corporations

People respond to incentives. This is the case regardless of how the politico-economic system in which we live and work is structured.

The Niskanen Center’s Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles have been making the rounds of late, promoting their new book The Captured Economy.

Our nation’s tax code is a nightmare mess of thorny brambles. Interwoven with other thorny brambles.

Hillary Clinton’s “trustworthiness” problem is fed by a long history of “varying credibility,” as a recent Politico story delineated, including cattle-futures trading, law firm billing records, muddled sniper fire recollections and e-mail use.

While cybersecurity risk may be the familiar and recognizable type of cyber systemic risk, it is only recognizable like the tip of an iceberg is recognizable, because most cyber systemic risk lurks well out of view, deep beneath the surface in the ocean of virtual ones and zeros.

The traditional American corporation has been a fixture in the U.S. economy for generations. Corporations allow entrepreneurs to shield themselves from liability, spread ownership out to an unlimited number of shareholders, and more easily raise funds for large-scale business investments.

American companies that reincorporate abroad are not doing so to avoid paying taxes on U.S. earnings, despite the often misleading impressions left by the rantings of Senators Carl Levin, Dick Durbin, Elizabeth Warren, and others to the contrary. They are doing it to avoid paying U.S. taxes on earnings in other countries.

The Obama Administration has proposed its latest form of collectivist control over the American people. In a letter to Congress U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, has called for punishment and prohibition of any company that tries to move its headquarters overseas to avoid higher taxes in the United States. Plus, Mr. Lew has the audacity to call his proposed territorial imprisonment of American business, “economic patriotism.”

President Obama’s speech yesterday on inequality is being lauded as one of the best of his life, by people who paid attention to it. It’s a sad speech to read, in some sense, since it contains within it the promise of a presidency that we never saw come to fruition – the sort of policy effort that might have been launched to bipartisan success in the first year of his presidency, instead of his effort on Obamacare.