191–200 of 260 posts
we need jurisdictions to compete on how much they can provide in return for as little as possible in collected taxes.
Well said. Each amount of money will find a "good" reason to be spent, so less money collected means less money wasted (or spent on weapons and armies).
Pretty hype about this TBH. There is a long history of companies domiciling in say, Monaco, The Cayman Island, Panama etc to avoid taxes and regulations where they mainly operate. My understanding is that the current process in vogue for the mega cap companies is the "double irish dutch sandwich" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut... No one, including tax lawyers, will tell you with a straig…
I thought I remembered at some point (might have been more than a decade ago) that I heard that most economist thought that corporate income taxes were basically a bad idea? Is this no longer held as a valid belief? Long term, I would almost prefer if we just moved to taxing people's assets. Maybe we can force corporations to basically pay out most of their profits to shareholders to avoid having them get too large?
taxing people's assets is complicated as hell. How much is your house worth. And before you answer that question, have you been in a bubbly market? Quotes for houses in the place I've been have gone up by 10% in the last 4 months. Now, suppose you have bought a house and suddenly all of your neighbors are rich. An appraiser comes to your place and suddenly you owe taxes and you basically get evicted from your home un…
I thought I remembered at some point (might have been more than a decade ago) that I heard that most economist thought that corporate income taxes were basically a bad idea? Is this no longer held as a valid belief? Long term, I would almost prefer if we just moved to taxing people's assets. Maybe we can force corporations to basically pay out most of their profits to shareholders to avoid having them get too large?
Most economists think corporate taxes are a bad idea: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-... > Tuesday's show presented the common-sense, no-nonsense Planet Money economic plan — backed by economists of all stripes, but probably toxic to any candidate that might endorse it. > Three: Eliminate the corporate income tax. Completely. If companies reinvest the money into their businesses, that's g…
That implies a GST/VAT/sales tax rate of ~35% in my country, changing from progressive to regressive tax. Enforcing it would require both the abolition of cash, and to somehow police the barter economy.
https://www.interest.co.nz/news/99949/budget-2019-summary-al...
Edit: 35%. Currently GST is 12.5% and 2019 GST budget was $21 billion, PAYE + other source deductions budget was $35 billion.
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what is the true underlying cause?
Corporation tax. They should just dump it and tax dividends and capitals gains like any other income. It's easy to shift corporation tax but much harder to shift an individuals income.
I think that even if taxing corporations doesn't make sense in terms of tax revenue, it makes sense in terms of stopping companies from growing too large
Imo corp tax should be nil until you get to about 1m profit, and then brutally progressive after that. Small businesses are great, and companies that benefit the consumer by being large can be public-owned and both compete internally and internationally.
Pretty hype about this TBH. There is a long history of companies domiciling in say, Monaco, The Cayman Island, Panama etc to avoid taxes and regulations where they mainly operate. My understanding is that the current process in vogue for the mega cap companies is the "double irish dutch sandwich" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut... No one, including tax lawyers, will tell you with a straig…
It’s strange that you recognize new stable equilibriums emerging as unanticipated consequences of global capital liberalization but you advocate for trying to maintain a new unstable equilibrium instead of thinking about viable strategies that may work. As a piece of advice, if your solution requires 100% compliance by random nations in order for you to tax your own citizens/corporations, then your solution is square…
Allowing cross-border flows of floating capital such as machines and commodity inputs and outputs should not be problematic if all new legal tender is initially placed into circulation through public local loans issued on security of the replacement cost of industrial fixed capital physically attached to domestic soil.
Conveyance of state enforced privilege such as deeds, titles, patents can also only be recorded between domestic residents and domestically chartered corporations liable for corporate tax. While these privileges provide security for capital investment they are not really capital themselves.
Allowing foreign investors to purchase shares of domestic corporations does not seem overly problematic as long any deeds, titles, patents held by corporations are directly taxed and there are some distributive offsets and deductions for domestic residents.
Is this similar to how the EU has minimum tax rates on businesses? Without recalling too many details, I recall Apple and Ireland being sued by the EU government for a sweetheart tax deal they put in place.
That was because Ireland only made this deal available to Apple, not because of low tax rates. In Estonia companies don't pay CIT unless they pay out dividends, for example.
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I'm surprised to hear this sentiment, but honestly I think there's a huge amount that the government does that is invisible to most citizens. When I lived in China, I was shocked not by how controlled it was (which is what I expected given the western vision of China) but by how chaotic and uncontrolled it was compared to the US. Everything from food, health, and safety inspection, to the enforcement of traffic laws,…
>I'm surprised to hear this sentiment, but honestly I think there's a huge amount that the government does that is invisible to most citizens. It's invisible because it provides no true value to them. Right now you and I are paying for some NSA hacker to compromise American telecom networks, 13 carrier battle groups to put around the ocean doing nothing, literal armies of people in a hundred plus bases on literally e…
Your examples show that there is money being used in malicious ways, which I don't disagree with, but it doesn't mean that there aren't a huge amount of positive things happening. There are so many of these it's impossible for a single individual to know all of them.
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This is why I used the word sometimes. Obviously the whole military industrial complex is the worst example. As for the philosophical argument that they take my money by force, I just don't get it. This is the best way we have found to have a civilized society so far. Going far in either direction communism or anarchy is not a good solution. You have to also consider reality when arguing policy.
>As for the philosophical argument that they take my money by force, I just don't get it. "No taxation without representation" was one of the core driving motivations behind the American revolution. The problem is that I, and I suspect a growing number of others, have completely and totally lost faith in my government to represent my interests while taxing me. The "men with guns" line is just to reinforce that I have…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
based on what?
The rich are extremely mobile, already have wealth and assets that will keep appreciating. The poor and middle class would need to disproportionately gain wealth if they were to rise to the same position in the power hierarchy, and they are not mobile. High taxes are like fixing positions in place, like a moat to make it difficult for others to rise, since it isn't going to retroactively take money. Historical data f…
I don't know if you're aware of this, but taxes in the west are significantly lower than they were in the 50s, 60s and 70s. The top marginal income tax rate in the 60s was 90% in the UK and 91% in the US. Currently it is 45% in the UK and 37% in the US. Corp tax is currently 18% in the UK and 21% in the US. In the 60s it was 45% in the UK and between 11% and 55% in the US.
But you're right about inequality rising