From USA Today, Burger King, Tim Hortons merge into whopper-size firm
With a new base in Canada, the Burger King merger quickly was lumped into the growing public outcry over tax inversions, which allow U.S. companies to lower their tax bills by reincorporating in a country with lower corporate tax rates through a merger with a foreign firm.
By midday several thousand comments had flooded Burger King’s Facebook page. On Twitter, #TimHortons was a trending topic with #BoycottBurgerKing and similar tweets numbering in the hundreds.
And, from the overheated yet woefully underused brain of the bipedal Roger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Orwellian and Impoverished Future (something like that), were threats of boycott:
“On almost every street corner, there’s an alternative fast food restaurant where [consumers] can buy food once they learn what Burger King is doing,” Hickey told The Huffington Post on Monday. “You don’t even have to announce a boycott to let them know that they’re going to lose business.”
Ya know, for pretty much ever, people have taxed things like cigarettes and booze to reduce consumption. The theory goes that, if you make something more expensive, you’ll not only directly reduce people’s ability to buy it, but you’ll make them think twice about whether that next smoke or drink is really worth the money you’re going to need to pay for it. It’s a belief so ingrained that the people of San Francisco are certain it’ll work, even on carbonated beverages.
Yet, the same logic applied to businesses – that you’ll get less of whatever you tax – causes outrage.
Strangely enough, it *should* cause outrage – at the idiots in government who play Russian roulette with the tax laws. See, a tax is just an expense to a company, like any other, to be minimized as much as possible. Many other countries recognize this, and try to keep corporate taxes as low as they can because – pay attention – that way, companies will want to stay in their countries, hire people, pay wages, supply goods and all sorts of wonderful stuff like that.
But not the US. We believe that we should be able to tax companies as much as we want, and that it’s totally unpatriotic if the companies relocate in response.
However much it pains our socialist souls, we need to tax business as little as we can, so that there’s MORE of it, and more of all those good things having thriving businesses create – jobs and goods. Taxing businesses more means you get LESS of those good things, eventually to the point where companies start looking for ways to get out of the US to someplace that understands basic economics.
Yard Sale of the Mind 