In 21 states, they’ve passed a law that says that taxes withheld from your paycheck

[Barb]

Major corporations are pocketing your taxes - Salon.com

DCJ: It’s now up to 21 states. In 21 states, they’ve passed a law that says that taxes withheld from your paycheck, for the state, can be kept by the company. Now, every employer doesn’t get this windfall — you have to have to get a deal from the government to do it — 2,700 big companies, every big company you’ve ever heard of, General Electric, Procter and Gamble, Deutsche Bank, you name it, they’ve got these deals, where they get to keep the taxes. Billions of dollars are diverted this way. You know the best thing for the companies about this?

JH: What’s that?

DCJ: The workers don’t know, because once the taxes are withheld, the state government treats you as having paid your taxes. You paid your taxes. They just then give a credit to let the company keep the taxes. I’ve called journalists. I’ve called union people who negotiate union contracts. And they say, “What are you talking about?” I showed them the work I’ve done. They go, “Oh my God!” They have no idea that this is what’s happening, and the fact that it’s spread from the 16 states when I first wrote about this and it’s now grown to 21 – eventually, all of the 44 states with income taxes are going to allow this, if we don’t put a stop to it.

Read David Cay Johnston's Fine Print

[ame=http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591843588]The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind: David Cay Johnston: 9781591843580: Amazon.com: Books[/ame]

“No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge cus*tomers, shortchange workers, and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news . . . addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward.”

You are being systematically exploited by powerful corporations every day. These companies squeeze their trusting customers for every last cent, risk their retirement funds, and endanger their lives. And they do it all legally. How? It’s all in the fine print.

David Cay Johnston, the bestselling author of Per*fectly Legal and Free Lunch, is famous for exposing the perfidies of our biggest institutions. Now he turns his attention to the ways huge corporations hide sneaky stipulations in just about every contract, often with government permission."

 

[Barb]

We are now 29th in the world in the speed of our Internet. We are behind Bulgaria, of all places.

 

[Barb]

Let me give you a stunning number I reported the other day. From 1966 – when Lyndon Johnson was president — to 2011, 45 years later, the bottom 90 percent of Americans’ average income, as reported on tax returns, went up by a stunning $59 — almost no change at all. If you measure that $59 increase for the vast majority of Americans as one inch, then on the same scale, the incomes of those in the top 10 percent went up by 168 feet. The top one percent, 888 feet. The plutocrats — the Mitt Romney crowd, the top one percent of the top one percent? Their incomes rose by almost five miles relative to that one inch.

 

[Truthseeker420]

That's the goal of the right wing is to make workers pay for everything.

 

[tjvh]

In 21 states, they’ve passed a law that says that taxes withheld from your paycheck???

Taxes withheld from your paycheck what? should be withheld, will be withheld, wont be withheld, might be withheld????? Which is it? Don't make me read your BS link...

 

[Barb]

In 21 states, they’ve passed a law that says that taxes withheld from your paycheck???

Taxes withheld from your paycheck what? should be withheld, will be withheld, wont be withheld, might be withheld????? Which is it? Don't make me read your BS link...

the character limit cut it off - I tried to edit, but it won't let me edit the thread title. You don't want the information, don't read the link

 

[depotoo]

Let me give you a stunning number I reported the other day. From 1966 – when Lyndon Johnson was president — to 2011, 45 years later, the bottom 90 percent of Americans’ average income, as reported on tax returns, went up by a stunning $59 — almost no change at all. If you measure that $59 increase for the vast majority of Americans as one inch, then on the same scale, the incomes of those in the top 10 percent went up by 168 feet. The top one percent, 888 feet. The plutocrats — the Mitt Romney crowd, the top one percent of the top one percent? Their incomes rose by almost five miles relative to that one inch.

want the truth? Go here -
http://www.census.gov/prod/3/98pubs/p23-196.pdf

 

[Rozman]

Since 1969 my income has risen dramatically...

 

[uscitizen]

Who pays taxes?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

You are being systematically exploited by powerful corporations every day.

of course thats very very stupid and 100% liberal. Saintly capitalist corporations are our slaves. If a corporation does not offer us the best quality at the lowest price in the entire world we shop elsewhere and that corporation goes bankrupt. In fact, 10,000 a month go bankrupt because they don't meet our exacting standards.

This intense life and death Republican capitalist competition to please us is how we got to be have the higest standard of living in human history!! To say they exploit us is 100% stupid, perfectly illiterate and oh so liberal.

