Disastrous? Were we better off in the days of Sears and Barnes and Noble? Companies like Walmart with $500 billion in revenue have margins of about 3%. A 10% revenue tax must increase prices, or Walmart would lose money on each transaction.
What you're promoting is a tariff on goods bought from big companies.
Tariffs are bad. They are regressive and anti-consumer
I'm arguing that enacting policies that force people into a life where it is impossible to find employment is a bad thing.
Even if this is true, benefits + low-wage job is better both for the worker and society than a lesser total entirely from public benefits and no job, so, the WalMart jobs are a net win.
> presumably have worse education
Hence why they can't get better jobs, but punishing WalMart doesn't fix that.
> and health outcomes than the average American.
Probably, that comes from being poor and is exacerbated by a wealth-dependent healthcare system. Again, punishing WalMart for employing them doesn't improve this.
Would Walmart go backrupt or employ noticeably fewer people if wages and taxes were higher? I don't think so, as similar companies exist in many economies with better wages. Is it inflationary? Only if the wages grow disproportionally with the economy (like costs have in health care). Basically richer people are effectively charged more for their shopping, and shareholders see less profit.
People employed at below cost of living wages (reliant on welfare for basics) by definition can't save much, and in the US are excluded from education and quality health care. I couldn't be happy with a system that perpetuates that just to get groceries 1% cheaper.
Thats a perspective, not a universal fact. They are effective and useful from a political perspective, which may be beneficial to consumers long term. Alternate levers being circumstantial.
They are anti-consumer in the sense that they raise prices without offering more or better goods in return. Sure you may try to muscle in some roundabout logic that concludes that tariffs will punish the consumer into using their money the way you want them to, such as buying overpriced goods from domestic producers, but history has shown again and again that only free trade produces net benefits. Tariffs just obsfucate the damage.
For instance, the EU guarantees European farmers a certain minimum price for agricultural goods. This price is 200% above market price. The effect is that every European consumer has reduced purchasing power because they must pay 200% more than they need to for food, African farmers are kept in poverty because they can't sell their goods to EU consumers, and the only people who win is the extremely small percentage of people in the EU who farm.
In this way, they are factually anti consumer.
It is not. You use a non gradiated tariff as a bad assumption. Good luck with whatever.
> They are anti-consumer in the sense that they raise prices without offering more or better goods in return.
There is also to say that economy of scale is real, so (within bounds, I wouldn't meddle in guessing numbers) it is reasonable to ask the company making 10 billion per year to be more efficient per-dollar than a 2-persons shop.
Regarding the EU I believe you are missing the point. Farming in the EU (outside of the Netherlands apparently) is almost by definition going to be a terrible business profit wise in an unregulated market; too little to automate too high cost of living for workers.
The regulations in place exist because of an explicit consideration that keeping those industries alive (especially regional traditional products) is something with a value in and of itself.
For sure many regulations have serious issues and some of them are plainly wrong, but arguing for anarcho-capitalism to me sound as reasonable as arguing for communism.
For example, most of the US population is currently under lockdown, most local businesses are closed, and households are dependent on delivery services for many products. A weak, broken-up set of former Amazon companies would have less capacity to provide such services, or even to survive.
The negatives of consolidation aren’t relating to being in a pandemic situation but the before and after, normal times. Things such as reduced labor choices, killing cheaper products and your competitors that would supply them, etc. that’s what’s been bad about the consolidation. (See that great example about how Covidian killed the cheaper ventilator.)
If Starbucks survives and local stores close and all we have in 5 years are Starbucks everywhere why is that good? Why is it good that Starbucks benefits from the pandemic this way? Why isn’t it better if there is no behemoth Starbucks to crowd out those local stores, so that they end up being able to be reborn in the aftermath of this as more new local stores? Or why isn’t it better to just have lots of local stores and if them closing and having to reopen is a problem you point the $4 trillion fire hose at your small businesses instead of large businesses? Such as how some other countries have done by backstopping payroll and other things.
That is the wrong framing of my argument. Here is a better one:
It is inherently good that some companies survive rather than none. The ones most likely to survive are big, and Americans are increasingly reliant on big companies during the lockdown. Therefore we should be glad we didn't break up those big companies, and after the pandemic we should be more skeptical of calls to break them up.
Starbucks and United Airlines have been hit much harder than many small tech companies that have seen minimal impact.
Most Starbucks stores were ordered to close by the government, and the government has advised against (and in some cases banned) air travel. Of course those companies are suffering.
Furthermore, I'd argue that Starbucks is more likely to survive this than local cafe chains, and United is more likely to survive than regional discount airlines.
