Increasingly positive views of socialism at Gallup are mostly at the expense of the growth of corporate power in big businesses

 Increasingly positive views of socialism at Gallup are mostly at the expense of the growth of corporate power in big businesses.

There's an app for that, but we don't use it enough.

It's called antitrust law.

And of course since Citizens United on January 21, 2010, money has increased the political power of the speech of corporations, so it makes sense that positive views of big business have collapsed from 50 to 35 over the period of the survey. 

American patriots have hated the political power of corporations since before the Revolution of 1776, rejecting the argument meant to appeal to the Loyalists among us, that we are mere subjects of his royal highness, The Boss, The Man, The King:

An English colony is a number of persons, to whom the king grants a charter, permitting them to settle in some distant country, and enabling them to constitute a corporation enjoying such powers as the charter grants, to be administered in such forms as the charter prescribes. As a corporation, they make laws for themselves; but as a corporation, subsisting by a grant from higher authority, to the control of that authority they continue subject. ...  

-- Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny, 1775

 That's why we say . . .

 

 

The cult is the basis of culture, and our cult worships money

 

NBC News: Labor share of business income falls to historic lows as corporate profits explode

American workers are getting the smallest slice of the pie on record

 

Rob Wile

 

Since 2000, the value of the S&P 500 stock index has gained about 600%. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted worker earnings have climbed just 12.5%. 

 

It is now the least rewarding time to be a worker in the U.S. economy since the government started keeping track.

The share of economic growth captured by labor in the form of compensation like wages fell to a record low last quarter, hitting 52.8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which began recording the statistic in 1947.

In other words, even as the economy continues to grow, worker pay comprises an ever smaller slice of the pie.

The data comes as stock prices continue to hover near all-time highs, while wage growth is barely keeping up with inflation.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that wage growth slowed to its lowest rate in five years in August and remains below the broader pace of price growth.

It’s the latest data point reflecting a decades-long stagnation in returns to labor, while corporate profits have exploded.

Since approximately the start of this century, the S&P 500 stock index has gained about 600%. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted worker earnings have climbed just 12.5%.

Wages vs. inflation

Since April, the prices consumers pay are rising faster than wages.

As of April 2026, inflation has outpaced wages, spiking in May at 4.2% before falling to 3.3% in July. Wages have continued a downward trend since March 2025 when the annual change was 4.2%, falling to 3.1% in August 2026.

What’s driving it all?

Economists aren’t really certain about the exact cause, but a confluence of factors appears to be at work, according to Mike Konczal, vice president of policy and research at the Economic Security Project and a former White House chief economist in the Biden administration.

The start of the century coincided with what is known as the “China Shock,” as Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization massively accelerated globalization and offshoring.

The shock chipped away at the number of traditional blue-collar workers in the U.S., and it reduced the bargaining power of those who remained.

Meanwhile, technological advances have allowed the typical worker to generate larger volumes of more valuable services.

But those gains are being captured as company profits, not as wage growth.

The trend appeared to reverse, or at least stabilize, for a brief period during the post-pandemic economic reopening. But exactly why that happened is still not entirely clear.

The decline resumed after President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025.

Konczal said some economists believe corporations have sought to increase their profit margins at the expense of higher wages for workers in order compensate for the economic uncertainty that Trump’s tariff policies have created.

Regardless of the specific reasons behind the renewed drop in gains for labor, the decline has implications for all of society, Konczal said.

It stands to increase wealth inequality by putting more resources in the hands of capital owners — namely stock market investors — while the returns to workers stagnate.

It also has fiscal implications: Konczal said efforts to increase taxes on wealth or corporate profits have proved politically untenable so far, compared with the current arrangement of taxing earned income and wages instead.

“The economy can start to become unequal in a way that it’s not just the CEO who makes more, but people who own shares do, and that wealth is very, very unequal,” he said.

 

 

Inflation been berry berry good to Chico, profit margins have never been higher

 Net profits margins running at 16.9% instead of 12.4%.

These charts show why stocks keep rallying. Profit margins are the highest on record

And of course they write this headline with a straight face:

Wholesale prices were flat in July, below expectations for 0.2% increase 

I got your record corporate profits right here pal, month after month after month:

... On an annual basis, the headline PPI increased 4.7% for the all-items index and 4.2% for core, according to unadjusted figures. ...

