Future President Newt Gingrich gave his first speech since announcing his campaign for president, and took the opportunity to praise a multi-billion dollar corporation for not paying any taxes. GE, a company that reported global profits of $14.2 billion last year while simultaneously cutting 20% of its American workforce to move jobs overseas, did a heckuva job in Gingrich's myopic eyes by paying zero corporate taxes last year.
GE demonstrated "remarkably rational behavior in recognizing the corporate tax rate is clearly past the Laffer curve point," Gingrich opined. "And so 375 tax lawyers in the largest tax department in the world [devised] a very clever strategy which enabled General Electric to pay zero corporate taxes." The "Laffer Curve," according to the Associated Press, is "a theory that says unless taxes are kept low, individuals and corporations will invest less and seek ways to avoid paying taxes."
Gingrich also said that when elected, he'll change the 35 percent corporate tax rate to 12.5 percent—but does it really matter when accountants can just weasel out of the taxes anyway? Another thing to look forward to under the Gingrich administration: Kiss the EPA goodbye, because President Gingrich knows it's just "a centralized bureaucratic control mechanism that's anti-business, anti-local control, committed to an ideological vision of reorganizing America in a way that makes no sense." Once he takes the oath of office, he'll change it to the "Environmental Solutions Agency," and make sure it's friendlier to business. Because the best way to solve all the environment's annoying problems is probably just to get rid of it once and for all.
For more on Newt Gingrich, we turn to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show:
