New Tax Rules: The Hidden Corporate Bailout - Time magazine

[JohnWxy]

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1865315,00.html



"The IRS has spent the past few months trying to make the rules as liberal as possible," says Robert Willens, an accounting and tax expert in New York. "They have been decreasing corporate taxes pretty consistently." (See pictures of the recession of 1958.)

The IRS this year has issued 113 notices, many of which will lower the taxes companies will pay this year and in the future. That breaks the previous record of 111 in 2006, and is nearly double the 65 issued in the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency. Lawmakers, too, have passed tax changes and are pushing for more, which will save corporations billions of dollars this year. One of the biggest windfalls could come from a proposed change in the so-called carryback rule, which would fatten the tax rebate companies get when they have losses. The extension would be similar to one that was passed after 9/11.


Of course, some IRS notices raise taxes, and not all of the tax-relief measures pertain to what corporations pay. For example, the IRS has passed notices this year that give tax relief to hurricane and flood victims.

But in the past few months, experts say, the IRS has been unusually aggressive in doing what it can to lower corporate taxes, going above and beyond what has been allowed in the past. The result is that the IRS has become, in effect, a much less public arm of the federal-bailout machine. "There have been all sorts of Administration announcements that relax the tax law," says Thomas Humphreys, an attorney at Morrison and Foerster. "I don't remember a wave of provisions like this." (See pictures of the global financial crisis.)
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Now if these changes were for just one year they could be seen as a way of helping counter the deep recession we are in (or the depression we risk sliding into.). But these changes are permanent.

[Democrats_win]

1. Life in America: you exist to support the corporation.

That's not the way it should be. Not by a long shot. But that's the way it is. The corporations should pay high taxes and be glad for that privilege. They should exist to support humanity, not the other way around. It is a "bastardization" of what it means to be human, a perversion of creation.

[JohnWxy]

2. It's what I call the New Capitalist Feudalism. Corporations are the new Lords of the land and

unless you are among the wealthy the rest of us are the new serfs. The very wealthy and the corporations determine the government policy and write the legislation through their political wing the Republican party.