GOP Thinks Corporations Should Have Their Cake And Eat It Too

You've probably heard the phrase that "you can't have your cake and eat it too", or that "you can't be on both sides of the fence at the same time" -- because those things are physically impossible. But they're only impossible for normal humans. The GOP have altered regulations in the last 30 years so that corporations can actually perform these impossible feats. Consider the following.

Republicans want us to think that corporations are people, and their right-wing brothers on the Supreme Court have made this a fact. They give corporations the same rights as human beings have under the Constitution, and in recent decisions have said money is speech. That means these corporations have the right of free speech, and since speech is money, they also have the right to spend as much as they want (i.e., millions of dollars) to put candidates in office that will make laws favoring them.

But while corporations are "people" (just ask Willard Mitt Romney) when it comes to politics and legal matters, these same Republicans will claim that when it comes to paying taxes the corporations should not be treated as people, but as a legal entity owned by people. They say only the people who own the corporation should pay taxes (and if they are rich their tax rate should be small), while the corporation itself should not be taxed at all (since it is not a person).

That's a pretty amazing feat -- being both a "person" and a "non-person" at the same time. But the Republicans have pulled it off. They have fixed it so the corporations can have their cake and eat it too. They are now able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on political campaigns (because they are people), and as the chart above shows, they are able to avoid paying taxes at all or pay only a tiny tax rate (because they are not people).

And now the Republicans want to lower the tax rates on corporations -- in case at sometime in the future someone might actually think they should pay taxes. They want to do this in spite of the fact most corporations pay an effective tax rate that is less than a single person making only $26,100 a year currently must pay.

The Republicans have not only make the impossible a possibility for corporations (being a person and a non-person at the same time), but they have also created one of the greatest economic injustices of all time. And they want to be put back in power. That's just insane.