We means test access to the social safety net programs for the poor.
We can means test access to tax loopholes as well.
Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
141–150 of 175 posts
Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
#142subchapter S (and other pass through) corporations pay no corporate income tax at all. this is the majority of small businesses. Corporations ultimately distribute their profits to actual people. Those people will pay tax on that income. It isnt automatically obvious that corporations should pay any taxes on income (or revenue) until it is distributed to actual people (shareholders and employees). We tax the profit o…
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Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
#143Really have to start taxing over revenues. It's long due.
Initially I too thought this was a bad idea, but if you think about it and set the tax rate really low - like a handful of percent, say 1% or 2%, not more than 5% - it might actually work. Because even if the corporate tax rate is 30%, but we only collect it on profit, which ends up being only 5%-10% of revenue. So in actual fact, if the corporation was honest, we're really only collecting 30% of 5% or so, which is a…
Seems like that would lead to massive vertical consolidation.
If you have a retailer buying from a distributor buying from manufacturer buying from a raw material producer, the revenue flowing from each to the next would be taxed again and again, but a single company doing everything would only pay once.
Is that something you want to encourage?
A VAT might make more sense, since you can deduct the VAT you paid to your supplier from the amount charged to your customers.
Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is offtopic but my country (NL) allows this: I earned €1600 in 2016 as a student and then €50k in 2017 and 2018 as I started working fulltime. So now I can make a request for 'averaging' my taxes and I now get a some money back.
Same in Israel
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Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
#145The article is reluctant to mention the reason why they got those tax rebates, and focuses on the way people feel about it. This seems like bad journalism. According to CNBC, “Amazon's low tax bill mainly stemmed from the Republican tax cuts of 2017, carryforward losses from years when the company was not profitable, tax credits for massive investments in R&D and stock-based employee compensation.” https://www.cnbc.c…
Those all sound like corporate tax policies. That's literally what they're talking about. Clearly, a growing portion of the electorate doesn't like those policies. That's the first step in democracy, no? Engagement?
I thought it was education. Like, about why carry-forwards make sense. If there's a (somewhat) reflectively consistent reason why we want to break the "only tax profits" model, and voters generally understand the tradeoffs, great, that sounds like a good debate to have. As it stands, like the OP suggests, it comes off more as misleading rabble-rousing.
Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it costs you 95 cents to make 1 dollar, an 8% revenue tax would means you would pay 1.03 in cost to make 1.00.
In my country, my company has to pay 21% VAT. For a dollar in sales we have to add 21% in taxes. But we deduct the VAT paid, so if we had to buy stuff for 95 cents, we'd get back the VAT paid on that, resulting in having to pay taxes only on the difference, being 5 cents x 21%, approx 1 cent. Hence it being called "value added tax". I think this is a better tax than income taxes because it taxes consumption, not labo…
Many companies explicitly pass VAT to the consumer. For example, I have to pay VAT as a line item on the rent for my coworking space.
VAT is the reason a MacBook is hundreds of dollars more expensive to buy in Europe than in the US.
I’m an American living in UK. I bought a jacket here, wore it home, and then forgot it, so I had my mom send it to be in the UK (where I bought it). She declared its value and so I had to pay £35 in VAT for a jacket I bought in the UK for £150.
VAT also makes it difficult for companies in a VAT jurisdiction to compete on price with companies in other jurisdictions, and for small businesses to sell internationally.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard someone talk about how great VAT is. It’s a system you implement when your country fails to innovate and instead siphons off the innovation of others.
Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
but the rent and bills of a corporation are deductable? Why is it different? A corporation has the same legal rights as a person, but a person has to pay more for these rights. It's unfair imho.
Let's say you run a gas station, which is a notoriously low margin business. You have $1,050,000 in revenue this year, and $1,000,000 in expenses, so you make $50,000. Let's say you run a small software company, which is a high margin business. You have $1,050,000 in revenue this year, and $500,000 in expenses, so you make $550,000. You should be taxed on the $50,000 and the $550,000, not on the $1,050,000. Otherwise…
By the logic that justifies subsidizing low margin businesses, housing, food, and other necessities should also be tax free.
Let’s say you make $100,000 a year as a school teacher in SF, and pay $7K a month for a three bedroom house for your family. That’s $84K just for housing. Food clearly uses up more than the rest.
If people and corporations were taxed the same, you could carry over the loss to a future year where your spouse cashed out some stock (or you got a job that paid a living wage).
Alternatively, we could pay everyone a fair wage, and stop subsidizing zero margin businesses that can’t afford the labor costs (which means things like gas would cost a bit more).
I’m for the latter. People have to work in these zero margin places, and their employers should figure out how to make more of a profit (and pay better), or go under.
Why should my taxes subsidize petroleum distributors, Walmart, Amazon, etc?
Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
#148Surprised to see a headline from the NYT that uses weasel words ("some voters"? well some voters are also uneducated, so what?), which even Wikipedia has rules against. That being said, why does it matter if Amazon is not paying taxes itself if it is creating many jobs, with a good percentage of them being high paying, and who end up paying income taxes anyway? Not to mention taxes that Amazon pays for those employees to begin with.
Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it better to tax employee personal income than corporate income?
Companies can easily move, people mostly don't. It was the other way around until XIX century. People had been moving around Europe or emigrating to America in search of lower taxation while moving physical business (like local brewery) was next to impossible.
Novel. I was expecting some variation of the supply side doctrine. Not penalizing people because holding corporations accountable is hard.
Re: Some voters are sick of companies like Amazon paying no corporate tax
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the difference is there are a lot more things a corp can do to reduce taxable income than an individual can do. this is exactly it. Rental costs are deducted as expenses for a corporation, but the same rental expense cannot be deducted from income. Arguably, the cost of staying alive for a person is an expense for making the income! To make it catagorized would be too complex though - i would propose that personal…
Though I agree with the annoyance of high marginal rates for one-time windfalls of income, I think it's more practically workable to only allow forward averaging in the form of "pay all the taxes now and fill out this new form XYZ to allow you to perform the alternative averaging process over the next 4 tax years". Otherwise, you end up effectively amending N returns (possibly opening them back up for examination), n…
Computing tax rates against a moving average of the last 5 years income is a simple and elegant way to have the same effect.
Young people would have lower rates while they’re establishing themselves, people with windfalls would end up paying rates in line with their annual compensation (instead of just maxing out the brackets with a big percentage of their income).
Also, people with sustained high income would be taxed at a much higher rate than upwardly mobile members of the middle class.
Similarly, low income people with intermittent income would have a much better chance at building their savings.
Finally, it defeats all sorts of timing strategies, so people could make major financial decisions without first hiring a cpa.