this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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Where do Canada’s soaring corporate profits go? Not ‘back into the country’ (breachmedia.ca)
submitted 4 months ago by Five@slrpnk.net to c/canadapolitics@lemmy.ca
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[–] psvrh@lemmy.ca 26 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Gee, it's almost as if trickle down economics doesn't work like they told us?

I remember having this argument with domestic-automobile-driving relatives who swore that buying a Chevy made in Korea was a (instead of a Toyota made in Woodstock, Ontatrio) was always the right choice because "the profits stay in the country". He would not listen when I explained that it didn't matter if the profits went to a rich douchebag in Osaka or a rich doucehbag in Traverse City, MI; what mattered is where the costs were spent, and if they were spent in Ontario, that mattered.

Want the profits to stay in the country? Tax. Them.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Want the profits to stay in the country? Get these workers higher portion of those profits. A perhaps even better way of corporate profit taxation. Not always applicable when the corpo doesn't employ domestic workers of course.

[–] psvrh@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Taxation is a valid way to do that.

It forces business owners to reinvest in their business lest they lose those profits to taxes. Part of that reinvestment is wages and headcount.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 months ago

Of course it's valid. I'm just thinking about it from the point of view of evasion and regulatory capture.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Decades ago, they devoted as much as a third of their profits to reinvestment. Today that number has shrunk to a piddly ten per cent.

Meanwhile, our productivity has been dropping. What a coincidence! 🤔

[–] psvrh@lemmy.ca 15 points 4 months ago

This is the part that drives me absolutely nuts.

When Art Laffer was selling this bullshit worldwide to people like Reagan, Mulroney and Thatcher, when we altered the tax code in such a way that it would incent the rich to hoard cash instead of reinvesting, but they told us they'd absolutely not hoard cash.

And then the rich promptly hoarded cash. Like, holy shit, who knew!?

So what did we do? We sold off crown assets for pennies on the dollar and offered them public-private partnerships and, this is important, even more tax cuts. And they hoarded even more cash, and came up with more rent-seeking and financializations schemes, leading directly to the housing crisis and failing infrastructure that we have now.

Tax. Them.