Henry George - a 19th century political economist - proposed exactly this, and suggested the only thing that should be taxed should be land: impossible to hide from a tax inspector, potentially a waste to the public commons if useful land that could be exploited isn’t and you can even protect land you wish to keep pristine more easily (tax it very, very highly).

His ideas are now considered eccentric, but I do wonder if the World would be a great deal simpler if globally we moved to a Henry George system and stopped trying to tax sales, income and everything else going we do.

That may have made sense in the 19th century when agriculture dominated the economy, but it’s irrelevant today.

At scale it becomes a tax on how space-inefficient your business is. Bad news for farmers, great news for the business running a 1000-person operation out of a skyscraper. You could of course start trying to change taxation rates based on various factors to compensate, but those factors reduce to proxies for revenue, which puts us back to square one.

19th venture taxation theories don’t translate to modern multinational trade with digital commerce.

Land taxes are highly progressive.

Note that land taxes are only assessed on the value of the land, not the value of any buildings on the land. This incentivizes land owners to put the land to its highest and best use.

Doesn't it incentivize them to put land to the use that generates the most revenue? I don't see how that is necessarily the "best" use.

There will almost always be a way that a yard or garden could make more revenue, for example, such as by letting a bunch of advertisers put up billboards on it or letting someone use it for storage.

Is it really best to make it so that only the wealthy can afford to use land in a way that they enjoy rather than as an asset to be exploited for maximal revenue?

The main difference between property and land tax is that with a land tax, the structure isn't taxed. So you can build up "for free" wrt taxes, which encourages more density on the most valuable land.

E.g. land in the middle of downtown San Francisco that's currently rented out as a flat parking lot, could instead be built up into multi level parking or housing instead. Whereas the current tax structure would punish such developments by increasing the tax (which is why it's still a flat parking lot).

Contrast that with New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Property owners had their buildings destroyed, so taxes went to zero (taxes based on the property value, not the land value). This incentivized property owners to wait and see if their neighbors would rebuild rather than take immediate action.

Property taxes on land aren't unique to San Francisco. It's basically standard practice in most cities to have one tax for property and one tax for improvements.

> Contrast that with New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Property owners had their buildings destroyed, so taxes went to zero (taxes based on the property value, not the land value)

New Orleans has separate property taxes on land and structures, so property taxes did not go to $0 after Katrina.

Overall property tax rates went up because income from taxes on structures went down, but unimproved lots still get a tax bill.

Maybe in the 19th century, where this idea originated. Economics of business have changed too significantly to use it as a one size fits all taxation scheme.

It may have made sense when revenue was somewhat proportional to the amount of land a business occupied, but that no longer holds true in the age of skyscrapers and digital revenue generation.

An internet company in a 10-story building would love this scheme, though, because they could generate billions in revenue but be taxed at the same rate as a local neighborhood of people who owned their homes for a few decades.

Land-only taxes may have been an interesting idea in the 19th century, but they aren’t relevant to a modern economy.

That's irrelevant, because the ultimate owners of the corporation - the shareholders - will always be in demand of land. Real estate explains most of the growth in wealth inequality in the US over the last 60 years:

https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-gra...

For example, if fewer wealthy individuals bought sprawling estates, and more bought high-rise apartments, we'd see more production of the latter, which would increase housing concentrations in high-productivity urban areas, and in doing so, apply downward pressure on rental rates in areas which offer the most economic opportunities.

This is basically saying real estate isn't relevant to a modern economy for tax policy. Broadly true in 19th century United Kingdom in the midst of the Industrial Revolution [1]. Disputed by many millionaires today in the US [2]. Another way to track the relative weighting of land in wealthy portfolios is by aggregate measures.

The wealth of the US 1% grew 2.22X from 2005-2020 [3]. During the same period, the value of land held by the US 1% grew from $3,176,274 million to $4,607,729 million, 1.45X [4]. Not a proportional tracking of wealth increase, but I wouldn't call it "not relevant"; this is hardly rounding error territory where I would dismiss it for tax policy purposes. The sample period is also during an ahistorical secular trend when held across decades when securities were and are quite strong compared to real estate assets, so I don't know what a broader and more granular analysis would reveal, but my cursory glance across a one-generation span would make me hesitate to strongly take the "aren't relevant to a modern economy" position with our current set of policies.