 

  

CNBC doesn't really want to talk about how bad April's increase in wholesale prices was, doesn't mention the year over year increase to core, stripping out food and energy, at 5.2%

 Wholesale inflation jumps 6% in April on annual basis, biggest increase since 2022

... The producer price index rose a seasonally adjusted 1.4% for the month, much higher than the 0.5% Dow Jones consensus forecast and the upwardly revised 0.7% March increase, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. This was the largest monthly gain since March 2022.

On an annual basis, the index was up 6%, the biggest increase since December 2022.

Excluding food and energy, the core PPI accelerated 1%, compared with the 0.4% estimate. ...

While much of the inflation move has been attributed to the war and President Donald Trump’s tariffs that were introduced a year ago, the PPI data shows the price pressures were broad-based. ...

I'll say.

Looks to me like producers giving us all the middle finger. 

I expect new record high corporate profits. 

 

 

Inflation, whether pandemic induced or war induced, has been berry berry good for hiding price increases to boost corporate profits

 

Corporate America Aims to Preserve Profit Streak During War in Iran:  Higher inflation is leading companies to raise prices without sacrificing margins

 

... Sonu Varghese, the global macro strategist at the Carson Group, a financial firm, said many of the companies he tracked viewed inflation pressures from “outside shocks,” such as this war, “as an opportunity to raise prices and boosts margins,” which can, in turn, raise profits.

“I think we’re actually going to get some margin expansion,” Mr. Varghese added. ...

 

Kamala Harris releases 82-page economic plan, CNBC's 40-plus paragraph article says her anti-price-gouging plan is still unclear lol

 Kamala Harris wants to take on price gouging. It’s hard to find agreement on what it even is

As she unveiled her most detailed economic plan yet this week, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris pledged to fight price gouging in order to rein in voters’ grocery costs.

The vice president first teased the federal ban in mid-August, prompting former President Donald Trump to attack the plan as “Soviet-style” price controls. Although Harris released more detail Wednesday as part of her 82-page economic plan, it’s still unclear what price hikes her administration would see as illegal “price gouging.”

“The bill will set rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers during times of crisis to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries,” the Harris-Walz campaign wrote in the policy pitch, released about six weeks before Election Day. ...

Still, Harris would face a tough road to passing any price-gouging legislation in Congress, and it’s still not clear how cracking down on price increases would work in practice.

More vague generalities. That's all she's got, folks. 

Democrats profiting off the little guy: Corporate profits at 12% under Bidenflation have been much better than under Trump at 4%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dirty little secret about corporate profits: they've been much better after 13 quarters of Biden than they were after 16 quarters of Trump, averaging 4.14% yoy under Trump and 12.13% under Biden.

 

This is a great little arrangement between Democrats and big business. Democrat-aligned business makes off with your cash while politicians pretend to do something about it in exchange for campaign contributions, with the important benefit that inflation inflates away the cost of their spendthrift deficit spending.

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which did no such thing and Democrats said would cost nothing, is estimated to cost the taxpayers nearly $800 billion by 2031 according to the liberal Brookings Institution.

This is your fascist America.

 

Shielding price increases by blaming them on inflation has been the modus operandi of the period. Price gouging is real, but gimmicks which address only symptoms won't solve the problem, which is caused by increasing the money supply and deliberately increasing other costs as a matter of policy, like energy and regulation, which businesses also can plausibly blame.

 

But Harris knows the demagogic value of running against price gouging.

 

Price controls poll particularly well. You can fool most of the people most of the time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hey look, corporate profits are higher than ever under capitalist pig Joe Biden hehe

 

Jay Powell's inflation has been bery bery good for corporate profits and a federal government drunk on debt

 

Inflation remains very, very profitable for corporations and federal government spendthrifts, at your expense

 

Gene Sperling: Republican tax reform will shift even more corporate profits and jobs abroad

You'd better pray this reform effort fails, for your kids' sake.

In The Atlantic here:

Now that the bill is advancing, it’s clear that things aren’t as bad as many feared. They’re worse. . . .

[T]he tax plan fails when it comes to incentives to shift profits and operations overseas and to curtail the obsession of major multinational companies with international tax arbitrage that has nothing to do with innovation, productivity or job creation. Indeed, the ability to blend income from intangibles and routine profits, and from investment in higher tax nations with tax havens with zero taxes, leads to a worst of all worlds scenario: an even greater corporate focus on international tax minimization through a careful mixture of shifting profits and operations overseas.

If there was one thing the GOP international tax bill was advertised to accomplish, it was that it would favor locating jobs and profits in the United States. It does just the opposite—expanding the degree our tax system tilts the playing field against American taxpayers and American workers.

