Obama wants high speed rail system for America
- Thread starter Spytheweb
- Start date
Yeah this is a pipe dream. California has been toying with this for years, and the projected time to completion is a LONG time and a LOT of money from being completed.
The environmetnal impact studies, cost, the land-seizure issues, feasability, local interest... all these things are reasonable objections to this really cool sounding idea.
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gw
this just shows how little you know about most things.
Study: Most companies avoid income taxes
GAO report says both U.S. owned and foreign corporations dodge levy
updated 5:57 a.m. ET, Tues., Aug. 12, 2008
WASHINGTON - Unlike the rest of us, most U.S. corporations and foreign companies doing business in the United States pay no federal income tax, according to a new report from Congress.
The study by the Government Accountability Office released Tuesday said two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, and about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.
Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO?s estimate.
?It?s shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country,? said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.
An outside tax expert, Chris Edwards of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said increasing numbers of limited liability corporations and so-called ?S? corporations pay taxes under individual tax codes.
?Half of all business income in the United States now ends up going through the individual tax code,? Edwards said.
The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren?t paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes and it did not identify any corporations by name. It said companies may escape paying such taxes due to operating losses or because of tax credits.
More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.
The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S.
Dorgan and Levin have complained about companies abusing transfer prices ? amounts charged on transactions between companies in a group, such as a parent and subsidiary. In some cases, multinational companies can manipulate transfer prices to shift income from higher to lower tax jurisdictions, cutting their tax liabilities. The GAO did not suggest which companies might be doing this.
?It?s time for the big corporations to pay their fair share,? Dorgan said.
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DOOOGY DUH !
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Just a example of how Obama comes up with new ideas that will work. Atlanta to Las Vegas
New York to California
Boston to Austin
Florida to Vermont
Get the airlines to invest in it. Put America to work building the thing.
Meanwhile McCain sits and thinks about bringing back horseback riding to work.
