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The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

larrysummers.com

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Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#111
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative to attempting to tax companies, is to tax people. There is no company that would just exist to forever eat money away from the public. Eventually they intend to pay the profits to a real person (either in money, or other benefits). Taxing that dividend or salary transaction might be simple enough to just work. And you have a real person to put to jail when the taxes were avoided.

Forever is a long time. In practice there are wealthy people willing to pass vast majority of their wealth through generations. Personally I don't think it is fair or likely healthy in the long term for the society to let vast majority of the income/wealth of wealthy and thus powerful people to go untaxed - even[1] if that income/wealth is not consumed. [1] Actually it should be "especially if it is not consumed". In…

> Personally I don't think it is fair or likely healthy in the long term for the society to let vast majority of the income/wealth of wealthy and thus powerful people to go untaxed

But this is already happening even with the current system that attempts to tax company profits, isn't it? My point is that taxing the person instead of the company would enable taxing the wealthy. There are already quite severe restrictions of using company assets for your personal benefit, at least where I live that is taxable as income.

I should amend how I expressed the idea: I never meant that companies pay no tax at all, only that they'd pay no tax on profit (which can be hidden for the yearly checkpoint by creative accounting). That leaves all sorts of tax categories still available for use (land, transactions, resource usage), which are much harder to hide or deny. A company making profit would be involved in some activity that would be taxable through these. Money on a bank account is by itself a bad medium to store wealth, as it's generally subject to 1%~5% yearly inflation.

Whether wealth (aside from income/profit) of individuals or companies should be taxed is a different discussion. Many countries choose to tax wealth only when it's in form of land or constructed property.

Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#112

I'm not sure I understand (or agree with) his assumption that the full tax returns of corporations are private matters and always must be. That's a choice that Congress can make. If corporations are the way for entities to achieve individual profits without individual liabilities, then surely privacy is not the same concern as for individuals' tax returns. Why are corporations (whose structure is granted by law to re…

But our leaders aren't incentivized to do it, because our leaders are incentivized only by the very corporations in question. As in, the corporations, through lobbying, quite literally write the legislation, not the people we actually elect to office. So uprooting corporate tax info transparency rules is something that will never come to pass until other existing systems are demolished, but how do you get the legisla…

> uprooting corporate tax info transparency rules

Also the Big Four are not going to like that, they make a lot of money off this.

Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe? Ingvar Kamprad net worth was "only" 3 billion $ That's about 25 billion $ lower than if he had unfettered access to all of IKEA's worth. https://www.forbes.com/profile/ingvar-kamprad/ If you like how the company you built spends money more than how the state spends money, you're going to want your company to capture more money/worth without relinquishing it to the public. Another rationale could also be when y…

> Also, this works well with the ethos of some companies (like Amazon, allegedly) which reinvest a lot of their profits to cut margins/develop new products... And overall just tighten their hold on the market Should a businesses goal not be to tighten their hold on the market? I’m pretty sure if I don’t, someone else will.

Pure greed dictates that companies must do what is best for the individual company. Grow like cancer, engulf all competition, capture the market etc.

However, the owners of the company are humans that do not need to be constrained by those rules. Indeed, humans can hold other values higher - such as seeing that acting in the benefit of the entire society or even to benefit the entire planet is better than focusing on the best for a single corporation.

Pretend for a while that you are the majority owner of an internet company that preys on attention. You can capture the attention of millions, even billions of humans, and grow your vast empire. You can even become so successful that humans choose your product before the attention of other humans, choosing the dopamin kick from social media before real social interactions.

But...should you? Replacing the social interactions of an entire planet might make you rich today, but the price might be very high. Even your own offspring might suffer and perish in a world where social life has been replaced by hearts, thumbs up and endless scrolling.

Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#114
Vague idea:

The government can compulsorily acquire the domestic domiciled assets of any company for 50? 100? times that company's declared taxable income with some appropriate average over the previous 5 years.

You earn nothing taxable here? Great for your tax bill but now you can worry about the capital loss and loss of control of trademarks & patents domestically. Better to declare the profit and pay the tax like an honest person...

Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#115

Or we could just focus on taxing the unearned value arising out of land control instead of property. Land tax + VAT would be ideal and difficult to avoid.

Or just tax pollution and resource (land et al) usage. That will rearrange the economy to overcome one of the biggest challenges of our time.

Tax on labour and housing are dis-incentivizing "good behavior".

Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#116
I don’t fully understand why corporations are taxed in the first place.

All the money the corporation takes in ultimately gets spent on operating expenses, or is profit that is then distributed to shareholders who then owe taxes on that income.