Smaller tech companies are already seeing the impact from the pandemic, and they will soon see more impact. Tech employees can work from home, so the companies are still producing things. However, most tech companies will have dramatic drops in revenue for the next few quarters and larger ones are more likely to be able to stick it out until the economy recovers.
High end/home toilet paper is in increased demand because people are using fewer public toilets which use the cheaper bulk toilet paper. Inversely, Starbucks voluntarily closed many stores because they served areas like collages that where going to be devoid of people.
So, while there is plenty of spin around both topics the reality is significantly different from how things things are being reported.
This exists for many giant companies; it's called "sales tax".
(Of course, sales taxes apply equally to small companies, so the incentive to break yourself up isn't there.)
As a matter of logistics, your claim isn't nonsense. But it is quite obviously false. The consumer gives money to the merchant. The merchant gives money to the government.
As a matter of legislation, it is, once again, plainly false. Here's the beginning of the California law imposing the state sales tax ( https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/lawguides/vol1/sutl/6051.html ):
> For the privilege of selling tangible personal property at retail a tax is hereby imposed upon all retailers at the rate of 2½ percent of the gross receipts of any retailer
(emphasis mine)
And the law _must_ be stated that way, because if a vendor is selling something for $100 + sales tax, the customer pays $100 ("no tax"), and the vendor accepts it, the customer hasn't violated the law. The vendor is allowed to charge whatever price he wants. It's the vendor's responsibility to pay tax on the $100 of gross receipts he just received.
There is no framework in which "sales tax is paid by the consumer" is true. What were you thinking?
>There is no framework in which "sales tax is paid by the consumer" is true.
If you want to interpret him as commenting that the ratio of elasticity of demand to elasticity of supply is very low, you then need to explain how that observation fit into the conversation.
> Why do you think sales tax can't be incident on the consumer as you imply here:
>> There is no framework in which "sales tax is paid by the consumer" is true.
In the tax incidence framework, in order for the tax to fall entirely on the consumer, elasticity of demand would need to be 0. The easy point is that this is never the case. But the better point is that in this framework, you don't assign taxes to a single party, and therefore "sales tax is paid by the consumer" is a conceptual error.
You just replied and exhaustively dug up a citation to refute every apparent interpretation of a comment.. But the moment I point out the obvious, charitable interpretation you missed, suddenly, you can't google? This seems like bad faith. You're apparently willing to research every claim, as long as doing so makes someone else look wrong, but not when there might be an actual reasonable meaning of what someone else said.[1]
And then, again, you misinterpreted me to make my claim trivially false. I said that it's "mostly true" that the sales tax is incident on consumers, and then you "misread" me as saying that the burden falls "entirely" on the consumer, thus creating the much higher burden of proving an elasticity of 0?
That's really not how to have a productive conversation.
If you or other readers still want to go that route, then here you go: a (summary of an) OECD working paper that shows that sales taxes in practice are mostly incident on consumers:
https://taxfoundation.org/new-oecd-study-reviews-research-be...
In any case, as fate would have it, the original commenter was harboring the confusion you suspected about the distinction between physically paying the tax, vs bearing its economic burden:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22787539
But still, if you're going to be charitable, be charitable. If you're going to research every possibility, research every possibility. Don't suddenly lose this ability when it might not make someone else wrong.
[1] i.e. "paid by" being a casual way to say "economically incident on".
You said that.
klyrs said "sales tax is paid by the consumer". You were discussing how to interpret his comment.
> In any case, as fate would have it, the original commenter was harboring the confusion you suspected about the distinction between physically paying the tax, vs bearing its economic burden
It's difficult to see how you can say this, since he quite clearly says the opposite. He's drawing a clear distinction between physically paying the tax and being the source of the money.
> It's semantically true businesses are required to make those payments to the government, but they're coming directly out of my pocket.
In that comment, he claims that every single expense a business incurs, tax or otherwise, is paid by that business's customers. He is in fact arguing for an elasticity of 0. That claim is not correct as a matter of cost incidence. As a matter of pure cash-flow accounting, it sounds obvious, but it's actually self-contradictory -- you can repeat the analysis to show that in fact business expenses are not paid by consumers, but by the employers they work for. But he clearly understands that there's a difference between suffering from the tax, and physically transferring the money. His confusion is over the idea that, if a flat $5 surcharge is levied on Oreos, and when you buy Oreos the receipt includes a line saying "Oreo tax - $5.00", that that might be costing Nabisco anything. He says it doesn't. He is wrong.
Of course it's the latter. Same with the gasoline tax, tariffs, value added tax, cigarette and alcohol tax, the list goes on.
E.g. companies over $100b pay a 5% revenue tax. Over $500b pay a 10% revenue tax.