U.S. Corporate Tax Avoidance

From The Transcript:

Avoiding taxes has become a hallmark of America’s business icons; Apple, Google, GE, and many more of the Fortune 500. The nation’s largest corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash while revenue from corporate income taxes have plummeted from just below 40 percent in 1943 to just below 10 percent in 2012. Government and big business have colluded to create what’s tantamount to an “unlimited IRA” for corporations. 

That’s not my term, although I wish I had thought of it, because it explains so much about what’s gone wrong in a country where some 20 million workers who would like a full-time job still can’t get one. Yet the upper one percent of the population takes home a staggering 22.5 percent of America’s income while their effective federal income tax rate has dropped.

All Things Economic

Poor Warren Buffet, he's upset that Obama wants to tax his ill-gotten gains.

Consumer debt - pushed by are easy-money, predatory lending, and our commercialized society - is out of control.

Dean Baker shows that the abilities of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council head Larry Summers to avoid a complete financial collapse really was not that extraordinary. No major country had a complete financial collapse.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and economics professor, thinks banks have failed at their basic societal mission.

A Giant Sucking Sound

Half of the $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate mortgages due in the next five years currently owe more than they're worth.

We're not out of the woods yet. We should listen to Joe Stiglitz, nationalize bad banks, and get these toxic assets out of the system already.

For Further Reading:
Commercial Real Estate Is Next
Yet Another Bubble

Meaningful Indicators

Joesph Stiglitz - Nobel Prize winner, Columbia economics professor, and chairman of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress - elaborates on the need for more useful and explanatory "statistical information about the economy and society."

The Commission was established by French President Nicolas Sarkozy due to his dissatisfaction with our current indicators.

Their first report will be released September 14.