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Warren Has a Good Beginning for Ending Corporate-Tax Avoidance

bloomberg.com

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

#51

Post by mamon »

maxxxxx wrote: post #29
dmm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flat tax with no exemptions The difficulty with taxation is not calculating tax rates, that's simple, the difficulty is determining what is taxable income/profit.

"The difficulty with taxation is not calculating tax rates, that's simple, the difficulty is determining what is taxable income/profit." Exactly! Flat tax is just another trick to reduce top tax rates while not solving any problems.

Then do not tax income, tax revenue. If company makes, say $10B in the US in sales, they should be required to pay at least 1% of that, i.e $100M in taxes. And before anyone starts complaining that some companies have very thin profit margins: if your profit margin is close to or less than 1% then your business model is unsustainable in the long run anyway.

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

#52

Post by thrill »

Terr_ wrote: post #43
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is correct. People own corporations. So if you're taxing a corporation, you're actually just taxing the people that own it. (And/or its customers or employees.) The only point in taxing corporations vs. people directly is if you're trying to target a set that's difficult to tax otherwise, such as rich people who own big corps but don't realize a lot of income on their own balance sheet. Which IMO is a fair group t…

> The only point in taxing corporations vs. people directly is I disagree, you're skipping a huge governmental benefit that almost all the biggest corporations request/receive: "Limited Liability." If Nuclear Asbestos Infant Toys goes bankrupt, everybody else is picking up the tab for land-cleanup and tumor-removal. In other words, those owners have chosen to socialize their company's risks, so it's only natural and…

The smallest corporation receives that same benefit.

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

#53

Post by basetop »

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.

There are specific taxes for specific projects. I'd say specific taxes are a good thing. For example, gas tax for roads, healthcare tax for health insurance, etc. What most people are opposed to is income tax ( which historically was only used to fund wars ).

I wouldn't classify taxes as "a good thing". I'd say it is a necessary evil or something that could be good in a limited form. If it truly was a good thing, then we should maximize the good and tax everyone at 100% and give all our income to the government.

Also, considering the poor state of our education system, healthcare, infrastructure and "wide variety of other stuff", arguments can be made that taxes aren't as good as people think. Toss in the neverending wars to justify military budgets, you could argue taxes are bad.

But I think most sensible people reject the good/bad extremes and take a moderate view. Some taxation are or can be good. It can also be wasteful and bad.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #25
andrewstuart wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Taxes come out of people's pockets, not corporations. That's not correct - corporations are meant to be paying significant tax.

It is correct. People own corporations. So if you're taxing a corporation, you're actually just taxing the people that own it. (And/or its customers or employees.) The only point in taxing corporations vs. people directly is if you're trying to target a set that's difficult to tax otherwise, such as rich people who own big corps but don't realize a lot of income on their own balance sheet. Which IMO is a fair group t…

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by jcranmer »

rb808 wrote: post #38
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 fund…

> largely goes to 14 giant aircraft carriers

How much do you think the Navy actually costs? Crunching the numbers, the tax the corporation I work at (admittedly, not a small company) is by itself sufficient to pay for running one of those carriers.

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

#56

Post by anoncake »

thrill wrote: post #50
zzzeek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

76% of voters favor higher taxes on the wealthiest americans, 61% favor Warren's "wealth tax", and even 40% support a marginal tax rate of 70% on americans earning $10M or more: http://fortune.com/2019/02/04/support-for-tax-increase-on-we... this would contradict your theory that "the common worker hates taxes", since most Americans want more taxation, not less.

Yet another reason why the Founders' recognition that ruling via a simple majority was an eventual death knoll for a society.

I.e. democracy is bad if you disagree with the results.

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

#57

Post by smileysteve »

AdamM12 wrote: post #6
nordsieck wrote: post #2

All these sorts of schemes are doomed to fail for the very simple reason that corporations are more agile than the law making process. Here's an easy plan to end tax avoidance: 1. Any company that sells more than $X/year to people living in the US needs to be registered in the US. 2. Flat tax with no exemptions (all corporations would be taxed like C-corps). 3. No more rules. A plan that won't work is one that adds e…

Just a thought. How about abolishing corporate tax and then making every entity as pass through entity for tax purposes? At the EOD all entities are owned by someone and that income is taxed at a progressive rate. From what I've read the corporate tax is only 10% of the federal budget anyway. Edit: This wouldn't stop a company from doing what Amazon did and reinvest all the time but at least given a profit an entity…

This! Shareholders either extract value through capital gains or through dividends.

And if you eliminate the corporate tax, it follows that repealing the bush tax cuts would be a thing, because no more double taxation argument.

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

#58

Post by skybrian »

olliej wrote: post #3

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

Companies already sometimes report two numbers, based on GAAP and some other number that's supposedly more informative. I guess they'd do that even more, and stockholders would understand GAAP as the profits for tax purposes (so, lower) and do their own estimates of the "real" profits.

Andrew Yang's proposal of doing a VAT might be another way around it, though I'd guess that probably has other problems.

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

#59

Post by skybrian »

AdamM12 wrote: post #6
nordsieck wrote: post #2

All these sorts of schemes are doomed to fail for the very simple reason that corporations are more agile than the law making process. Here's an easy plan to end tax avoidance: 1. Any company that sells more than $X/year to people living in the US needs to be registered in the US. 2. Flat tax with no exemptions (all corporations would be taxed like C-corps). 3. No more rules. A plan that won't work is one that adds e…

Just a thought. How about abolishing corporate tax and then making every entity as pass through entity for tax purposes? At the EOD all entities are owned by someone and that income is taxed at a progressive rate. From what I've read the corporate tax is only 10% of the federal budget anyway. Edit: This wouldn't stop a company from doing what Amazon did and reinvest all the time but at least given a profit an entity…

Investors can delay capital gains tax by not selling their shares. If they delay them until they die, they don't pay capital gains at all. (Step-up basis for their heirs.)

You kind of want to collect at least some taxes in the year the economic activity happened.

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

#60

Post by refurb »

gnicholas wrote: post #41

The Bloomberg article links to a blog post by Warren, which is headlined by a graphic that says: You probably pay more in federal income taxes than America's biggest, most profitable corporations . This strikes me as an inflammatory — and generally untrue — statement. Even if you assume that all of these corporations pay zero federal income tax (they don't), then roughly half of Americans don't pay more (recall Mitt…

The other thing that i see a lot is cherry picking of data. “Company X paid no tax this year”. It’s often because of some event where they had a big loss, conveniently ignoring all the past years where they paid hundreds of millions in taxes.
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