The inflation-adjusted price of the average prime slave from 1860 is $44,100, very close to the 2014 raw average US wage of $44,569

The average price of a prime slave from 1860 was about $1,500. Using the consumer price index, that's the equivalent of about $44,100 in 2014. The raw US average wage in 2014 was $44,569 according to the Social Security Administration.

The annual mean price of the labor of a slave from 1860 brought a return on investment of about 12%, and on a month to month basis about 14%.  In 2014, corporate profits before taxes came to 12.7% of GDP.

Total slave population in 1860 is estimated to be 3.95 million,  14.7% of the total white population.

See The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert Evans Jr. of MIT (1962), here.

The UK's Jeremy Warner joins the cognoscenti: high asset prices are going bye-bye

Here:

"It is as if all the inflation that used to go into consumer prices has been diverted into financial assets and real estate instead. ... Static or falling prices, on the other hand, are always extremely bad for corporate profits in the long term. ... In a deflationary environment, equities and property will inevitably perform badly: only fixed-interest sovereign bonds, the least risky form of investment, do well."

The keys to corporate profits since the 2008 panic

Layoffs and ZIRP and buybacks, oh my! Layoffs and ZIRP and buybacks, oh my!

American Businesses Have Saved $2.8 Trillion In Last Four Years Due To ZIRP

In the form of lower borrowing costs, according to this story from Bloomberg:

America’s companies, from Apple Inc. (AAPL) to Verizon Communications Inc., are saving about $700 billion in interest payments with the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented stimulus. ...

Savings of about $700 billion represents the difference between what companies that have sold bonds since Sept. 17, 2009, are paying annually based on an average maturity of nine years for securities in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Corporate & High Yield Index, versus what they might have paid before the crisis.

After rising as high as 11.1 percent on Oct. 28, 2008, it wasn’t until Sept. 17, 2009 that yields fell below the pre-Lehman average of 6.14 percent, the Bank of America Merrill Lynch index shows.

------------------------------------------------------------

Just another reason corporate profits after taxes have skyrocketed to another record seasonally-adjusted annual rate of $1.83 trillion for Q2 2013.

A Rationale For Ending The Tax On Corporate Profits

John Steele Gordon provides a helpful survey of the history of American taxation, here, including the chronically avoided topic of how the tax on corporate profits (ruled constitutional as an excise tax "on the privilege of doing business as a corporation") was meant to be a temporary tax on the rich:

In the first decade of the 20th century, the stock of corporations was owned almost entirely by the rich. So taxing corporate profits was, in a very real sense, taxing the rich. Congress passed the legislation and in 1911 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the tax was constitutional. ...

Unfortunately, the [subsequent] personal income tax did not replace the corporate income tax that had originally been intended only as a stopgap. Nor did Congress integrate the two taxes so that income, whether corporate or personal, was only taxed once. The two taxes simply ignore each other as if corporations are owned by Martians, not people.

At the tax levels of the early 20th century, the harm was inconsequential. But when tax levels rose dramatically to fund the great wars that soon followed the personal income tax, the pressure to legally avoid taxes rose equally. As a result, the two separate, uncoordinated tax systems became a uniquely powerful engine of complexity as accountants and lawyers have played the two systems off each other and Congress has tried, unsuccessfully, to close or regulate the resulting “loopholes.” ...

The two income taxes have been the main reason that the tax code has exploded to a 4-million-word incomprehensible mess.

Recalculating Herman Cain's 999 Plan For Calendar Year 2008

Herman Cain's 999 Plan continues to get tweaked by none other than Herman Cain himself, in response to criticisms and questions about it in the media in the wake of recent Republican presidential debates.

Some of the additional information he is supplying looks to have been latent and just previously unexplained, while other information has the feel of modification. In any event, the unsettling thing about this is that the 999 Plan appears to be something of a work in progress, not a finished, fully vetted proposal, which makes it less sellable politically.

One question which seems so important to the left, for obvious reasons, has been the plan's ability to fund the Leviathan State's appetite.

Previously it seemed to me that the plan was woefully inadequate to the task. But some of the additional information that has come out makes me more sanguine, if that's the right word as the taxpayer stares into the maw of the bloodthirsty Beast.

