Tax spending in the form of corporate tax breaks for certain groups of companies—such as oil and gas producers, insurance companies, U.S. multinationals, as well as others—amounts to more than $150 billion annually. These tax breaks enable companies to pay a much lower effective tax rate. In other words, these tax breaks dramatically reduce the amount of a corporation’s income that is subject to the 35 percent statutory corporate income tax rate, making their overall effective tax rate lower than the statutory rate—in some cases, much lower. For example, in a study that compared income companies reported on their 2010 financial books with income that they reported on their 2010 corporate tax returns, the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that profitable U.S. corporations paid an effective tax rate of 22.7 percent. In a 2012 report, the U.S. Department of the Treasury found that U.S. corporate effective tax rates were in the same range as those of its G7 trading partners despite the higher statutory corporate income tax rate in the United States.

the Cold War “ontology of the enemy”—the image of the adversary as a “cold-blooded, machinelike opponent . . . a mechanized Enemy Other.” The machine does not have ideals or values, issues on which it might compromise or goals that might encompass something other than its own aggrandizement. It wants only to win, and every move it makes is a move in that game. It’s a short step from this abstraction to the domino theory, the belief that Communist expansion is an inexorable and practically mindless force.