Brilliant plan: Fire teachers to give tax breaks to big business
Teachers Fired To Pay For Huge Corporate Tax Cut – Why?
I’ve been asking around and it seems that most Californians don’t know that the budget deal that fires so many teachers also has a huge tax cut just for big, multi-state and multi-national corporations.
But it’s true. Last month’s budget deal that fires teachers, cuts essential government services, and guts the investments that bring future economic benefits also has a huge tax cut for the largest of corporations. While this part of the deal has been kept pretty quiet, the LA Times had a story, Business the big winner in California budget plan. From the story,
The average Californian’s taxes would shoot up five different ways in the state budget blueprint that lawmakers hope to vote on this weekend. But the bipartisan plan for wiping out the state’s giant deficit isn’t so bad for large corporations, many of which would receive a permanent windfall.
About $1 billion in corporate tax breaks – directed mostly at multi-state and multinational companies – is tucked into the proposal.
But wait, won’t a big corporate tax cut cause companies to come to California, creating jobs? No, they are already here and it will drive them away, because it is paid for by firing teachers:
A study by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, released in 2005, found that most companies decide where to locate based not on tax breaks but on factors such as the availability of a highly educated workforce. California’s proposed plan would cut spending on higher education by hundreds of millions of dollars. </em>
That’s the same short sighted, profit now nonsense that ran California- and the rest of the nation- into a hole. Teachers are the infrastructure of our country- a country that is already generally outperformed scholastically by most every other nation in the civilized world. But hey, as long as ATT and Philip Morris get a bit more grease, the rest of us can be content living in a nation of fat cats on one side, and uneducated dolts on the other. Oh, joyous.
