Jim Bob and his wife make their living as “licensed real estate brokers.” In addition, Jim Bob is a former Representative in the Arkansas House of Representatives and former candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Except for one little, uh, anomaly.

Uh oh, it’s one of those
“real estate seminar” things

Surf around a little bit further and you discover that Jim Bob is in the tape and seminar business in a big way, too.

To quote from his sales pitch:

Order DVD Set & Seminar Manual Value Pack! $129 NOW ONLY $109
>> Order Men's Manual Vol. II (Manual Only) $30

But wait, there's more!
Say hallelujah!

Keep digging into this stuff and following links and you discover that the “DVD Set & Seminar Manual Value Pack” are, umm, “faith based” as is the Duggar family’s home schooling setup.

To quote from the home school organization which sells its curricumlum to the Duggars:

We believe Adam was directly created in innocence and in the image of God and did not evolve from preexisting forms of life. By voluntary transgression, he fell; and thus the whole human race is now sinful by nature and practice and, therefore, under just condemnation to eternal separation from God…

Funny, I didn’t learn any of this stuff on the NBC report.

Anyway, I somehow doubt that this is on the required reading list of the kids’ home schooling.