If it’s annoying and counter intuitive that corporations are in some legal senses considered people, it is even more confusing that they pay taxes.

This sets up a crazy situation where employees of the corporations start lobbying and messing with policy and regulations so it favors the organization.

Seems like bad piled on top of bad. Increasing the tax rate on investment income is basically the same thing as taxing corporations, but would remove all these perverse incentives.

Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#117

I read about tax avoidance schemes like corporate inversions or sending all your patents to a company in some tax free haven and licensing your patents from your company for all your profits, and so on, and it makes me really mad. Companies making many billions of dollars paying no taxes. My intuition is that if I personally came up with a cute "gotcha" like this where I wound up paying zero in taxes because of some…

Earlier this year I read the book The Chickenshit Club on the advice of someone on here. It has a lot of interesting information but I didn't agree with the author's summary, basically: "prosecutors are cowardly and don't fight cases that don't look easily winnable. They should be braver and go for the highest-profile cases to make a statement". This seems wrong to me because a) litigating a complex, lengthy case and…

The flaw is simple: you'll end up with only having as criminal defence attorneys those people who didn't succeed at being civil case attorneys, as everyone will prefer to earn more money with mostly the same training. So you won't have any outstanding criminal defence attorneys, which is equivalent to undermining the rights of those of need to defend themselves in criminal cases.

If you want to go this way, you have to go for the full-fledged solution: either the defendant choses their attorney (at a capped price) or an attorney shall be selected at random among all attorneys registered with the bar and must take charge of the case, the only exception being if they have a valid conflict of interest in that case.

Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#118

I'm not sure I understand (or agree with) his assumption that the full tax returns of corporations are private matters and always must be. That's a choice that Congress can make. If corporations are the way for entities to achieve individual profits without individual liabilities, then surely privacy is not the same concern as for individuals' tax returns. Why are corporations (whose structure is granted by law to re…

But our leaders aren't incentivized to do it, because our leaders are incentivized only by the very corporations in question. As in, the corporations, through lobbying, quite literally write the legislation, not the people we actually elect to office. So uprooting corporate tax info transparency rules is something that will never come to pass until other existing systems are demolished, but how do you get the legisla…

I just read a story about how in the 1950s some citizens in Appalachia couldn't get their representatives to give a damn about fixing the run-down single bridge to their small isolated town far away from the big cities of importance.

So what they did was to ask the Soviet Union's representative office in the United States to sponsor their bridge repair, and they let all the newspapers know about it.

Sooner than you could blink, the state politicians reversed course and ponied up the $ for the bridge.

Maybe sometimes what you need is your enemies to be shown to be exploiting your weaknesses so that someone cares enough to fix it.

Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#119
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a little too much to ask, but are why are you "not saying any of this is right or good". Part of my brain wishes that law would actually mean justice but somehow, if I trust only what I know, I cleary cannot judge, as you do, if finance engineering is good or bad. I'd like to know what prevents you to choose if it's good or right (as person who have worked inside the business) thx

I do have opinions about various tax provisions that I know well. But the topics I mentioned in my prior comment were not about a specific tax provision, or even tax policy generally. I was just stating the facts of life. It will always be the case that big companies will find it efficient to engage in certain revenue-producing activities that smaller companies/individuals will not. Just as I don't have feelings abou…

So you don’t have any emotional opinions on the work of others that has real effect on your life?

Physicists can be wrong.

Economists can be wrong.

At some point technical nonsense becomes “imperfect people choosing.”

A fix might simply be change tax laws? Kind of like how the billionaires changed them to be less distributed.

But you don’t have feelings enough about economics being purposely wielded at scale to manipulate; let’s hope you’re still one of the privileged enough to be indifferent and comfortable in the future.

popcorn

Real-time meltdown of Pax Americana is pretty metal.

Re: The public has a right to know how companies that pay no taxes pull it off

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have opinions about various tax provisions that I know well. But the topics I mentioned in my prior comment were not about a specific tax provision, or even tax policy generally. I was just stating the facts of life. It will always be the case that big companies will find it efficient to engage in certain revenue-producing activities that smaller companies/individuals will not. Just as I don't have feelings abou…

Thanks. What I love about the comments you make is twofold: - You clearly differentiate between opinion, observation and fact. - You don't try to find an easy answer. Thanks. Comments like these make me come back and read on HN.

My hobby [1] is helping people think clearly about media bias and filter bubbles, so I'm glad to hear that my comments come across as rational and balanced!

1: http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com

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