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Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

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Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#31

Post by TACIXAT »

andrewstuart wrote: post #17

Taxes are a good thing. They pay, or should pay, for education, health, military, roads and infrastructure and a wide variety of other stuff that is good for everyone. It puzzles me that people hate taxes so much.

In an ideal world I would prefer to reduce zoning so I could live near my work rather than pay a ton for roads that don't support me as a cyclist and transit user. For paying for healthcare, many illnesses are preventable and I do not think those should be paid for by others. As well, the military does some super questionable things that I do not support. Working in security, with my partner previously in healthcare IT, we have seen our share of wasteful or inefficient government contracts.

I don't have a solution for a better system, but I can absolutely see why people do not like taxes. They aren't building the world I want to see.

Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#32

Post by p1necone »

chii wrote: post #28
programmertote wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself a fairly progressive person. But I think at least some of the people, who don't like paying so much taxes, don't like the fact that the government is allocating the tax money collected, and it could, according to their belief, cause inefficiency. I agree with that notion to a certain degree. For example, I wish there is a way to allocate the tax that I pay yearly to the programs that I want to fund.…

> programs that I think are important for me Which is the whole reason why individuals should not be making such choices. Small, marginalised causes or departments should still get funding. If we followed your method of fund allocation, some aspects of Govt would not get any funding at all. You may also end up funding departments which don't need as much funding. This misallocation is worse than today's imo.

And things where the negative effects of lower funding won't be seen for maybe decades down the track might not get enough funding either because their necessity wouldn't be obvious to the average person. Although we have that problem currently too so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#33

Post by olliej »

rb808 wrote: post #13
olliej wrote: post #3

Can’t we just say “your profit for the purposes of taxation is the profit you report to shareholders?”

Yeah I think this is the real problem. Most people think Amazon makes a lot of money. They even say they made $12B, but they gave billions to of RSUs to employees so the IRS wisely says they didn't make much. The truth is they didn't make much/any money which is why their tax is low.

The problem I have is being able to report different profits to different groups - you should be required to have a single pretax profit number, and that is what you report.

If you really don’t make money then you should be required to report that to your shareholders, and conversely if you tell your shareholders you’re making money, then you should be required to report that value to the irs.

I don’t care which one you use (I mean I do, but in this case it’s not the specific point), what I’m saying is you don’t get to make money by having overvalued shares (by giving one profit number or the market), while not paying tax (by reporting a different number to irs)

Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#34

Post by maxerickson »

malandrew wrote: post #8
scottlegrand2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would extend this sort of simplification to individuals as well. I'd give them a huge upfront deduction all the way up to the median income and then flat tax the remainder.

This just creates a disincentive for those corporations and individuals that are being the most productive. People need to remember that the United States doesn't exist in a vacuum. We are in competition with all the other countries out there. Maximizing productivity matters at a national level. The more competitive we are, the better off Americans are on average. If we lose that lead position to other countries, we…

I think you have to be careful with semantics. If the marginal effect is small, a higher tax rate might be better described as "slightly less motivating" or something, rather than as a disincentive.

The idea that there's a substantial aggregate effect on behavior if you increase taxes from 40% to 41% probably needs a little more proof than just assumption.

Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#35

Post by maxxxxx »

aeternus wrote: post #27
moosey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are things that Amazon needs done to continue to run it's business effectively. Roads need repaired, crime needs to be kept down to acceptable rates, trash needs to be removed, they need to be defended from foreign nations, etc. The need of the corporations of our nation means that everyone, including these companies that don't build their own roads and militaries are on "the government teat". The idea that mon…

I'd be interested to know which studies? While I agree that Amazon should pay their fair share, I find it hard to believe that there is a general loss of efficiency when privatized. Companies have strong incentives to reduce costs, whereas government projects often have negative incentives to reduce costs. (Cost-plus contracting and use-it-or-lose-it budgets). NASA is a great example, that organization made some amaz…

I'd agree that NASA is stagnating but without them there would probably be no private companies building rockets right now. They have done a lot of trial and error figuring out how rockets should work and now private companies are commoditizing this knowledge NASA has accumulated. We would know nothing about Mars either without NASA and Musk could not even dream of going there.

