Burger King: Enemy of the people

Comrades, there are wreckers in our midst. The industrialist reactionaries at Burger King have declared their intention to abandon the struggle and join the ranks of the enemy in rightist Canada.

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That’s right. The traitorous corporation Burger King plans to take advantage of the fact that America’s English-speaking neighbor to the north maintains the second-lowest corporate tax rate of any G-7 nation. How dare they?

“The iconic American fast-food brand is in talks to buy coffee-and-donuts chain Tim Hortons and move its headquarters to Canada,” Forbes reported. If concluded, this deal would create the world’s third-largest restaurant company and allow Burger King to take advantage of a tax inversion deal and relocate their headquarters to Canada.

Earlier this summer, the Obama administration threatened to use the power of executive action to limit the ability of American companies to avoid paying America’s corporate tax rate by, as the president said, “renouncing their citizenship.” According to Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal, Burger King’s move is a direct challenge to the White House.

“So much for the theory that Treasury could chill future inversion deals by hinting of possible action,” Potomac Research’s Greg Valliere told Weisenthal.

“[T]he news gives Democrats another talking point,” the Business Insider analyst wrote. “The potential departure of an iconic American company because of ‘corporate greed’ will be trotted out on the campaign trail.”

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Oh, we are well past denouncing “corporate greed.” The time has come for populist rage to hit the streets!

“They’ll keep their money and we all will have to pay their taxes,” an outraged Joe Scarborough said on Monday. “So, you know what I’m going to do so I can afford to pay Burger King’s taxes? I’m just not going to ever go to Burger King again.”

“I think a lot of American should not go to Burger King again if they’re going to cheat,” he added. “It’s wrong for them to do this. They are stealing money from us.”

“Boycott B.K.,” Scarborough’s sidekick, Mika Brzezinski, concurred. “The reason they’re doing this is because you can.”

Brzezinski offered the most constructive suggestion of the group, though she filed to denounce the vrag naroda Burger King with what the White House would likely deem an appropriate level of idealist zeal. She said that Congress should be encouraged to strike a deal which lowers America’s corporate tax rate (at 35%, the highest rate in the industrialized world) and creates incentives for American corporations to repatriate.

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Her proposal did not set MSNBC panel on fire. Impotent expressions of populism are all the rage, you see. It is entirely beside the point to propose policy solutions aimed at resolving situations which inspire well-timed outbursts of righteous angst among Democrats. The idea is to get Democratic voters all worked up to head to the polls in November, so those novel and untested prescriptions like creating economic incentives for companies to stay in the U.S. will have to wait.

Meanwhile, get ready to engage in some virtuous self-deprivation while we all boycott our way to prosperity.

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