A liberal will simply lack the IQ to understand these basics. What other explanation is possible??

 

[Mad Scientist]

OP doesn't know that Income Tax goes DIRECTLY to Banks VIA their Collection Arm: The IRS.

Banks have controlled this country since 1913 and will continue to do so.
Your Government doesn't have a say, it's all a show. But by all means be my guest and wave that Republican or Democrat Flag like your life depends it!

Behind the scenes when the cameras are turned off they all laugh at how gullible and stupid the American people really are. Suckers!

 

[Avorysuds]

And you want more Government, lol....

 

[Barb]

OP doesn't know that Income Tax goes DIRECTLY to Banks VIA their Collection Arm: The IRS.

Banks have controlled this country since 1913 and will continue to do so.
Your Government doesn't have a say, it's all a show. But by all means be my guest and wave that Republican or Democrat Flag like your life depends it!

Behind the scenes when the cameras are turned off they all laugh at how gullible and stupid the American people really are. Suckers!

Yeah, David Cay Johnston doesn't know what he's talking about, he's only one of the leading investigative journalists (2001 Pulitzer) of our time, and specializes in economics and tax issues. YOU on the other hand, know SO much more

 

[Barb]

Missing the Story *|*American Journalism Review

The shift away from competitive markets to insulating favored companies from the rigors of the marketplace should be one of the most important news stories in America. Yet when my research assistants and I dug through news databases like Nexis and Factiva, we found almost nothing. What was reported by major newspapers, magazines, Web sites and broadcast news organizations about new rules that favor monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies was like scattered dots here and there that no one had connected, even to provide the most rudimentary outline.

But while news reports have missed the connections, Wall Street financial analysts get it. These analysts understand that when competition is absent or minimal, companies can charge higher prices and offer a lower quality of goods and services than they could in a competitive market. There is even a word for legal barriers to competition — moats.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

when competition is absent or minimal, companies can charge higher prices and offer a lower quality of goods and services than they could in a competitive market.

so where is this happening, what companies, what products????

 

[Barb]

when competition is absent or minimal, companies can charge higher prices and offer a lower quality of goods and services than they could in a competitive market.

so where is this happening, what companies, what products????

seriously?

Moats are barriers companies erect, through government laws and regulations, that make it difficult to impossible for competitors to enter the business successfully.

for instance:

• After a business professor testified that "the stupidest things" AT&T and Verizon could do would be to "start jacking up local service" prices if California lifted price caps, the caps were removed — and the companies promptly raised prices as much as 600 percent.

• New Jersey lawmakers required Verizon to wire 70 cities with fiber optic lines but did not require it to provide service, so people who wanted to negotiate where holes would be punched in their walls are out of luck.

• Asserting that competitive markets would make electricity cheaper, New York legislators authorized Energy Supply Companies, or ESCOs, to pitch consumers. But they did not require benchmarking, so people cannot determine if they are saving money or shelling out more.

• Electric utilities in 25 states pocketed about $30 billion that customers prepaid for corporate income taxes that government will never collect.

• A 1980 law to promote railroad competition resulted in 37 big lines consolidated into six under rules that let them charge higher monopoly prices, even when two rails run parallel for a thousand miles.

All of these stories went unreported or got only spotty and superficial coverage. What coverage there was often incorrectly characterized these changes as benefits to consumers rather than a shift in government policy that favored companies over their customers.

In my book "Free Lunch," I explained how rules for new electricity markets actually tend to raise prices to levels almost as high as what an unregulated monopoly could charge. Those rules, not coincidentally, were written by Enron.

The simple story is that Congress in 1986 exempted monopoly pipelines from the corporate income tax if they organized themselves as Master Limited partnerships. The George W. Bush administration then let these pipelines include the nonexistent tax in the rates they charge.

The cost of this fake tax is both tiny and huge.

The pipelines raise prices to cover the cost of the tax, which in turn means they have to raise prices even more to cover the taxes on the extra earnings, known as "grossing up." A 42 percent tax on profits, grossed up, means a pipeline gets to earn its profit plus 75 percent for taxes. These higher costs are then built into prices people pay for gasoline and natural gas to heat homes.

Paying this fake tax costs each American less than three cents per day, about $10 per year, I calculate. That is the tiny part. The huge part is that collecting just a penny a day from everyone in America adds up to $1.1 billion in a year — or $3.3 billion at three cents per day per American.