NASA should go back to working on big leaps instead of being forced into things like the SLS by Congress. But private companies would go nowhere without the public investment through NASA.

Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#36

Post by qmanjamz »

Corporate taxes shouldn't exist in the first place. They're just a sneaky way of double-taxing people.

Corporations are really just groups of people. Those people already have to pay taxes on the income they receive from the corporation. They shouldn't have to pay taxes on it again when the corporation reports it as income.

Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#37

Post by jimmy1 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #17

Taxes are a good thing. They pay, or should pay, for education, health, military, roads and infrastructure and a wide variety of other stuff that is good for everyone. It puzzles me that people hate taxes so much.

> It puzzles me that people hate taxes so much.

People's problems with taxes typically fall into two buckets, sometimes both.

1. On a fundamental economics level, the Government is an inefficient third party spender: it spends other peoples money on services it doesn't utilize. There is no feedback loop there besides bureaucracy.

2. We actually have a pretty moderate tax burden already, mostly footed by the average US worker. Everyone talks about the top rate, or federal taxes, but we also have sales tax, property tax, estate tax, in some areas a county tax on top of city or municipality tax, and additional education-related taxes, not counting the outlier states that have even more taxes on top of that. (There's a saying in NYC: Every day is tax day). The common worker pays the majority of the taxes, and they are the ones who are most sensitive to any increase in taxes, and feel pinched already, so they naturally, and very expectedly are against being taxed more. (Realize that the typical HN'er is not the average US worker, making ~60k median salary with few benefits)

Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#38

Post by rb808 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #17

Taxes are a good thing. They pay, or should pay, for education, health, military, roads and infrastructure and a wide variety of other stuff that is good for everyone. It puzzles me that people hate taxes so much.

I'm not sure if you're in America, but in the US it federal income taxes largely goes to 14 giant aircraft carriers, a huge network of nuclear weapons, corporate farmers intensely growing carbs that makes our nation fat and payoffs to various politically well-connected lobby groups. State and local taxes probably are more useful for the things you think benefit society. Social Security and Medicare are of course funded separately. There is nothing for the endless army of homeless people living on the streets.

I know in many countries people are happy to pay taxes, if I saw everyone was treated well, got free healthcare and free universities I'd probably be happier about paying tax too.

Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#39

Post by malandrew »

aeternus wrote: post #18
malandrew wrote: post #4

So much of the tax avoidance tactics ends up as more investment and propels our economy forward. Amazon is a prime example. The government taxes profits. Amazon instead of making a profit, reinvests the money into its business. Even when corporations do stock buy backs, it's not like most of the money goes to the investors to spend frivolously. Instead most of it just gets reinvested in different businesses that have…

Sure, we should be encouraging reinvestment but how do you resolve the unfairness of companies that choose to reinvest themselves vs. pay out a dividend and allow investors to re-invest? Amazon benefits from many government-funded programs: educated workforce, road & rail infrastructure, national defense, judicial contract-enforcement, etc. Is it fair that a company that reinvests gets all that for free while a compa…

How do you resolve that? You let the market decide. By buying Amazon, you’ve decided that Amazon knows how to reinvest that money better than you. If that were not the case, you can sell Amazon shares and buy a company that gives you dividends that you can reinvest as you see fit.

Re: Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

#40

Post by seanwilson »

programmertote wrote: post #21
andrewstuart wrote: post #17

Taxes are a good thing. They pay, or should pay, for education, health, military, roads and infrastructure and a wide variety of other stuff that is good for everyone. It puzzles me that people hate taxes so much.

I consider myself a fairly progressive person. But I think at least some of the people, who don't like paying so much taxes, don't like the fact that the government is allocating the tax money collected, and it could, according to their belief, cause inefficiency. I agree with that notion to a certain degree. For example, I wish there is a way to allocate the tax that I pay yearly to the programs that I want to fund.…

> I wish there is a way to allocate the tax that I pay yearly to the programs that I want to fund

Isn't that what voting for representatives that represent your general viewpoints is meant to do? You delegate decisions to representatives because it wouldn't be practical to keep up with everything you need to make a large number of informed decisions.

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