I find it interesting that, to support his idea that tax breaks for business will generate jobs, Mitt Romney continually points to the fact that Canada's corporate tax rate is only 15%.

He's right, our tax rate is 15% having dropped from 28% in 2000. The idea was that tax breaks would create employment for Canadians- much as the Governor predicts will happen for Americans. So, how has that worked out in Canada?

Our corporations are now sitting on cash reserves of $477 billion, an increase of $320 billion in the last decade. Shareholders and corporate executives have done very well but the unemployed....not so much.

The Canadian unemployment rate is currently 7.4%, slightly less than the U.S. at 7.8%.

And that 7.4% rate is an increase from 6.8% in January 2000, before we started fattening corporate bank accounts and executive wallets.

he doesn't care about facts.

How exactly does a Republican expect to get elected while standing on a "we need to raise corporate taxes" plank??

He won't. However Romney is saying that lowering corporate taxes will bring jobs and economic growth. That's very different, and very wrong. All that will happen is that the corporations will have fatter bottom lines.

Check out the link that alternaut provided in another thread and hear what Hedrick Smith says about the change in corporate ethos from stakeholder capitalism and the "virtuous circle of growth" to what we have today. All of a suddenly it becomes very clear why the middle class has disappeared.

The whole talk is pretty good but, if you're short of time, you can jump in about the 17:00 minute mark and listen for about 10 minutes to get a pretty good feel for it.

I had to chuckle (wryly, I have to admit) when I heard Romney refer to 'trickle-down government', in an obvious attempt to deflect onto Obama some of the (well-earned) pejorative meaning of the 'trickle-down economics' he himself appears to favor. But, as I suspect V1 might say, that's par for the course.

The "trickle-down-anything" theories all hinge on one fundamentally-flawed concept - that giving money to large organizations will automatically cause them to redistribute all that money to "the people". People are greed by nature. Corporations are greedy by mandate. So trickle-down reasoning is fundamentally flawed, it can never work in practice. Any rebel business that tries to pass those sorts of savings onto their customers will on the average eventually be pushed out of business by the greedy ones that surround them. So it's not just a matter of "doesn't usually work", in a free market it simply can NEVER work.

But if you say you want to give the money directly to the people, they label you a communist/ socialist, which I suppose is accurate for the action. And for which Obama (and Democrats in general) tend to catch a lot of bile over, because somehow it's supposed to be unacceptable regardless of the implementation.

You're right. I liked Hedrick Smith's description about what has actually happened. He suggests that the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy (in the hundreds of billions and largely due to that greed) means that rather than a "trickle down" there has been a "geyser up".