241–250 of 423 posts
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It is not a problem. Just give subsidies as a tax credit.
That's still a problem, if you think companies minimising their tax is a problem. The game shifts to creating the correct structure to qualify for tax credits.
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 situat…
I believe an income tax should be the only tax, since it covers any and all economic transactions, and it's the only progressive tax. - There's only a single loophole: People who use their business to pay for personal expenses. They are easy to catch, and the simplicity of the tax scheme allows collectors to focus on this one loophole. - It's simple to collect: Ask all the banks for everyone's statement, and apply a…
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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…
But prosecutor salaries are (more or less) fixed, so if you let defence attorneys earn the same as prosecutors I don't think this harms the right of the defendant. You have a right to a reasonably good lawyer, but not to be defended by the most brilliant legal mind on earth who could get anybody acquited. The randomisation suggestion sounds good too.
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Or do like Europe is finally starting: just tax revenue. They can suppress their 'profit' whichever way they want, they can't suppress their revenue in a given country. The digital services tax is imposed at a rate of 3% on the gross revenues derived from digital activities of which French “users” are deemed to play a major role in value creation. The law not only affects digital companies but, more generally, digita…
> Or do like Europe is finally starting: just tax revenue. That rapidly turns into a disaster of consolidations and monopolies. You don't want that. Think about the difference between big company $BIG selling you the consumer a million Widgets for 10^9 currency units, versus 26 small companies $a..$z each selling to the next in a long supply chain which results in a million Widgets. In revenue taxation, big company $…
Just get rid of corporate taxes, and get rid of capital gains taxes. Treat all income the same. Kills the double taxation issue, and removes the incentives for corporations to avoid taxes.
Double taxation is a talking point, not a philosophical problem. It's like rebranding the inheritance tax as the death tax to make it sound unfair or absurd ("they tax dying in this country!!!"). Double taxation happens constantly in all sorts of contexts, for instance, most of us pay income tax, and then pay sales tax using those already-taxed dollars, and then the seller pays income tax on the money received less s…
As the philosopher said, taxation is the art of plucking a goose so as to get the most feathers with the least squawking.
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VAT is literally tax on revenue and it works fine. You tax the added value, so each company pays tax only on (sell_price - purchase_price).
VAT is not tax on revenue. Only the end customer pays VAT.
No matter which company in the supply chain pays it!
With VAT, it's raised prices and shown on the receipt.
With other business taxes, it's raised prices and not shown on the receipt.
Customer pays either way.
Of course, competition and other factors also govern prices. It's not a given that changing business taxes always causes a business to change its prices by a related amount.
But that is the same for VAT and other business taxes too.
Disclaimer: I own no companies. I don't even own stocks at the moment.
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VAT is not a tax on business revenue. Only end-customers pay tax, that's why it's called "value-added" tax.
It's called "value added" because it's a tax on profit, and everyone in the supply chain pays it.
VAT is definitely not a tax on profit, that's usually called "corporate tax" [2] which is a completely different thing.
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…
This tax shenanigans happen because we have built an absurdly complex tax framework which can be gamed/abused with economies of scale. The solution is to streamline the tax framework as to make its implementation almost unavoidable. Long-story short, my bet is: - Sales tax (VAT) - Inflation - UBI Sales tax is far less gameable as it's linked to concrete economic activity. It also has the benefit of tracking the added…
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> Or do like Europe is finally starting: just tax revenue. That rapidly turns into a disaster of consolidations and monopolies. You don't want that. Think about the difference between big company $BIG selling you the consumer a million Widgets for 10^9 currency units, versus 26 small companies $a..$z each selling to the next in a long supply chain which results in a million Widgets. In revenue taxation, big company $…
You can always address that, like VAT (and other commentators have said), by allowing refunding of tax on purchase (for example) for business purposes.
GP comment (me) points out that the proposed change is not a good idea.
P comment (riknox) points out we can always address that problem by doing what we currently do already (VAT).
I agree, we can solve the problem of the proposed change by continuing to do what we are already doing :-)