Hey Everyone,
I'm back in the Skopje center and was looking over my last Xanga entries because I was thinking of blogging about a political point. I love blogging, but just don't have the extra time... but one blog a year isn't too bad. Maybe one will become popular someday :)
Anyway, still moving forward with life, as well as the farming project in Albania. Working and living in Ireland, and thinking of buying an apartment, if I can get the down payment. It just makes sense, because the mortgage would be cheaper than the rent I'm paying now... but have some debts I have to work with as well, so again, it's a balancing act.
Love the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Haven't been able to watch them for awhile, so catching up yesterday and today for this week's episodes. Keeps me fair and balanced ;), because I still see myself as being a pretty strong Republican. Cobert took a crack at President Obama yesterday, after showing a couple takes in a row of Obama saying 'Peace is hard' at the U.N., he followed with, "but apparently winning a Noble Peace Prize is not so hard." LOL.
On that funny note, I would like to propose my solution to a pretty silly problem we have in the U.S. - an incredibly high corporate tax rate but often not paid due to a variety of loopholes. The loopholes are encouraged by a high tax rate... I think Romney made a good point when recently at a rally someone asked him why we can't raise the corporate tax rate, and his gut response was 'corporations are people too'. This gave me a great idea: why not tax corporations as people? In other words, why not tax corporations on their entire global income, minus the domestic taxes they pay in each country they are in. Of course it would be stupid to do that at our current tax rate, but what if we drop the rate to 15% (or maybe even 20%) and then require all corporations to provide an international audit. This is what I have to do with my personal income, and I don't see why corporations should be let off the hook on this. We could make a exception amount (for example: up to 10 million dollars on worldwide income is exempt from the international tax rate), and for countries where the tax rate is higher then there could also be deductions counted towards the total (so if a corporation paid 21% tax in the U.K, the 6% would be deducted from what they owe). This would also apply to any corporation trying to set up in the U.S., no matter where they originally were incorporated, although there would probably have to be a new legal entity created to allow some flexibility on this in order to prevent scaring away FDI.
Anyway, just a random thought. I'm sure it would be politically suicidal in one way or another. Although this one might not count, all good economic ideas tend to be politically dangerous, since as John Stewart put it, you can't really sell an idea by appealing to American's love of math. However, I wonder if anyone think it makes any sense from an economic perspective.
While I'm spouting out crazy tax theories, I would also suggest dropping the social security tax to a total of 10%, and make it a universal tax, including in the amount people make over 100K, although maybe it makes sense to lower it progressively until it gets down to 1% or 2%. After that, since it is meant as a social safety-net program, provide it on a need basis. That should ensure the program can pay for itself, but it should also be able to provide a large enough fund to start investing it the way the Norwegians have been investing their oil money, and over time it should be able to become self sufficient. A portion of the profit can then be used to pay off national debt, and when that's done we can start using the fund to provide more social improvement programs without relying on tax revenues.
Anyway, that's all the time I have for this kind of randomness, and I obviously need more time to flush out these theories and see if they have any merit, but feedback is always welcome, even from the random stranger who stumbles upon my blog...
Sincerely,
A brother and friend,
Youngil Ely Loew
I initially wrote this blog on Xanga:
http://loew01.xanga.com/755222052/mitt-romney-corporations-are-people-too
