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WalletHub Study: New Jersey Ranks Dead Last on Patriotism

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the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, With Americans preparing to show their national pride this Fourth of July, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its report to determine where Americans have the most red, white and blue pride.

WalletHub compared the 50 states across 13 key indicators of patriotism. The data set ranges from average number of military enlistees to share of adults who voted in the 2016 presidential election to AmeriCorps volunteers per capita. New Jersey cam in dead last .

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Obama, Familial Nationhood And Patriotism

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Obama, Familial Nationhood And Patriotism

Posted by Dan Cirucci On February 23, 2015 0 Comment

By Dan Cirucci | Dan Cirucci’s Blogspot

It’s no accident that George Washington was called “the father of our country.”

From the very beginning, American presidents have been somewhat patriarchal — not in the sense of a monarch, of course but more like a strong, caring, reliable dad who sees the best in us, inspires us, rallies us and above all, defends and protects our national family.

That’s what the best dads do. That’s what we’ve come to expect from them.

But what if we had a dad who always noticed our faults? What if he was repeatedly critical? What if he kept pointing it out to others whenever he thought we did something wrong?

Instead of challenging us to aspire to our highest goals, what if he constantly warned us and attempted to lower our aspirations? What if he pushed us to pull back instead of leaping forward?

What would it be like if we had a father who at times appeared to be arrogant and occasionally disdainful toward us?

https://savejersey.com/2015/02/obama-familial-nationhood-and-patriotism/

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Businesses Don’t Leave the U.S. Because of Lack of Patriotism

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Businesses Don’t Leave the U.S. Because of Lack of Patriotism

Curtis Dubay / @CurtisDubay / July 24, 2014

Curtis S. Dubay, a leading expert on tax reform, income tax, corporate tax, international taxes, and the estate tax, is a research fellow in tax and economic policy at The Heritage Foundation.

President Obama will deliver a speech today railing against corporate inversions. That is the process whereby a U.S. business merges with a foreign business and moves the new joint business’s headquarters to the foreign country. Inversions have been a hot topic recently because well-known businesses such as Walgreens, Pfizer, and Medtronic have been looking to engage in the process.

The president, like others before him, decried this practice because he believes it displays a lack of patriotism. However, inversions have nothing to do with love of country. They are all about U.S. businesses keeping up with their global competition.

When a U.S. business inverts it continues paying the same amount of tax it always has on its U.S. income. Any business, no matter where headquartered, pays the 35 percent U.S. corporate tax rate – which is the highest corporate tax rate in the world — on income earned within our borders.

The policy causing all the problems is the extra tax the U.S. levies on the income its businesses earn in foreign countries. This is known as a worldwide tax system. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that taxes the foreign earnings of its businesses.

The worldwide system makes it difficult for U.S. businesses to compete with their international brethren because those businesses don’t face an extra layer of tax when they invest in a growing new market. The extra tax U.S. businesses face makes certain investments unattractive for U.S. businesses that remain attractive to their competitors.

As I explained in a recent paper:

Foreign businesses unencumbered by the worldwide U.S. tax system are free to make investments that the U.S. worldwide tax system makes unprofitable for U.S. businesses. In these situations, U.S. businesses decline in standing compared with their foreign competitors because foreign businesses enjoy increased earnings and enhanced global efficiency from making investments that the U.S. worldwide system forces U.S. businesses to forgo.

If U.S. businesses don’t do anything to remedy this disparity, their relative profitability will fall as they take a pass on more and more growth opportunities their foreign competitors eagerly chase. Eventually this would put the viability of their businesses in jeopardy.

The preferred liberal fix to this problem is to make it harder for businesses to invert by requiring foreign shareholders to own a larger portion of a merged business (50 percent compared to 20 percent under current law) before the headquarters can be moved from the U.S. This change would only make matters worse.

Business will still find ways to remain competitive, such as by selling themselves outright to foreign competition. Raising the threshold could backfire by sending the message to businesses that the U.S. tax system will remain uncompetitive and could become more hostile to investment, causing more to want to flee our shores.

The only fix for this problem is tax reform that reduces the corporate tax rate and stops taxing the foreign income of U.S. businesses. Instead of demonizing U.S. businesses that are trying to do best by their shareholders, employees, and customers, Obama would better serve the country by spending his time working with Congress to make tax reform a reality.