Six on "our" Economy: Unless Democrats Refute the Myth of a "Good Economy," Trump Likely to Win Second Term; Elizabeth Warre
panaritisp
"On Friday morning, on Medium, the blogging platform of choice for all presidential candidates, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren debuted a plan to “break up Big Tech.” Silicon Valley, she writes, has “too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy.” The problem? Not enough competition. Taking a page from the “hipster antitrust” movement, Warren bemoans the “weak antitrust enforcement” that’s allowed tech megaplatforms to accumulate power without having “to compete as aggressively in key areas like protecting our privacy.”
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But she’s got a plan to change all that. Warren’s proposal centers around what she believes have been two major obstacles to healthy market competition in Silicon Valley: (1) that mergers like Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012 have limited competition in the tech industry; and (2) that platforms that own “proprietary marketplaces,” like Amazon or the App Store, can also participate in those marketplaces, giving them intense competitive advantages.
To combat the first, Warren would appoint regulators charged with “reversing illegal and anti-competitive tech mergers” (and, no doubt, preventing new ones). To address the second, Warren would propose legislation that would designate tech platforms with a total global annual revenue of $90 million or more as “platform utilities,” subject to specific regulations. Once they reached revenues of $25 billion or more, they would no longer be able to participate in the marketplaces they own. (For example, Amazon would be obligated to spin off Amazon Basics.)"
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"But temporary tax breaks aren’t unique to disasters, whether natural or economic.
Instead, Congress has authorized them for a menagerie of reasons, often at the behest of corporate or trade association lobbyists with the connections and financial means to bend lawmakers’ wills to their own and lubricate their pleas with a reliable flow of campaign cash.
Example: A “nuclear production tax credit” buried on page 90 of February’s budget bill. It’s poised to provide roughly $1 billion in benefits to Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power alone — and seems unlikely to benefit anyone else.
Southern Company has aggressively courted federal officials, spending more than $106 million on federal lobbying efforts since 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Its executives and political action committee have also lavished lawmakers with campaign contributions and, in the case of Trump, spent $100,000 last year to help fund his inauguration festivities.
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“Sure enough, we were able to preserve our production tax credits,” Southern Company President Thomas A. Fanning boasted last month in a call with investors.
In December 2010, the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — colloquially, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, after its co-chairmen — warned the body politic of what it considered dangerous government giveaways.
In a 65-page report, the commission excoriated special interest tax carve-outs and called on Congress to axe them.
But the 18-member Simpson-Bowles commission, created by then-President Barack Obama and primarily composed of members of Congress, failed to attain 14 votes needed to formally endorse the report and send it to Congress for a vote. A subsequent House bill modeled after the Simpson-Bowles report suffered greater ignominy, with most members voting it down."
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