Why not drive away more companies?

by John Seiler | June 1, 2014 1:04 am

Taking a tactic from the envy playbook , Democrats in the California Senate want to grab even more from successful businesses. Which would drive away even more companies. The Register reported[1]:

A bill sponsored by Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, and Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, would set a sliding scale for corporate taxes, cutting them for publicly traded companies whose CEOs earn less than 100 times the median compensation of their workers, and raising them when CEOs make more.

California currently has a corporate flat tax rate of 8.84 percent, except for financial institutions, which pay 2 percentage points more.

California is the first state to consider tying taxes to CEO pay, according to Damon Silvers, policy director of the AFL-CIO labor federation, which tracks the issue for its Executive Paywatch initiative.

The California bill, SB1372, surprised some observers by passing the Senate Appropriations Committee by a 5-2 vote Friday, with Democrats supporting it and Republicans opposing.

The money, of course, would flow to the government, of which the five state senators are leaders. And which the AFL-CIO helps control through its public-employee members; and through financing political campaigns.

If these politicians really wanted to help the middle class and the poor, for starters they would slash the top 9.3 percent income tax rate that starts at about $55,000 of income. (The Prop. 30 tax increase will expire in five years.) That’s right, in California, you’re considered “rich” at $55K of income — even though the state’s so expensive that’s really lower-middle-class!

Next, they would repeal AB 32, which destroys jobs to fight “global warming” that isn’t happening.

Then they would repeal the California Coastal Commission, a Soviet-style agency that severely limits developing land, which drives home and apartment prices sky-high, so only the 1 percent can live here.

None of that will happen, of course.

Source URL: https://calwatchdog.com/2014/06/01/why-not-drive-away-more-companies/

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