Forum Post: Jobs and a reurn to Democracy Part II

Not that long ago in the 1970’s, corporate tax rate was 71%. Companies were given tax breaks if they invested in America and hired more Americans. Our country prospered because most businesses chose to grow their business and hire more Americans rather than pay more taxes. As jobs were created more and more people had money to demand more and more goods. Tax revenues increased from these workers and their companies. America and Americans prospered. We need to return to this 71% corporate tax rate. We also need to break up the monopolies. Monopolies destroy competition. When a few people take most of America’s wealth, the rest of us do not have enough to make our “supply and demand” economy work. We need to stop them from taking our tax dollars and investing in countries like China instead of America. I remember when gas was $.18 cents a gallon. Gas station attendants pumped your gas, cleaned your windshields and check the air pressure in your tires. There were gas wars and prices were kept down by good old fashion capitalistic competition. Then Big Oil paid lobbyists to represent them and buy off politicians. While Bush was in the White House oil and gas industries spent $393 million on lobbying the federal government. 80 percent of the industry's contributions went to Republicans. During his first month in office, Bush appointed Cheney to head a task force charged with developing the country's energy policy. The group, which conducted its meetings in secret, relied on the recommendations of the Big Oil Companies. In 2005, Bush, who has received more from the oil and gas industry than any other politician, signed an energy bill from the Republican-controlled Congress that gave $14.5 billion in tax breaks to energy companies. Of the $15 billion in income taxes Exxon paid in 2009, not one penny went to Uncle Sam. But tens of billions of dollars in earnings were permanently reinvested overseas. Oil company profits were $35 billion in the U.S. in just the first 3 months of 2011. Under Bush’s reign, gas went from $1.50 to $4.00 a gallon, an extra $50 to $100 to fill up our cars. Multiply that by all those people waiting in Costco’s gas lines every minute of every day and you get a lot of people with a lot less money and a lot more job losses. We again have taxation without representation. So now people can no longer afford the American dream of buying a house, sending their children to college, or even buying medical insurance. We need to make them pay their fair share and break up Big Oil again as the U.S. Supreme Court did in 1911. Better yet maybe we need to take back all of our natural recourses. Do not forget what you were taught in school. “This land is your land; this land is my land, from California to the New York Island.” We need to take back America’s natural resources like oil which was given to oil companies at below market prices behind closed doors. We need to have a publically owned company like 65% of the world already has. Canada, for example, has a state owned oil company and they do not have slums and a crumbling infrastructure like we have in America. Or we could keep paying more and more at the pump till we all go broke and America is destroyed. And if Exxon Mobile Oil doesn’t like it, too bad we are not going to let you destroy America. There are plenty of Americans who would love to invest in a state owned gas company and get more than the 1% offered by banks for our money. That doesn’t even keep up with inflation which means we are losing even more of our money by putting it into banks. Gas prices would go down, we could invest in renewable energies and Americans would have more money in their pockets creating more jobs.