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Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

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Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means shareholders will be taxed twice, once at the corporate level, and once at the individual level, leading to double taxation (unless a tax credit is given). But, like you, I'm a big fan of a simple flat tax, with relatively little deductions.

As long as the flat tax applies to profit rather than revenue (for both individuals and companies), that wouldn't lead to double taxation. Salaries are an expense.

Two scenarios:

1/ Shareholder and CEO. My company generates €1M in profit. I pay myself a salary of €1M, and pay a flat tax on my salary. The business pays no tax.

2/ CEO, but no shareholder. The company generates €1M in profit, and pays flat tax on that €1M. Dividends flow to shareholders, and they're taxed again?

Situation one would mean that owner run businesses can be more competitive than non owner run businesses. After all, that owner could, after taking out his salary, just loan that money back to the business.

3/ What do you do with foreign companies that levy corporate tax, and then declare a dividend? Do you tax it again at the flat tax in the hands of the shareholder?

Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#102
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get certain things in exchange, like laws that protect your property. With the important difference that the price is non-negotiable, and set by the service provider alone. The people highlighted on the website chose to park their property elsewhere, so the government had zero cost in protecting that. The price is not in proportion to the quality of service at all, it's proportional to the income of the citizen…

>With the important difference that the price is non-negotiable, and set by the service provider alone. Hunh? Most (all) of the states involved have some form of democratic government don't they? I know some of them still have monarchs (why?), but I believe their policy makers are elected by the general population, are they not?

Democracy is a pack of wolves voting on which sheep to have for dinner.

Now, what I'd like to see is each person's vote multiplied by the amount he pays in taxes (all taxes: property, sales, income &c.). That would be fair, and it'd give an incentive to pay up too.

Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#103
post #95
post #92

How Hitler Defied The Bankers? http://open.salon.com/blog/gordon_wagner/2010/05/11/how_hitl...

Now that was truly eye opening! Thanks for posting it.

That article has some rather strange claims, and there's more than a hint of the traditional anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. No point in starting to refute things point by point, but just to pick a few:

At that point the German government thwarted the international banking cartels by issuing its own money.

As if the Weimar Republic didn't have its own money, which it printed with lots of zeroes after a non-zero.

World Jewry responded by declaring a global boycott against Germany.

Oh, there's a declaration by World Jewry?

Hitler began a national credit program ... All these were paid for with money that no longer came from the private international bankers.

Except, of course, where money came by confiscating the property of racial and political enemies [edit] that happened to be bankers [/edit].

Under the National Socialists, Germany’s money wasn't backed by gold

That was no news, exactly. The Weimar Reichsmark wouldn't get you much gold, either.

Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#104
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is one i can sympathise with to some degree. For standard wage levels taxation (whilst still to much in UK) makes sense. Scale that up to millions and it really is out of wack. There is no moral reason why a government deserves 50% of everything you have made. Its like when you order a more expensive bottle of wine, and the restaurant's service charge is a percentage of it... its ridiculous to charge $100…

> There is no moral reason why a government deserves 50% of everything you have made. Why? Personally I think the marginal tax rate should be much higher on the highest earners, for the simple reason that the impact of exact additional percentage point tax is far lower for a higher earner. To me the actual percentage is irrelevant. The relative impact is far more important. If I had to pay 1 percentage points more ta…

> Personally I think the marginal tax rate should be much higher on the highest earners, for the simple reason that the impact of exact additional percentage point tax is far lower for a higher earner. To me the actual percentage is irrelevant. The relative impact is far more important.

So, you define a fair tax system as one whose perceived impact is identical across the tax base.

I define it as one where people pay in proportion to the benefits they receive. One can, indeed, argue that a rich man receives more benefits than a poor man, since his larger fortune is protected, and indeed due to his connexions he himself is more likely to be able to call on the protection of his state. I'd bet that it's linear or sublinear, though, and surely not superlinear (which is the case with progressive tax systems).

Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#105
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With the important difference that the price is non-negotiable, and set by the service provider alone. Hunh? Most (all) of the states involved have some form of democratic government don't they? I know some of them still have monarchs (why?), but I believe their policy makers are elected by the general population, are they not?

Democracy is a pack of wolves voting on which sheep to have for dinner. Now, what I'd like to see is each person's vote multiplied by the amount he pays in taxes (all taxes: property, sales, income &c.). That would be fair, and it'd give an incentive to pay up too.

Which is even more cut throat, since you're basically selling political power: rich people would be able to afford way more, than the poor.

Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, I should clarify: A progressive sales tax not based on purchasers income, but the type of good. For example, luxury goods should be taxed higher and basic staples very low to none. This the wealthy could not avoid tax by simply shifting money around political jurisdictions. This system would encourage transparency, encourage wealth creation as well as thrift in lower and middle income earners. Also, a sid…

This kind of proposals tend to ignore how mobile wealthy people are. They might have more than one home - say, one in US, onw in Switzerland, one in Hong Kong, etc - and they might have luxury items here and there. Taxing such things with wildly different percentages is not going to work very well. The rich guys will just shop for that jewellery in Dubai and keep it in Hong Kong. Will you require him/her to declare a…

What's the difference between what you brought up and wealthy people just moving their holding companies to jurisdictions with lower capital gains and earnings tax? People should be mobile as they want to be in free societies. Do we believe that the state owns their citizens or a portion of those citizens working lives? The income tax presumes they do.

Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#107

Presentation of data is hard/art. The obvious: Bahamas, $7B, population 320 000 versus US $13.4 Less obvious (I suppose) Israel (6) , $10B, pop 8,2 million and 6554 clients; Belgium (10), $6.3B, pop 11,1 million and 3002 clients India (16), $4.1B pop > 1200 million and 1668 clients It's perhaps not a coincidence that those countries are active in the diamond trade. Perhaps it is. But that information is in the data.

Are all the "clients" listed as persons or are some of the corporations? I know for a fact that the Bahamas is used massively as an endpoint for many tax evasion schemes, going through shell company after shell company and ending up there, which is then spent there (which is why the Bahamian gov doesn't really do anything to stop it.)

Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the flat tax applies to profit rather than revenue (for both individuals and companies), that wouldn't lead to double taxation. Salaries are an expense.

Two scenarios: 1/ Shareholder and CEO. My company generates €1M in profit. I pay myself a salary of €1M, and pay a flat tax on my salary. The business pays no tax. 2/ CEO, but no shareholder. The company generates €1M in profit, and pays flat tax on that €1M. Dividends flow to shareholders, and they're taxed again? Situation one would mean that owner run businesses can be more competitive than non owner run businesse…

[Disclaimer: this is a rough idea, not a tax code. Almost certainly needs further thought to make sure there aren't any unwanted incentives for strange behavior.]

> 1/ Shareholder and CEO. My company generates €1M in profit. I pay myself a salary of €1M, and pay a flat tax on my salary. The business pays no tax.

Right.

> 2/ CEO, but no shareholder. The company generates €1M in profit, and pays flat tax on that €1M. Dividends flow to shareholders, and they're taxed again?

Dividends don't magically appear out of nowhere; they're paid out of profits, just like a salary. (Some companies pay out the majority of their profits as dividends, others pay none at all.) They'd either get taxed at the business because they're not paid out, or taxed at the shareholders because they are, not both.

As much as I'd hate to point at it as an example of anything, think VAT, with its notion of "where was the value added", but on the income side, as "where was the profit extracted". Either a VAT-style sales tax (with less doublespeak) or a flat profit tax seems like a workable model. And much like VAT's presumption of paying sales tax unless you show that you bought something taxed, the presumption is that you're paying tax on every dollar of income/revenue, unless you provide evidence in the form of having paid that dollar to someone else who then paid tax on it (or who provided evidence that they paid it to ...).

Interestingly, that then means that if you take money out of the country and out of the economy, you get to pay all the taxes on it at that point. That seems like a nice side effect.

