261–266 of 266 posts
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It’s much easier to do that with something called a sales tax!
Isn't that more a value added tax, rather than a straight sales tax? Similar, but not identical.
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Isn't that more a value added tax, rather than a straight sales tax? Similar, but not identical.
VATs operate at every stage of the supply chain. A sales tax is only applied at the point of consumption.
If there was a tax hike on my business, I'd automatically hike prices by 15%. This is what businesses are supposed to do. You buy shoes for your shoe store, you mark up the price, you can't sell them for what you bought them for. You hire an extra person, you raise the price of your goods or services. Oil prices go up? Gas stations raise the price of a gallon of gasoline. You have to pay extra taxes, you raise the price of your goods or services. It's always the customer who pays that extra 15% tax. It has to be that way, how else could it be?
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Individuals (in the US) have standard deduction, which approximates the minimum value to sustain one's person. It's a bad approximation, but it is what it is. It's assumed that corporations spend as little as possible on operations. Individuals obviously don't. Whereas a corporation wouldn't rent employees 500 sqft / person, individuals regularly rent/purchase that density for themselves. Similarly, while a corporati…
With progressive taxation of corporations, we could disincentivize the existence of trillion dollar corporations, opening up the market for thousands more million to billion dollar businesses to exist. Regulatory capture would be much harder to coordinate which would lead to much less corruption. Greater marketplace competition would lead to better quality services and products for consumers. The curve used to shape…
Having these monopolies (defining loosely - whether one company or a 2 or 3 or 4) is the main deficiency of capitalism.
Unfortunately, breaking up monopolies or increases taxes is exceedingly difficult to do as large companies and their lobbying congress prevents it in most cases.
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> it's easy to spend money until there are no 'profits'. Will we ever live in a society where you aren't allowed to "write off" R&D/depreciation/the typical things companies use to avoid profits? We want companies to reinvest their profits into growth to hire more employees, right? Where do we draw the line to make it harder for them to do so?
Those things are fine, but many companies will e.g. register a separate company in a tax haven, give that company a piece of IP, and then have that company charge the original company for all of their profits. That way, the company has no profits to report, but the money wasn't reinvested in any way, just routed around profits taxes.