Background on Corporations

Corporate Issues in 2020 election cycle

• Corporate Inversion: (CBO): A corporate inversion occurs when a U.S. multinational corporation completes a merger abroad that results in its being treated as a foreign corporation in the U.S. tax system, even with majority U.S. shareholders [and end up paying less tax].
• PRO-Corporate Inversion: (CLS): U.S. corporations have a strong tax incentive to renounce their U.S. incorporation. Inversions will continue because of the tax benefits, including reduced corporate income tax rates and access to unrepatriated cash holdings.
• ANTI-Corporate Inversion: (ATF): Inversions largely occur on paper. Corporations typically do not move their executives or operations overseas. Corporations that invert continue to enjoy the benefits of operating here--they just dodge a lot of taxes.

• TRUMP: Get U.S. money back into U.S.: address corporate inversion (Nov 2015)
• BIDEN: Some corporations make billions & don't pay a penny in taxes (Sep 2020)
• PENCE: Voted YES on replacing illegal export tax breaks with $140B in new breaks (Jun 2004)
• HARRIS: New tax on banks with over $50 billion in assets (Jul 2019)
• News on Estate Taxes (Candidates' recent excerpts)

• Capital Gains Tax: (NerdWallet.com): Capital gains are the profits from the sale of an asset--shares of stock, a piece of land, a business--and are taxable income. How much these gains are taxed depends on how long you held the asset before selling. In 2020 the capital gains tax rates are 0%, 15% or 20% for most assets held for more than a year.
• PRO-Capital Gains Tax: (Business Insider): Biden has floated a plan for effectively doubling the capital gains tax to 43.4% for Americans with more than $1 million in income. The wealthiest Americans were the biggest stock sellers following the last capital-gains tax hike in 2013.
• ANTI-Capital Gains Tax: (Fayetteville Observer): The most destructive tax increase for your nest egg is Biden's call for a doubling of the long term tax rate on capital gains. His tax will punish savers and make it more difficult for the country's economic recovery.

• TRUMP: 0% corporate tax would create millions of jobs (Dec 2011)
• BIDEN: Double the capital gains tax (Oct 2019)
• PENCE: Reduce the capital gains tax (Jan 2001)
• HARRIS: Reverse the 2017 corporate income tax cut (Jul 2019)
• Reform Party Nominee Rocky De La FUENTE: Tax incentives to businesses for purpose of job creation (Nov 2016)
• News on Capital Gains tax (Candidates' recent excerpts)

• PRO-Social Media Regulation: (Facebook): I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.
  (Wired): There have been calls for the creation of a new regulatory agency focused on digital platforms. There is already a well-established template. The FCC's regulatory mandate includes assuring adequate competition in the electronic media sector but also assuring that the broader public interest is being served.
• ANTI-Social Media Regulation: (Forbes): A breakup of Facebook would offer drawbacks of its own. If it came out that one competitor had abused the trust or privacy of its customers, those people would move in the direction of a more trustworthy firm. This is a great advantage that regulation cannot offer, which is why, no doubt, Zuckerberg and company have so stressed the regulatory approach.

• TRUMP: Repeal internet privacy rules: let companies sell ad info (Apr 2017)
• BIDEN: Internet is new public space; make it a force for democracy (Nov 2011)
• PENCE: End net neutrality; allow tiered Internet service (Jan 2011)
• HARRIS: Facebook is like a utility; needs to be regulated (May 2019)
• News on Deregulation (Candidates' recent excerpts)

• PRO-Corporate personhood: (NPR): The Cato Institute sees all corporations, when they spend on political campaigns, as merely associations of like-minded people: "Nobody is saying that corporations have souls. This is about protecting the rights of the individuals that associate in this way."
• ANTI-Corporate personhood: (NPR): A nonprofit corporation formed to advance particular political views is one thing; a large for-profit corporation is something else entirely: "There's no reason to believe that the people involved--shareholders, employees, even the directors or managers--have come together for an expressive purpose related to anything other than really what the business is doing."
• PRO-Corporate personhood Supreme Court case: The Hobby Lobby case involved a billionaire store owner--devout Christians who sought a religious exception from the Affordable Care Act's provision that companies provide contraceptives to employees. The court ruled that, indeed, Hobby Lobby could get an exemption. The 5-4 majority opinion stated, "protecting the free-exercise rights of corporations like Hobby Lobby protects the religious liberty of the humans who own and control those companies."

