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The 99 percent

economist.com

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Re: The 99 percent

#31

Post by mdda »

guimarin wrote: post #24
guimarin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot replace a corporate tax with a personal tax, all persons will simply become corporations.

When people bring up this argument, I feel like I'm screaming in a room full of people and everyone is ignoring me. You cannot make it easy for people and corporations to be interchangeable and then have differing tax rates for each. They MUST have the SAME rate. eg. I 'own' all my rental properties through LLCs which are themselves 'owned' by a corporation of which I am the sole benefactor. Travel? expensed. Living…

Your living expenses and rent are a benefit you receive as an individual from the company, with a direct monetary equivalent : You should be declaring it, and paying tax on it.

Re: The 99 percent

#32

Post by noahc »

guimarin wrote: post #20
mynameishere wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

end loopholes that allow companies like exxon to pay no federal taxes Corporate taxes are idiotic. They should tax them at zero and replace the lost revenue with a new upper-margin tax. Reasons: 1. Corporate taxes are effectively a sales tax. 2. Corporations, unlike individuals, can hire armies of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to get around the taxes. 3. Those same professionals are more often deployed by large…

You cannot replace a corporate tax with a personal tax, all persons will simply become corporations.

It seems plausible to make it so that people can't become corporations.

1. The IRS already does this with certain classes of businesses in which they make it illegal to form them purely for tax avoidance purposes.

2.You set the corporate income tax to 0, but personal income tax to whatever. You then make all corporate profits flow through to individuals, and make corporate write offs and deductions rare/impossible/non-existant.

Under our current tax environment, you're right. But there is nothing inherent in reality that makes this impossible.

Re: The 99 percent

#33

Post by cperciva »

guimarin wrote: post #24
guimarin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot replace a corporate tax with a personal tax, all persons will simply become corporations.

When people bring up this argument, I feel like I'm screaming in a room full of people and everyone is ignoring me. You cannot make it easy for people and corporations to be interchangeable and then have differing tax rates for each. They MUST have the SAME rate. eg. I 'own' all my rental properties through LLCs which are themselves 'owned' by a corporation of which I am the sole benefactor. Travel? expensed. Living…

I can't speak to the US tax system, but people absolutely don't get away with doing that in Canada. People try it, of course; but the Canada Revenue Agency is very good at catching "benefit conferred on a shareholder" and taxing them as deemed dividends.

And, of course, throwing people in jail who deliberately fail to report such benefits.

Re: The 99 percent

#34

Post by natrius »

guimarin wrote: post #2

Five points for the OWS guys. 1. Transparency. We need to see where every dollar of the US federal gov't is spent. It needs to be on the internet, and it needs to be easily accessable. An exception can be made for classified spending in specific, but not so categorically (IE we spend X on classified stuff). Additionally, just like there is a Surgeon's General Warning on cigarette packages, there needs to be a link on…

On transparency, I've come to believe that it should be the government's role to make data available and the private sector's role to compete with each other to create the most useful tools with that data. I might be biased since the latter is my job, but I think it works fairly well. The "Surgeon General's Warning" you suggest is an interesting idea that doesn't really work without the government putting a lot of the tools together themselves, though.

Re: The 99 percent

#35

Post by [deleted] »

guimarin wrote: post #24
guimarin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot replace a corporate tax with a personal tax, all persons will simply become corporations.

When people bring up this argument, I feel like I'm screaming in a room full of people and everyone is ignoring me. You cannot make it easy for people and corporations to be interchangeable and then have differing tax rates for each. They MUST have the SAME rate. eg. I 'own' all my rental properties through LLCs which are themselves 'owned' by a corporation of which I am the sole benefactor. Travel? expensed. Living…

[deleted]

Re: The 99 percent

#36

Post by bravura »

noahc wrote: post #9
guimarin wrote: post #2

Five points for the OWS guys. 1. Transparency. We need to see where every dollar of the US federal gov't is spent. It needs to be on the internet, and it needs to be easily accessable. An exception can be made for classified spending in specific, but not so categorically (IE we spend X on classified stuff). Additionally, just like there is a Surgeon's General Warning on cigarette packages, there needs to be a link on…

Can anyone with more experience and knowledge explain the effects of #3. I've read that HFT is actually a good thing because it basically acts as a market maker. This is just a back of the napkin opinion, but it seems that #3 would reduce liquidity in the markets. We know that markets aren't perfect or else Buffet and other value investors couldn't survive. Does HFT make markets more or less perfect at pricing? Does…

Why does a market need millisecond-resolution liquidity?

Re: The 99 percent

#37

Post by mjtokelly »

jarek wrote: post #16
noahc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone with more experience and knowledge explain the effects of #3. I've read that HFT is actually a good thing because it basically acts as a market maker. This is just a back of the napkin opinion, but it seems that #3 would reduce liquidity in the markets. We know that markets aren't perfect or else Buffet and other value investors couldn't survive. Does HFT make markets more or less perfect at pricing? Does…

The standard response to claiming HFT as a market maker is that it provides minute amounts of additional liquidity and its costs and drawbacks, or potential costs and drawbacks, outweigh the benefits. Of course some amount of market making is necessary, but you could claim that without HFT you'd just settle your trades in 0.1 s rather than 0.02 s and with 0.5% spread rather than 0.49% spread. I don't know enough to f…

According to some recent research, HFT appears responsible for lowering spreads by more than an order of magnitude: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/10/mor... That's a definite social good that would go away under proposal #3.

Re: The 99 percent

#38

Post by guimarin »

guimarin wrote: post #24
guimarin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot replace a corporate tax with a personal tax, all persons will simply become corporations.

When people bring up this argument, I feel like I'm screaming in a room full of people and everyone is ignoring me. You cannot make it easy for people and corporations to be interchangeable and then have differing tax rates for each. They MUST have the SAME rate. eg. I 'own' all my rental properties through LLCs which are themselves 'owned' by a corporation of which I am the sole benefactor. Travel? expensed. Living…

thus the army of lawyers, accountants and golden shares. It's good to live in a globalized world.

Re: The 99 percent

#39

Post by njharman »

majika wrote: post #26
mynameishere wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

end loopholes that allow companies like exxon to pay no federal taxes Corporate taxes are idiotic. They should tax them at zero and replace the lost revenue with a new upper-margin tax. Reasons: 1. Corporate taxes are effectively a sales tax. 2. Corporations, unlike individuals, can hire armies of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to get around the taxes. 3. Those same professionals are more often deployed by large…

You make a good case. However, I think it's important to acknowledge that corporate taxes are useful for providing an incentive for corporations to do something a certain way. That is, they can avoid the tax if they change their behaviour. (see: equal-opportunities employment, regional commercialisation incentives, emissions control, recycling, etc)

Greed is the most powerful force in the world. If you tie regulation to money, it will be exploited and corrupted. It also shifts accountability from the individual violators to "the corporation". Instead enforce criminal laws against people. Doing the "right thing" doesn't deserve reward. Doing the "wrong thing" does deserve punishment.

Re: The 99 percent

#40

Post by dgallagher »

The graph is a bit hard to read since it's labeled poorly. The X-axis is the year. The Y-axis is the percentage of income relative to 1979, after-tax. They do not mention if these numbers were adjusted for inflation, but the report linked to on the page says the numbers are adjusted for inflation:

Income is adjusted for inflation using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ research series of the consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U-RS). -http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/124xx/doc12485/10-25-HouseholdIncome....

That report is much more detailed than the Economist's summary.

So, in 2007 the top 1% made ~375% of what they did in 1979 (~275% gain). In 2007 the bottom 20% made ~120% of what they did in 1979 (~20% gain).

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