The structure ends up looking a lot like VAT, with a key difference: it affects all transactions, without requiring any kind of code defining taxable/non-taxable items. But apart from that, I think your questions just demonstrated that a profit tax effectively turns into VAT.

Half of the tax code for a flat tax on profits would probably end up being absurdly precise definitions of what "profit" means. (Then again, the other half, or the whole tax code for a flat tax on income, would probably end up being absurdly precise definitions for what "income" means.)

(To preempt the obvious response: yes, there are companies, such as the one-off shell companies constructed to make films, that intentionally construct their books such that they don't actually make any profit. However, that money has to go somewhere, and it'll get taxed there.)

That said, it wouldn't be the end of the world to just make it a flat (and much lower) tax on income rather than on profits. That'd be a much simpler system; it would, however, be much more of a drag force on the economy, like the current tax system. Hard tradeoff.

> 3/ What do you do with foreign companies that levy corporate tax, and then declare a dividend? Do you tax it again at the flat tax in the hands of the shareholder?

[I'm assuming you mean "foreign companies in a jurisdiction that levies corporate tax"?]

The situation definitely gets more difficult with a non-self-contained economy and multiple tax structures. It's a flat tax, so it shouldn't have a complex set of deductions and loopholes, especially that only apply to large multinational businesses. So yeah, I think you'd have to just ignore the foreign corporate tax, and treat the money paid as a dividend as income entering the economy.

Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#109
post #92

How Hitler Defied The Bankers? http://open.salon.com/blog/gordon_wagner/2010/05/11/how_hitl...

Wow, this is a crazy article.

>World Jewry responded by declaring a global boycott against Germany.

So we're using "World Jewry" in casual conversation now? Like that's a thing and it gave out declarations? Wow.

>All these were paid for with money that no longer came from the private international bankers.

How many billions were generated by the nationalization of wealth from Jews and minorities? Killing people and taking their wealth shouldn't be applauded.

>Germany even managed to restore foreign trade, despite the international bankers’ denial of foreign credit to Germany, and despite the global boycott by Jewish-owned industries.

Uh, it wasn't just Jews boycotting Hitler, it was a good chunk of the world. Turns out not everyone loves a sociopathic mass murderer who declares war on his neighbors.

>Canadian researcher Dr. Henry Makow (who is Jewish himself)

Is this how we write now? We mention who and who isn't a Jew? Wow.

Please keep this pro-Hitler bullshit crap off HN, thanks pal. I find it amusing and unsurprising that the "OMG THE FED IS THE WORST THING EVER" crowd obsessed with Rand/Ron Paul also turn out to be historical revisionists and straight-up racists.

Re: Explore the Swiss Leaks Data

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two scenarios: 1/ Shareholder and CEO. My company generates €1M in profit. I pay myself a salary of €1M, and pay a flat tax on my salary. The business pays no tax. 2/ CEO, but no shareholder. The company generates €1M in profit, and pays flat tax on that €1M. Dividends flow to shareholders, and they're taxed again? Situation one would mean that owner run businesses can be more competitive than non owner run businesse…

[Disclaimer: this is a rough idea, not a tax code. Almost certainly needs further thought to make sure there aren't any unwanted incentives for strange behavior.] > 1/ Shareholder and CEO. My company generates €1M in profit. I pay myself a salary of €1M, and pay a flat tax on my salary. The business pays no tax. Right. > 2/ CEO, but no shareholder. The company generates €1M in profit, and pays flat tax on that €1M. D…

> Dividends don't magically appear out of nowhere; they're paid out of profits, just like a salary. (Some companies pay out the majority of their profits as dividends, others pay none at all.) They'd either get taxed at the business because they're not paid out, or taxed at the shareholders because they are, not both.

This is not how it works. Salaries are not paid from profits. After the salaries and all the other costs of the business are paid, the company gives the state its share of what is left and keeps the rest (profits). Dividends are paid with this money that is left after taxes. And then (in general) are taxed again when the shareholder receives them.

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