<p>Yes, and for every one example you give me, I can give you thousands of examples of corporations and businesses who are good citizens, obey laws, donate heavily to charaties. The only difference between your examples and mine are that my examples don’t make it in the press that often. Your examples are often mentioned in the press and that is what leads to a distored sense of cynicism about American business.</p>
<p>Analysts offer opinions based on their due diligence. If their opinions were wrong, it does not mean they feed the public misleading information, it simply means their opinions were wrong. There are a lot of large retirement systems that have their own financial analysts and they got hurt just like individual investors.</p>
<p>Shareholders have to affirm compensation packages and if the compensation is not acceptable, they don’t have to pay it. Why do you think there are shareholder meetings.</p>
<p>And for your list of wrongdoings, I can give you a list of people who were fired or put in jail because of those wrongdoings. It’s called accountability.</p>
<p>Oh, PLEASE!</p>
<p>Let’s not be NAIVE here.</p>
<p>While I am perfectly willing to give the benefit of the doubt to small to mid-size business owners, corporate America and Wall St. (w/ some exceptions) is another thing altogether.</p>
<p>Give me any particular sector of industry and I can rattle off corporate misdoings.</p>
<p>And during the boom years of the late 1990s and early 2000s, more than HALF (61% according to the GAO) of US corporations paid ZERO income tax.</p>
<p>Yeah, I’m sure all of that was on the “up and up”.</p>
<p>I would say it is niave not to recognize that corporations do not pay taxes, they merely collect taxes. People pay taxes, not corporations. When corporations do not “pay” taxes to the US government, it is usually because the corporation is not profitable or that the corporation is engaging in behavior rewarded by the US tax code. For example, there are a lot of incentives in oil drilling because of the risk of drilling dry wells. How about he incentives for orphen drugs? Drug companies need tax incentives in order for them to invest in research that does not have a broad market. </p>
<p>The truth is that we should go to a zero tax rate for corporations. The effect would be to eliminate the double taxation of profits and it would lower the cost of goods and services and it would enhance capital formation and investment.</p>
<p>Oh, please - 61% of US corporations weren’t profitable during the BOOM years?</p>
<p>Look, I’ve seen upclose the various off-shore, etc. tax shelters that corporations have been using.</p>
<p>As for tax incentives for drilling - I really don’t think that is needed these days.</p>
<p>As for the pharma companies - do you know how much they spend on advertising and incentives to hospitals/physicians? They spend more $$ on that than on research.</p>