• ROMNEY: Corporations are people; everything corporations earn also goes to people (Nov 2011)
• PENCE: Companies should have religious freedom like people's rights (Feb 2019)
• Green Party Nominee Howie HAWKINS: Amend Constitution: corporations are not persons (Jul 2020)

• PRO-Executive Compensation: (Columbia): In the face of aggregate data showing a dramatic increase in the ratio of CEO pay to average-worker pay (from 24 times in 1965 to 262 times in 2005), arguments in defense of rising executive compensation packages often rely on the following to justify the trend:
  • efficient-market theory--a global shortage of superior executive talent causes their pay to rise
  • agency theory--the best way to ensure shareholder-manager alignment is to make the managers into equity-holders
• ANTI-Executive Compensation: (EPI): Policies should be passed that boost both the incentive for and the ability of shareholders to exercise greater control over excess CEO pay. Tax policy that penalizes corporations for excess CEO-to-worker pay ratios can boost incentives for shareholders to restrain excess pay.

• TRUMP: In the game of life, money is how you score (Sep 2008)
• BIDEN: Quit corporate law firm rather than help big business (Oct 2017)
• PENCE: Voted NO on letting shareholders vote on executive compensation (Jul 2009)
• HARRIS: Same rules must apply to everyone, including the wealthy (Sep 2012)

Corporate Issues in 2016 election cycle

• Shadow Banking refers to non-bank financial institutions which many candidates consider responsible for the Great Recession. "Shadow banks" include hedge funds, providers of securitization vehicles, credit insurance providers, and private equity funds. All of these make very large financial transactions with very little regulation. None of these are "banks" in the public sense of the word; they don't take deposits from the general public and they don't make loans to the general public. AIG, for example, was a credit insurance provider which faced failure in 2008 and was bailed out with $280 billion from taxpayers, because it was considered "too big to fail."

• Corporate welfare refers to deals that benefit only one company or industry, often encoded in tax law, usually negotiated by corporate lobbyists. Crony capitalism refers to the same result of a narrow benefit, but effectuated because of personal connections rather than corporate lobbying.

Corporate Repatriation

• One popular strategy for reducing corporate income tax is to shift jobs, operations, and profits overseas--totaling about $1.5 trillion offshore as of 2010.

• Many candidates suggest a "repatriation holiday" -- a temporary period during which profits from overseas could be "repatriated" to the US at a reduced tax rate, say 5% instead of 35%.

• Opponents of repatriation point out that in the previous "repatriation holiday", in 2004, $300 billion was repatriated, but 92% of that went to stock buybacks and shareholder dividends.

• The argument in favor of a "repatriation holiday" would be to create jobs during the current recession, which would require additional rules for another round of repatriation.

Corporate Bailout

• The federal government “bailed out” the Big Three automakers early in the 2008 Great Recession. The bailout consisted of direct loans to General Motors and Chrysler, and a line of credit for Ford Motors. President Bush’s loan to GM and Chrysler (originally $17 billion and ultimately $64 billion) was contingent upon the two automakers following federal government restructuring of their companies, and later improving fuel efficiency standards. The purpose of the bailout was to avoid bankruptcy and a large surge in unemployment of auto workers. It was criticized (mostly by Republicans) as “government intervention.”

• The U.S. Treasury sold its last GM stock from the bailout loan in December 2013, repaying taxpayers $39 billion out of the total $50 billion invested (a 20% loss). When Chrysler stock was sold in 2011, taxpayers were repaid $11.1 billion out of a $12.4 billion (a 10% loss). Ford received a $5.9 billion loan in 2009, which is still being repaid. In theory, six million jobs were saved.