For example, with respect to the 9 percent corporate tax, it turns out that, for reasons which I still do not understand, business' cost of labor is no longer deductible for tax purposes under the plan. So for 2008 when corporate profits posted as $1.25 trillion, you theoretically must add back in net compensation of nearly $6.2 trillion. I think. A 9 percent tax on $7.45 trillion now yields a much higher corporate contribution to federal revenue for 2008 of $671 billion.

Combine that with a 9 percent tax on adjusted gross income of $8.5 trillion equaling $765 billion and with a 9 percent tax on personal consumption expenditures of approximately $10.5 trillion equaling $945 billion, the resulting sum is $2.38 trillion, just shy of the actual collected in 2008 under the current system, which was $2.5 trillion.

And if I read the language of the 999 Plan correctly, there will also be substantial tariff revenue from imports designed to level the playing field between them and our own exports. Imports in 2008 of $2.5 trillion taxed at 9 percent would yield an additional $225 billion in revenue, more than enough to cover the $120 billion shortfall. Presumably some imports would not be so taxed due to pre-existing trade agreements, but the potential is obviously there for far more revenue from tariffs than America presently collects.

Mr. Cain is also now stating that his plan is undecided about how to remove the regressivity of the sales tax on the poorest Americans, but that it will. This will, of course, reduce the revenue described above, as will the income tax deduction for charitable contributions.

Herman Cain Comes Closest to a True Flat Tax

So says Stephen Moore for The Wall Street Journal, here, pointing out that FICA taxes do go in the shredder under Cain's 999 plan:

But the candidate who comes closest to a true flat tax is Herman Cain, the former Godfather's Pizza CEO. His argument for a "9-9-9" plan puts the current income and payroll taxes in the shredder and replaces them with a 9% personal income tax with no deductions, a 9% net business income tax, and a 9% national sales tax.

That would be rocket fuel for the economy, though the combination of a federal sales tax and an income tax is a big worry. But at least Mr. Cain has super-sized solutions to an economy with super-sized problems.

Solution? In 2008 Cain's 999 plan would have meant 900 billion fewer dollars in receipts for federal social insurance. I don't see how he could make up that difference, let alone an additional $300+ billion he comes up short compared to what was actually collected in 2008.

It looks more like a stealth plan to bankrupt Social Security and Medicare by ignoring it.

• A 9 percent tax on $8.50 trillion in adjusted gross incomes in 2008 comes to $765 billion (actual collected in 2008 was $1.03 trillion).

This is actually a huge tax cut on the wealthy and a big tax increase on everyone else. And does Cain intend to do away with deductions even for IRAs and 401Ks? If so that AGI number would be much higher, and the tax revenue higher, along with your tax bill. At least the billionaire will pay the same rate as the janitor, as Obama now famously says he wants.

• A 9 percent tax on $1.25 trillion in corporate profits comes to $113 billion (actual collected was $309 billion).

This is a huge tax cut on business, which is why Stephen Moore calls Cain's plan rocket fuel.

• A 9 percent tax on $4.40 trillion in total retail and food service consumer spending in 2008 comes to $396 billion. 

Does Cain intend this to be wider in scope than indicated? It is often said that 70 percent of the economy is consumer spending. In a $15 trillion economy, that's $10.5 trillion. A 9 percent tax on that would boost the receipts of a national sales tax to $945 billion.

But all told, Cain's plan would have collected only $1.274 trillion in federal revenue for 2008 when the government actually collected $2.5 trillion and still ran a deficit of close to $400 billion anyway.

We're currently spending $3.8 trillion in this country under Obama, $1 trillion more than in 2008. The 999 plan doesn't look up to the task.

Herman Cain's 999 Plan Would Have Cut Corporate Taxes in 2008 by 64 Percent

Average annual corporate profits for 2008, 2009, and 2010 were $1.47 trillion.

The average annual corporate tax paid on those profits was $331 billion for an average annual corporate tax rate of 22.5 percent.

How Herman Cain thinks he can lower the rate to 9 percent and still have enough revenue in combination with a 9 percent income tax rate and a 9 percent national sales tax rate is beyond me.

In 2008, those 9 percent rates would have yielded a mere $112 billion in corporate taxes (instead of the $309 billion actually collected), $400 billion in sales taxes, and $765 billion in income taxes, or $1.223 trillion short of the $2.5 trillion actually collected by the federal government.

If Cain leaves social insurance taxes in place, which would make it a 9997.65 Plan, not a 999 Plan, the $900 billion collected in 2008 in FICA taxes would still have left him $323 billion short of actual revenue collected in 2008.

See the corporate profits data in Table 11 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, here: