The Washington Post reports that the business community is mostly OK with modest tax increases to fund infrastructure:
Corporate America’s relatively muted reaction thus far to significant tax hikes was until recently unthinkable and reflects major changes in U.S. politics — the most important of which may be the recent falling out between the GOP and business elites.
When congressional Republicans worked to approve a $2 trillion tax cut in 2017, the GOP and corporate America worked together seamlessly to build support for the measure and push it into law.
Now, that relationship is under unprecedented strain. Congressional Republicans are incensed by corporate criticisms over GOP-backed voting restrictions and stances on culture war issues. Business groups, meanwhile, have increasingly eyed the GOP as a dangerous partner, toxic to their brand and harmful to their ability to recruit young worker talent.
Hmmm. "Toxic" to their brand. Here is Yale associate dean Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who is extremely plugged in to the CEO community, in a Politico story from a few days ago:
Divisiveness in society is not in their interest—short term or long term. They don’t want angry communities; they don’t want fractious, finger-pointing workforces; they don’t want hostile customers; they don’t want confused and angry shareholders.... That is 100 percent at variance with what the business community wants. And that is a million times more important to them than how many dollars of taxes are paid here or there.
If [corporate tax rates] go from 34 percent to 27 percent instead of 22 percent, they’re way less concerned about that. There’s too much focus on taxes. On taxes, what we’re seeing is, in fact, CEOs are willing to concede. There’s a lot of ground there.
The bottom line, so to speak, is that in the past the business community stayed in its lane and didn't worry much about the social conservative wing of the Republican Party. But now they feel like it's out of control and bad for business. Like it or not, big corporations have mostly adopted the vaguely liberal "responsible citizen" attitude of the majority of Americans, namely that climate change is bad; diversity is good; mass killings are bad; immigration is good; trade wars are bad; trans people are good; and so forth. This is the corporate persona that they actively promote in their advertising, and they do it because their market research says this is what most people want.
And of course, perhaps most important, boycotts are bad. Corporations want to sell their stuff to everyone and not have to worry about either side going medieval on them because they're forced to take public sides on issues they don't truly care that much about.
Now, this is an interesting perspective, and you can add to it the fact that businesses, more than individuals, are keenly aware that they need high-quality infrastructure to survive. So they're willing to pony up some new taxes because taxes are, to them, just a cost of doing business, not a holy war led by the ghost of Ronald Reagan.
This all makes sense but it is absolutely not a sign for Democrats to go hog wild in hopes that corporate America has abandoned the GOP for good. For one thing, businesses do still care about unions and regulations, and that's going to keep them at arms distance from Democrats. What's more, they haven't suddenly become a bunch of Bernie bros. All they want is for Republicans to turn down the volume a bit.
In the end, they believe that a happy, contented consumer base is a consumer base that spends lots of money. So that's what they want. Joe Biden may be a Democrat, but he seems very familiar to them in his guise of happy, contented Uncle Joe. By contrast, Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson and others seem like they're doing nothing but upsetting the apple cart over trivial crap like Dr. Seuss and trans bathrooms that no one would care about if they'd just shut up about it.
The big question, of course, is whether they're willing to put their money where their mouths are and stop funding the party if it doesn't calm down. I have my doubts about that. After all, those Democrats and their regulations are still waiting in the wings.
"This is the corporate persona that they actively promote in their advertising, and they do it because their market research says this is what most people want."
So, capitalism is working ... ?
Coke would like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.
Provided someone else does the teaching and the singing, they can spare a few percent more in taxes.
And provided you don't get arrested for handing a Coke to a voter in Georgia.
The big question, of course, is whether they're willing to put their money where their mouths are and stop funding the party if it doesn't calm down.
Hahahahahahahahano.
They will not stop funding Republicans because they fund both sides, all the time. You keep your lines of communication open. The party that is out of power today will be in power tomorrow. It's just good business.
And the rule generally applies to policy as well. You don't jerk their strings except on very particular things that matter to you a great deal. That means staying way out of big, messy, general, kulturkampf issues. You keep your powder dry. That's also just good business.
There is no culture of social responsibility for corporations in this country, as there is in other countries. (In German countries, some of it is even codified into the laws of corporate structure.) They will not act in the public interest. At best, they will do something that is good for them that also happens to be in the public interest. That's what has happened here, and nobody should expect anything else.
But there is a powerful instinct for survival that might easily be triggered if the Republicans overplay their hand. I don’t really know how seriously the Republican base takes all these performative tantrums but it does seem as if they never let go and end up in their own self referencing feedback loop. Sort of the way that memes and things long forgotten by most people keep turning up on Twitter and the internets.
The interesting thing will be how these large corporations react to being threatened. If the pressure doesn’t let up and the base tries to force Republican politicians to pull the trigger on antitrust exemptions and government contracts, the die will be cast and these large, powerful corporations will have a binary choice to bend the knee or kill the Republican Party and drive a stake through its heart.
I wonder how long CEOs will work with Biden and the Dems? Until they can't park their earnings overseas?
talk is cheap and frankly i don't buy it. climate change is also bad for rational corporate actors. disastrous in fact. but they've spent 40 years denying it and supporting the GOP's opposition to doing anything about it. maybe things are different this time, but i wouldn't bet on it.
The business community is not a monolith. Businesses that sell fossil fuels deny climate change because climate change mitigation is bad for their business. Car companies are recognizing that they can do just fine selling electric cars, so they're climbing onto the climate change bandwagon. Insurance companies have been factoring climate change into their long term calculations for a couple of decades. Companies that produce windmills and solar cells have been pushing the climate change narrative. Electric utilities are getting on board; green energy may, at present, be a bit more expensive but decarbonisation is going to call for a lot more electricity.
'...green energy may, at present, be a bit more expensive..'
Providing that we continue to ignore the VAST external costs of dirty enery that the media - including Kevin Drum- appears to be entirely blind to. Which corporations love, of course....
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf
No, green energy is a bit less expensive.
Corporations always have to hedge their political bets. When Republicans start to look like they can still win elections, they'll be friends with the CEOs again.
"If [corporate tax rates] go from 34 percent to 27 percent instead of 22 percent, they’re way less concerned about that."
Paul Krugman had a good column about this. Corporations fund expansion through borrowing, the cost of which is tax deductible anyway. So tax rates are not as important as Republicans seem to believe. This is also the reason that the Trump tax cuts produced little shift from offshore to onshore operations. The larger point is that corporations are concerned, if not unnerved, by the trajectory of the Republican party in the last several years.
There's the direct contributions, then there are those various organizations and industry groups throwing money around.
The thing is, insofar as it doesn't effect the bottom line, corporate entities aren't much like people and really don't much care about ethics, suffering, etc. They're much more like that hypothetical paperclip maximizer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paperclip_maximizer
That they are concerned with the Republican party's behaviour is thus not any sign of wokeness; it's a sign that the Republican party has lurched so far to the right that business is thinking it's bad for business. As it most indubitably is. And the fact is, while corporations are not people, they do have (institutional) memories. They know well that whatever their relative importance to these people is now, very few would fare well under corporate cronyism favored by fascist regimes.
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"they don’t want fractious, finger-pointing workforces"
I know that some of my co-workers are republicans and I don't give any of them the time of day. It's easy enough to freeze them out given my role so no one notices. It really doesn't make for good productivity or cooperation, but that is the price of these crazy times. I'm not interested in even talking to them.
At my old job, knowing there was a three percenter on the team, I was leery.
(I saw their extended cab pickup in the parking lot with the III% decal on the rear window.)
(Funny thing is, I was working for a bank. Didn't know the three percenters consorted with the Zionists.)
Corporations? Concerned about republican politics?
Here let me show you the real reason corporations don't care
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/business/donald-trump-coke-boycott/index.html
Trump and the republicans are empty suits.
They know they cannot "cancel" Coke, or Delta etc - but they continue to support them. Hypocrisy is no longer seen as an embarrassment.
