AT&T lied about everything it promised to do if it got a tax cut

To me, this whole thing was a sham anyway. Promising the working class some tax breaks but large corps get significantly outsized breaks which will turn into jobs if you just vote this thing through!<p>Oh and the deficit will add $1T but no one&#x27;s worried about that.<p>This is all fixable, but we cannot expect the current administration nor party to do it. Honestly, I wish I knew what was going on in the party such that they perform these long term losses for these extremely questionable short term gains.

I&#x27;m not sure what the author&#x27;s complaint is. The quote they provide is:<p>“By immediately lowering the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, this bill will stimulate investment, job creation and economic growth in the United States,” AT&amp;T CEO Randall Stephenson said at the time. “Research tells us that every $1 billion in capital invested in telecom creates about 7,000 good jobs for the middle class,” the CEO proclaimed.<p>Nowhere in this quote it says AT&amp;T specifically promises anything if they get a tax cut, or that they perform any actions at all. It&#x27;s a generic opinion about a nationwide economic policy, not a specific promise of an action of specific company. To call this &quot;lied&quot; is insane, it&#x27;s like I&#x27;d say &quot;lowering taxes is good for middle class&quot; and the tax cut happens but then I get in financial trouble and some journalist writes an article claiming I am a liar because I am middle class, and taxes were cut but I am actually doing worse off! It should be crystal clear that no nationwide economic policy can guarantee every single company would post profits every single year and would never have workforce cuts.<p>If somebody is lying here, it is the author of the article. He obviously have read AT&amp;T statements, as he is quoting them, he should be smart enough to understand what is being said in them, and still he claims AT&amp;T promised what it clearly never did. This is textbook definition of lying.<p>Now, its legitimate to argue that maybe tax cuts were not as good as their proponents promised, and maybe their real effects were different. But one can not do it on the example of one single company! AT&amp;T is indeed in big trouble, as somebody who recently cut off all ties with the company after being a client for more than a decade, I can confirm their service have gone way downhill, while their prices continue the steady march upwards. This company is in trouble, no question about that. But making from that the conclusion that it somehow is related to the tax policy and constitutes a &quot;lie&quot; is plain idiotic and insulting to the reader&#x27;s intelligence.

Lies are only punished if you tell them to rich people.<p>Further down the article, you can see that investors are mad only because AT&amp;T&#x27;s mergers and acquisitions don&#x27;t seem to be paying off fast enough.

Almost all companies&#x27; overwhelming priority is to increase the wealth of their owners and shareholders. That is often diametrically opposed to benefiting customers. Unfortunately too many people have only attended Economics 101, which insists that the way for a company to be successful is to be the best for the market. Economics 101 fails to be evidence based, or realise that the dominant market is not a company&#x27;s customers, it&#x27;s the company ownership.

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like neither party really knows what it&#x27;s doing. If you&#x27;re going to create some big tax bill, passing it early on in your presidency is the worst possible choice you can make. Now, the American people can judge the outcome of that bill and will vote accordingly in 2020. If they&#x27;d simply waited to pass that bill until just before the midterms in 2018 and had it take effect in 2020, then no one would truthfully be able to say that the bill had failed. This isn&#x27;t even some deep insight I&#x27;m making here - it should have been brought up within the first five minutes of the first meeting of creating the bill.<p>You could argue that the strategy may have been to stanch their losses in the 2018 election....but that election went almost as badly as it could possibly have gone for the right anyway (depending on who you ask).

I don&#x27;t really understand corporate taxation, but maybe someone here can educate me.<p>Why do we expect cutting corporate taxes to increase investment? Aren&#x27;t costs associated with infrastructure, hiring, wages, etc. considered deductible business expenses? I suppose there are some edge cases there like payroll taxes, but it seems like most of what a corporation spends money on is effectively coming from pre-tax dollars.

Huh, it&#x27;s almost as if Ajit Pai is corrupt. Whadya know.

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”<p>― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress<p>A tax break is never a long term incentive for an organization. Each year the financial plan is re-base against last years performance. The expectations is always set at continual growth and improvement. A tax break is only seen as a tax break for a single year... especially when you consider a different political establishment could drastically swing the country in the opposite direction.

Set the corporate tax rate to 0. US companies hold trillions in profit overseas which could be used to invest or be taxed when it&#x27;s distributed to shareholders.<p>Edit: If the rich shareholders disproportionately benefit from this then raise capital gains. I&#x27;d wonder though what proportion of shares are actually held by the 1% though, I&#x27;d think a large amount of shares are held in people&#x27;s pensions&#x2F;ETFS&#x2F;401k etc. Theres always calls for taxing the evil corporations more but in the end all taxes are paid by people - either shareholders or employees.