Thursday, October 27, 2011

The New Feudalism: Corporations as Your Liege Lords



Watch this video. It tells us that many large firms in Illinois now get to keep either half of the state income tax their employees pay (for current employees) or all of it (for new employees). This is an incentive for the firms to stay in the state. The usual incentive: that of reduced corporate state taxes cannot be used because these firms don't pay any!

So they get the state income tax payments of their employees instead.

This reminds me of the feudal system where the king assigned taxing rights to the barons and so on he wanted to bind himself. The new feudalism is not the same as the old feudalism, because corporations won't give you anything but jobs. It's a start, however.

And naturally I get why Illinois is doing it. A subsidy per each worker will give firms more incentives to hire people. But that this was the only way the state could enact such a subsidy tells us how very little the firms are contributing in state taxes to begin with.