They say things to rile up the base - hoping the base is riled up enough to do the dirty work for them.
Fine example they set eh?
El Jefe was drinking a Diet Coke at the same time as he called for a Coca-Cola boycott.
The truth is, that the GOP has lng been bad for the economy and the business community AS A WHOLE, but if we are talking not about business in general, but corporatism, that is a different animal. If you support monopolies, trusts, rigging the tax and regulatory systems, boom-and-bust industries and sticking the public with the bill, etc. the GOP is the party for you.
If you support free market competition, innovation, sustainable markets, profit, and natural assets, high employment and good pay so that consumers can actually buy things, then the GOP has betrayed you for generations.
Let's not forget, too, that most of the leading lights of today's contemporary GOP -- Trump, Cotton, Hawley, and many others -- are extreme trade/globalization skeptics.
That's not a dynamic that Disney, Walmart, Goldman or Proctor and Gamble want to see strengthened.
Not sure I would say the Coarse Manners of a Yalie or Martial Law Tom are globalization skeptics. I imagine their wives, similar to Soup Cruz's beloved Heidi, have corporate jobs with multinational concerns, so they personally profit off internationalism while preening for votes as nativists.
It's two-faced.
Not sure I would say the Coarse Manners of a Yalie or Martial Law Tom are globalization skeptics.
Well, fair play if your objection to the use of "skeptic" is that it implies the anti-globalization views are sincere. No doubt some are just playing the rubes*. But it seems to me plainly the case that the rhetoric and communication coming from the Commanding Heights of GOP, Inc. is infused with constant Soros/WTO/China/WHO/EU/"globalists" --bashing. So effectively the GOP has indeed become anti-globalization in that its policy agenda is now being increasingly driven by the perceived need to court white, working-class voters. And we see this results in actual, concrete policies (trade wars, anti-immigration policies, hostility to and lack of cooperation with international bodies, reneging on international agreements, literal wall building, etc.).
*I do think there is actual, widespread, Taftian-style neo-isolationism, though, in many right wing quarters these days. It's not all an act. Tucker Carlson comes to mind. So does J.D. Vance. So do Marjorie Taylor Greene and plenty of other crazies. And Tom Cotton is a true believer -- I don't care where he went to school. His kind of dead-eyed fanaticism is no act. (But sure, Hawley and Cruz are different stories).
False. Trade globalism stuff, skeptics they are not. The globalist system is based around dollars and US finance simply must be globalist or die. A lazy post by lazy posters.
Iets note the Suess decision backfired publicly for the company. My guess in a few years the decision will be reversed.....to no great fanfare. Republicans virtue signaling was a poor decision themselves.
On what planet?
No, minimizing divisiveness is not a million times more important to CEO's than tax rates. This is total BS. The reality is the other way around. CEO's are not idiots - they know very well that Republicans divide Americans on race and religion to get support for tax cuts and deregulation and they have been fine with this for over 50 years. One thing they do want is to get rid of Trump, primarily because of his incompetence, not really his divisiveness. His fooling around with international trade is not something they want to repeat. Their judgement may also be that his extremism is actually weakening Republicans. They are probably OK with infrastructure spending, since they know that they will wind up getting a large amount of money directly from it, but they are not going to support any tax raises on themselves.
They may be more selective in their support of Republicans in the near future, avoiding some of the ones who are just on a partisan or cult trip and have no realistic plans for supporting big business. But there is no reason to think that CEO's are really opposed to Republican's deliberate divisiveness, since they have been major beneficiaries of it.
> climate change is bad; diversity is good; mass killings are bad; immigration is good; trade wars are bad; trans people are good; and so forth. This is the corporate persona that they actively promote in their advertising, and they do it because their market research says this is what most people want.
In the case of at least Diversity, there are at least two other reasons for doing it. When you're trying to sell to a diverse marketplace, having a diverse staff developing products is more likely to get you products that meet diverse needs. And there is research that shows a diverse workforce solves problems better than a homogeneous workforce. See, e.g., Scott Page _The Difference_.
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