I don't see unemployment benefits as relieving the burden on the employer of employing workers when demand is slack, rather it helps relieve the burden on the employee while he/she transitions to something else.
Then it still benefits the corporation.
Society as a whole is a human resources mine from the corporation's perspective.
A mine operator bears the cost of extracting the valuable nuggets all the same as the cost of extracting the worthless rock.
You can't pay only for the costs of extracting the nuggets.
I disagree with your analogy. I think it misrepresents the corporations view and neglects the employee's view. Employment is where one entity (a company) agrees to pay another entity (the employee) for services rendered. They agree on a price for those services. Either is open to ending the deal based on the agreement.
I also think your analogy (logic) is dangerous in that it opens the door to the corporation being liable to the employee for an indefinite amount of time. That may not have been your intent but that is how some would interpret the analogy.
The point is that Microsoft hires the people who have graduated with an education. These are the gold nuggets.
There is an expensive system in place the bubbles this gold up to the surface where Microsoft can just bend over and pick it up.
I view the corporation as bearing responsibility for funding the expensive system. Do you not?
Don't want to shock you but corporations are not responsible for funding education in practice. Education is largely local/state funded via property, sales and personal/business income taxes. Thus if the costs of education are your rationale for the existence of federal corporate taxes it fails logically.
I appreciate the need to feed you little tidbits that you can win.
It's the entire system cost that matters. There's a whole support network that the federal government pays for. Transportation, defense, entitlements... etc... you can't take them all out and still have a functioning human resources mine.
You can't just keep the lights turned on in the mine -- you need to keep the support beams maintained otherwise the mine will collapse.
Of course, when the corporation only pays for the nuggets they can always just find their gold in a different mine. So prevention of collapse is not really the responsibility of the corporation. Thus, the development centers in India, China, etc... This happens to some degree regardless, but some of this isn't just a shift to lower cost labor pools -- some of it is rather that they can't find enough of the skilled talent here! Missing for example is the people from the ghetto who have the talent but will not make it through the system.
Bernanke is trying to boost consumption, but we don't have a consumption problem. We just don't produce many of the goods that we consume. Bringing income and payroll taxes off of the individual and onto the corporation makes the domestic labor more cost competitive (more domestic production of the goods that we consume).