• “TARP” refers to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Pres. Bush’s 2008 program to purchase assets from financial institutions to alleviate the subprime mortgage crisis. Congress initially approved $700 billion; the Dodd-Frank Act reduced that to $475 billion. The purpose of the bank bailout was to avoid “collapse of the financial system” because some banks were “too big to fail.” It was criticized (mostly by Democrats) as “rewarding the bankers who caused the recession.” TARP money went to mortgage banks and mortgage insurance companies, not to individual mortgage holders.

• As of December 31, 2012, the Treasury had received over $405 billion in total cash back on TARP investments. The Treasury has been earning a return on most of the money invested or loaned. So far, it has earned $271 billion. When those revenues are taken into account, the government has realized a $46.3 billion profit as of Dec. 1, 2014.

Corporate Taxation

• A key issue in the 2012 race was corporate taxation, a major topic in the GOP presidential primary debates.

• Democrats and liberals, in general (and Obama in particular), want to increase corporate taxation by closing loopholes and removing tax breaks (not by increasing the corporate tax rate)

• Republicans and conservatives, in general, want to reduce the corporate tax rate, in some cases reducing it to zero.

• The case for reducing the rate is that the US rate is among the highest in the world: at 35%, compared to 16% for Germany and Canada, and 2nd only to Japan's corporate rate.

• The case for removing loopholes is that the effective US rate is only about 25%, comparable to the average rate for the industrialized world, due to the numerous available deductions and tax breaks.

• Of the 500 major companies in the S&P 500, 115 paid a tax rate under 20% over the past five years, and 40 paid a tax rate under 10%.

• General Electric paid zero corporate tax in 2010, despite $14 billion in profit; this topic came up in the Sept. 2011 GOP debates.

• Pres. Obama's deficit-reduction committee recommends reducing the corporate tax rate to 23% while closing most loopholes.

• GOP candidates recommend reducing the corporate tax rate, in conjunction with a "tax holiday" for corporate repatriation...

Corporate Regulation

• "Sarbanes-Oxley" refers to the Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act, named after its sponsors, Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D, MD) and Rep. Michael Oxley (R, OH). Sarbanes-Oxley standardized accounting practices to avoid false reporting of corporate profits. In response to corporate accounting scandals, the law passed Congress with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, and was signed into law by Pres. Bush in 2002.

• "IPO" means "Initial Public Offering," describing when a company first offers stock to the public on a stock exchange.

• "Six Sigma" refers to a business management strategy, politically popularized by Newt Gingrich, and originally developed by Edwards Deming in the 1980s, based on a cycle of "Plan-Do-Check-Act." The complementary "lean manufacturing" methods focus on process and waste (making work faster), where Six Sigma focuses on design (making work better). In recent years, the combined strategy has become known as "Lean Six Sigma."

“Occupy Wall Street”

• “Occupy Wall Street” was a protest movement that began on September 17, 2011 when protestors occupied a city park near the New York Stock Exchange, where they remained for months. The “Occupy Movement” spread to dozens of other cities. Their slogan, “We are the 99%,” addresses income inequality between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population, especially with regards to how the government has distributed relief for the 2008-2012 Great Recession.

Labor Issues

• Total union membership stands at about 16 million workers, or 14% of the workforce.

• Union membership has been falling steadily since 1958, when it stood at 35% of the workforce.

• The minimum wage is currently $7.25, increased from $5.15 in 2009, by an act of Congress.

• The last increase took place in three stages over a period of years; another increase will require another act of Congress.

• Some candidates want to increase it again now, and automatically increase it to keep up with inflation (known as "indexing").

More labor issues, plus farming issues, are covered on the Jobs page.

Foreign trade and import regulations are covered on the Free Trade page.
Corporate welfare issues are covered on the Government Reform page.
Earned-income Tax Credits are covered on the Tax Reform page.