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Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

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Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#161

Post by msgodel »

FredPret wrote: post #160
msgodel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP going up does not absolutely improve people's quality of life (and there's quite a lot that can make GDP go up while making every participant in the economy miserable.) That's why optimizing for it makes no sense.

More money is strictly better; if you think rich countries are "unpleasant or unpractical" to live in, try living in a poor one. You're right that GDP is far from the only thing that matters. But sacrificing growth for intangible benefits is a tradeoff that should be made very carefully indeed.

Money is arbitrary. It's like voltage: power is the important part.

Same with economics: wealth is the important part. Wealth can be invariant while money fluctuates.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#162

Post by Aloisius »

msgodel wrote: post #159
Aloisius wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the effects of a lower GDP that people tend to care about. And those effects are unpleasant and make the country more impractical to live in.

GDP going up does not absolutely improve people's quality of life (and there's quite a lot that can make GDP go up while making every participant in the economy miserable.) That's why optimizing for it makes no sense.

Yes, we can create a hypothetical world where that is true, but that's not the world we live in.

GDP is not just an abstract number. It's a measure of the value produced by the nation - value that people find, well, valuable.

We do not optimize only for GDP. It is merely a leading indicator we use that helps us predict things like recessions and unemployment which themselves are leading indicators for quality of life.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#163

Post by FredPret »

msgodel wrote: post #161
FredPret wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More money is strictly better; if you think rich countries are "unpleasant or unpractical" to live in, try living in a poor one. You're right that GDP is far from the only thing that matters. But sacrificing growth for intangible benefits is a tradeoff that should be made very carefully indeed.

Money is arbitrary. It's like voltage: power is the important part. Same with economics: wealth is the important part. Wealth can be invariant while money fluctuates.

Money is just a token. The valuable thing is the actual output of products and services.

Companies are great at this, and taking resources away from them means they have to crank out less of it. The best and simplest thing is to tax the salaries and dividends paid by the companies, and stop taxing consumption (regressive tax that's hardest on the poor) or profits (reduces investment and output).

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#164

Post by LtWorf »

throw0101c wrote: post #143
LtWorf wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the idea is that corporations are the most efficient entities in the economy in terms of allocating capital. Anyone who has had a job knows it's not true.

>> I think the idea is that corporations are the most efficient entities in the economy in terms of allocating capital. > Anyone who has had a job knows it's not true. In an 'absolute' sense they may not be as there is (always) some waste, but is there a more efficient way / entity?

I think the claim is that public administration is always less efficient. I just need to demonstrate it's equally inefficient :)

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#165

Post by const_cast »

FredPret wrote: post #65

Here's some interesting thinking about different kinds of tax: https://economicsobservatory.com/which-taxes-are-best-and-wo... > "Raising the income tax rate has by far the least negative effect on GDP. In the long run, the simulation shows that the economy pretty much returns to baseline levels, with a slight increase in potential output. The opposite is true for corporation taxes. A rise in the corporation tax rate…

Just intuitively, periods of high corporate tax rates in the US were accompanied by significantly greater purchasing power for laborers. Obviously it's a little hard to tell if that is the cause, since post-WWII America was an entirely different beast, but I think high corporate tax is really not the end of the world.

Regardless, we got rid of almost all corporate tax, and did that really trickle down to average laborers? Er, no, I think decidedly so.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#166

Post by const_cast »

throw0101c wrote: post #143
LtWorf wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the idea is that corporations are the most efficient entities in the economy in terms of allocating capital. Anyone who has had a job knows it's not true.

>> I think the idea is that corporations are the most efficient entities in the economy in terms of allocating capital. > Anyone who has had a job knows it's not true. In an 'absolute' sense they may not be as there is (always) some waste, but is there a more efficient way / entity?

Public entities can, theoretically, be more efficient because they operate at greater economies of scale and with lower barriers. Centrally-controlled systems become unbelievably efficient when the scale is very large. In addition, public entities enjoy the absence of the shackles of profit, which allows them to make longer-term decisions.

Now, if this is really the case in the US today is debatable. But, it was the case in the past, and is still the case in many very functional countries.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#167

Post by const_cast »

crazygringo wrote: post #59
cynicalkane wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unironically yes. The reason people want taxes on profits is they think large, powerful companies are a threat... but if you think that, why tax money that large, powerful companies don't waste? The other reason is to tax the rich, but you can do that by simply taxing the rich directly. If we fear powerful companies, we can put some sort of scaling size tax on the largest ones.

> Unironically yes. Do you realize that won't produce more revenue, it will just bankrupt companies and produce less revenue? Companies are already incentivized not to waste by competition. That's the whole point of capitalism. You don't need taxes for that.

A lot of companies are essentially on the welfare of their investors, who may or may not be stupid. Many companies purposefully do not turn a profit, because they're aiming to cheat the market and sell at a loss to push competitors out. A lot of very successful companies operate or have operated this way, and it's incredibly dangerous for the market. It causes the erosion of small businesses and further promotes monopolization. We can try to disincentive that by saying, "hey, you don't want to turn a profit, that's fine, but you still have to pay up".

This is part of the reason why if you look around America today it's going to be 99% big corporate players dominating markets and 1% small businesses barely staying afloat.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#168

Post by const_cast »

monero-xmr wrote: post #72
atbpaca wrote: post #18

This number is actually a shame in the sense that it shows how little taxes are paid by other big companies.

The correct corporate tax rate is zero, or the correct income tax rate is zero. Double taxation on employees of corporations is ludicrous and warping. IMO corporate tax should be zero, and we tax individual people instead.

The problem with taxing individuals is that it's hard and it's complex. Many individuals have zero income and are filthy rich. So then we have to start thinking about wealth taxes, which is apparently communism, unless we do it to the middle class in the form of property taxes, in which case it's good, actually.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#169

Post by _DeadFred_ »

FredPret wrote: post #158
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget a large amount of US stocks are held by overseas individuals. So the burden is put on American workers in order to protect the capital of overseas millionaire investors.

Or overseas investors are sending capital to America, where it enlarges existing businesses and creates new ones, leading to more jobs, more competition for the consumer's dollar, and more tax for the US government when money is paid out to those investors. If it was so simple to use capital to exploit the rest of society, why would these investors not simply invest where they are? Why go to the trouble and expense o…

Edit: Nevermind, it looks like the big beautiful big specifically goes after sovereign wealth funds, retirements funds, etc and overrides existing treaties. So at least we aren't subsidizing other countries on the back of high taxes on American workers.

Re: Berkshire Hathaway Now Pays 5% of All Corporate Income Taxes in America

#170

Post by [deleted] »

const_cast wrote: post #165
FredPret wrote: post #65

Here's some interesting thinking about different kinds of tax: https://economicsobservatory.com/which-taxes-are-best-and-wo... > "Raising the income tax rate has by far the least negative effect on GDP. In the long run, the simulation shows that the economy pretty much returns to baseline levels, with a slight increase in potential output. The opposite is true for corporation taxes. A rise in the corporation tax rate…

Just intuitively, periods of high corporate tax rates in the US were accompanied by significantly greater purchasing power for laborers. Obviously it's a little hard to tell if that is the cause , since post-WWII America was an entirely different beast, but I think high corporate tax is really not the end of the world. Regardless, we got rid of almost all corporate tax, and did that really trickle down to average lab…

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