Kickstart: Manufacturing and tax policy

ProPublica recently dug into the numbers behind how business owners benefited from tax changes in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2017. Essentially, it notes that some people were able to transfer some of their income from higher-taxed salary rates to corporate profits, which saw tax rates reduced by a bigger margin.

I am neither a tax expert nor an employer, so I'm not going to get into the questions raised in this story, but I will say that it's an interesting read.

One of the people mentioned in the story is David MacNeil, the owner of MacNeil Automotive Products Ltd., the injection molder and thermoformer of WeatherTech car accessory products based in Bolingbrook, Ill. MacNeil invited ProPublica reporters Robert Faturechi and Justin Elliott to a WeatherTech plant where he defended his salary cut as a way to put more money back into the company and employ more American workers.

"MacNeil defended his wage drop and said he used the tax savings to create more jobs: 'You want me investing in my country — my fellow Americans? Get out of my pocket,'" Faturechi and Elliott wrote.

A few days ago, while driving home, I saw the car in front of me toss a black plastic bag out the window. (The driver was also texting, so I'm sure you join me in judging their sense of what constitutes "acceptable behavior.")

Obviously, for as much as Plastics News writes about efforts by the plastics industry to improve recycling and potential bans and taxes on plastics by government leaders, a lot of what happens in the environment comes down to people making the right — or wrong — choices.

And while we can't pull over polluters driving 75 mph on the freeway, there are things that individuals, businesses and communities are trying to do to try and stop the actions of the few bad actors from hurting everyone else.

Macomb County, a suburban county north of Detroit filled with homes and small businesses, recently launched its own pilot program to capture plastics before they end up in lakes. Chad Livengood writes in our sister paper Crain's Detroit Business about the mounds of rubbish from all types materials that end up in storm drains because people fail to dispose of them properly. Those items then can flow into Lake St. Clair.

"We're very patient. We know [trash is] in there, we just want to get rid of them before they're in the lake," said Candice Miller, the former congresswoman turned Macomb County public works commissioner.

The auto industry is still struggling to make cars during a microchip shortage.

Consulting group AutoForecast Solutions estimates that the industry has lost about 6.4 million vehicles worldwide because of the supply chain interruption.

The shortages bubbled to the surface again last week as Toyota Motor Corp., which had seemed to have production numbers under control, said that it expects to lose about 40 percent of its production in September — 360,000 vehicles.

In North America it will lose an estimated 170,000 vehicles thorugh the end of next month, Automotive News writes.

"The pandemic is clearly far from over and appears, as far as the auto industry's recovery path is concerned, to have a sting in the tail," David Leggett, an analyst with consulting group GlobalData, told AN.