SOCKING STOCKS BAM'S CORPORATE-TAX HORROR

NY Post ^ | May 6, 2009 | Jim Powell

[Scanian]

JUST as the econ omy begins show ing glimmers of a turnaround, here comes President Obama with a "tax-reform" effort that's sure to sock the stock prices and after-tax profits of many of the biggest US employers.

Obama's $190 billion business-tax hike will hit Americans whose jobs and pensions depend on these companies doing well, and will increase pressure on already struggling colleges and hospitals. Why? Because millions of individual investors hold the companies' stocks in their portfolios, mutual funds and pension funds, as do many colleges, hospitals, museums and other institutions in their endowments.

Among the important employers in Obama's crosshairs: Aetna, Alcoa, Allstate, American Express, Berkshire Hathaway, Best Buy, Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola, Costco Wholesale, Dell, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon Mobil, Ford, General Motors, GMAC, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft Foods, Kroger, McDonald's, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, News Corp., PepsiCo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Safeway, Sears, Sprint Nextel, Supervalu, Sysco, Target, Time Warner, Walgreens and Walt Disney.

Obama is outraged that these employers use offshore tax havens to reduce their tax burdens.

[livius]

One of the greatest mistakes ever made was to think that Communism had died with the fall of the USSR. Whittaker Chambers said that Communism will never die because it is a religion; rationally, there is no basis for it and it obviously has not and can never succeed. But that’s not what its true believers are looking for, and they have made the decision to believe it and work for it without ceasing.

One of the reasons Communism has gotten so far so fast in the last few years is that people stopped acknowledging that it still existed.

[oblomov]

I believe that communism and slavery triumphed in the cold war, rather than freedom and capitalism. What the communists changed is that they abandoned Stalinism (the Third International) and accepted a hybrid version of Troktskyism (the Fourth International). Also, they co-opted modern advertising and persuasion techniques.