Tag Archives: Tim Cook

Picking Apples on the Road to Serfdom

photo credit: Greg Autry
photo credit: Greg Autry

An article on HuffPo reports that taxes on the wealthy have reached a 30 year high while the middle class and poor are now paying diddly squat (that’s a technical term in economics). Tax inequality is no less immoral that income inequality and punishing the most successful for their very success while disincentivizing production is a non-sustainable model, no matter how smugly satisfying it may seem. Talent and capital invariably flee such a regime – see Cuba, Soviet Europe, Argentina, etc.

While the left anxiously ruminates about equality, the right is obsessed with growth at any cost. Equality without growth is equality in poverty. See Lady Thatcher’s powerful argument on that point. However, growth without equality invariably leads to resentment, in a democracy that means welfare and populist demagoguery which kills the growth. This is followed by the rise of an idiot like Hugo Chavez and deepening poverty. Two voyages to the same terrible destination.

Ironically, its the capitalist, captains of industry that charted our course to socialist misery by creating a society that would make Karl Marx salivate – one in which returns to capital are ever increasing and returns to labor dwindle. Stocks roar and wages fall. It’s full speed ahead for the 1%; America’s future and American values be damned! Let the rest of us save up our pennies and send our kids to Stanford so they can ALL design the next iPhone – sure.

The path to both sustainable growth and increased social equality will NOT be found in taxes and transfer payments. The solution both the left and right must embrace is the creation of a policy environment that that motivates businesses to invest in America and to hire American workers. We must do that even if it is a bit less efficient than our current model of funding Chinese communism in exchange for raping their environment and borrowing their slave labor. This means instituting a more competitive tax and regulatory environment, but doing so with an absolute refusal to join a “race to the bottom” in civilized standards of living for our citizens.

Consider Apple’s $140billion+ cash hoard. Most of it is overseas avoiding the US corporate tax (highest in the world). Very little of what is in the US is invested in creating good American jobs (sorry dudes in blue shirts). Our current political plan appears to be: tax the hell out of Apple and its wealthy shareholders and give that money to the chronically unemployed so they can sit at home and play video games on their Chinese made iPads.

Instead, we could abandon harsh ideology and simply make it fairly painful for Apple to invest further in China by penalizing them for the very benefits they gain via China’s illegal subsidies, currency manipulation, and environmental abuse. We should also throw in the cost of defending ourselves from the Chinese hacking, countering China’s massive military build up and dealing with the escalating regional tension in Asia that Apple is indirectly funding.

I propose that we cut Apple’s domestic taxes and then forward the bill for extended unemployment payments, our West Coast missile defense system, and Obama’s “Asian Pivot” directly to CEO, Tim Cook – with postage due.

Greg Autry serves as Senior Economist with the American Jobs Alliance, Economist with theCoalition for a Prosperous America and is co-author (with Peter Navarro) of Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – a Global Call to Action. He blogs regularly at: http://www.gregautry.us/blog  and on the Huffington Post.

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Memo to Apple CEO: Stop trashing the environment for profit

 

 

In another installment of what Nightline missed in their “exclusive” Foxconn City visit we look at the unsavory way the Chinese Communist Party uses environmental abuse as an economic weapon against the West.

We’ve said before, Apple does indeed make insanely great products. This blog is written on a Mac and the video below was edited on one. Taiwanese-managed Foxconn manufacturers them to a standard far above the normal crap we get from communist China. We have a great deal of respect for Apple’s brilliant business strategy and the business acumen of Hon Hai’s (Foxconn) inspirational founder, Terry Guo. That said, all is not well in the Middle Kingdom.

Foxconn and Apple have chosen to operate inside this Orwellian gulag of a nation in order to increase their short term profits. The fact that Apple and Foxconn folks sincerely care about the environment makes it all the worse, because by doing business in communist China they fund, empower and legitimize a system that is inherently evil. Clearly neither of these firms gives a damn about the unemployed and underemployed American workers (and Taiwanese ones) who cannot compete against a country whose brutal rulers secretly advocate environmental abuse while running a big lie propaganda campaign to paint themselves green. While they are far from alone and far from the most culpable Cook and Guo are the visible leaders in the global race to the bottom of environmental standards.

Check this out:

 

httpv://youtu.be/US5OJV5juOo

Or watch the video on our YouTube Channel

 

If you don’t like what you’ve just seen and heard, please forward it to anyone you know at Apple as well as to your US Congressperson and Senator. Do it over and over again until they finally get it. If you own Apple stock (like I do) please send a note to CEO Tim Cook telling him that you’d sleep better at night if you weren’t contributing to the destruction of the Earth and if your neighbors had jobs.

– Greg Autry teaches Macroeconomics at the Merage School of Business, UC Irvine and is co-author with Peter Navarro of “Death by China” and serves as senior economist for the American Jobs Alliance.

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