The global urban real estate market so severely punishing younger generations for so long with such high prices relative to income and income precarity indicates some severe secular rent-seeking / gatekeeping taking place at an ahistorically wide scale, scope and duration. I have no dog in that hunt; I was purely lucky by timing to not live in that cohort, but I share their hostility to the status quo. If you favor the "modern economy making real estate not relevant" position, then tax, monetary, finance, social and industrial policies like LVT (though LVT is not without its challenges [5] [6]) that disincentivize such rent-seeking and favor a more efficient allocation of limited capital away from real estate towards such modern industries would be welcome, to the point that aggregate measures show little to no correlation between wealth concentration and real estate instead of our current situation.

I'm personally in favor of more metropolitan transit authorities consciously and deliberately using public transportation corridors as part and parcel of an explicit industrial policy that drives down residential costs over time. Residential development is planned more along Singaporean public housing lines with a goal of ever-decreasing DTI ratios (possible with more modern construction techniques like Lstiburek'ean Perfect Walls and Passive Net Zero in structures that last centuries, and co-operative financial organizational structures), than open market operations in the US. This doesn't have to come at the expense of open market operations; they're free to syndicate their own transit networks and monetize those networks. I'm advocating the free market advocates in US real estate becoming even stronger in the global market by practicing true free markets instead of relying upon the crutches of publicly-funded infrastructure to break the capital ground in front of them.

[1] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Land_e202c898-eb...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/01/real-estate-is-still-the-bes...

[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01002

[5] https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/land-value...

[6] https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/ass...

What’s the value of the land that Google uses?

I say the land value tax (LVT) is best grouped with Pigouvian taxes; as PP says, normal property tax relatively incentivizes holding undeveloped land, which is like charging a higher carbon tax if your car has a better MPG.

One one hand, we can also do a VAT in developed countries --- perhaps more feasible than in the 19th century and making more sense if we are no longer rapidly developing and reliant on private investment to foster those changes --- on the other hand in big closed economies we can also just print money quite safely, so Henry George is quite right to focus Pigouvian taxes when "taxation for the revenue" is far less important than curbing bad material outcomes.

(I only suggest VAT with a UBI to make it no longer regressive.)

Land value taxes adjust based on how desirable a plot is: basically, you get to keep any value you generate above and beyond the value the society surrounding the land gave it. If you leave a plot of land empty in downtown, you’re preventing someone else from using that plot productively, and adding a net negative cost to the surrounding properties. So you should be taxed accordingly.

If you keep the zoning then maybe the land isn’t worth that much, but if property taxes were based on the “true” land value then it would mean farmers sell out faster to create sprawl.

I would rip up urban zoning with an LVT to ensure density, but keep the agricultural zoning because we can't eat skyscrapers.

Not especially. The skyscraper land is probably 10000x more valuable per square foot so the tax will be 100x higher.

If you assume every square foot is taxed the same then you've kind of missed the point of a land value tax.

It won't fix the inherent problems with intellectual property though.

This would also help push back against ridiculous patents and eternal copyright.

Eternal copyright, however - yes, sucks.

If you have a good idea and patent it, then taxation of that patent right would force you to license it or lose your monopoly protection granted by the government.

If you have a good expression of an idea and copyright it, then taxation of that copyright would force you to license it or lose your monopoly protection granted by the government.

Either way, you are still granted the IPRs, on a "pay for it" basis that captures some of that value back.

Pigovian taxation is even better. Taxing gas is a great example. Gas consumers emit carbon which has a cost for society. We should make them pay for this negative externality via a gas tax, so their consumption is economically optimal. This is how to prevent the Tragedy of the Commons.

I'd argue that some taxes are objectively better than others and not all equally wrong.

They may additionally fine you though.

But in either case - sure, but the system means absolutely no worries about your tax return for 90% of British employees.

To follow on it is easy to hit the limit on dividend allowance if you have shares outside of your ISA

Where these US companies? employee share holders in the USA really get screwed

And no, it's a British company .

Bit of a red flag that the company is so badly run.

Also I'm not sure how much tax this would actually save - you can only get £3600 worth of shares tax free per year on the employee incentive plan(which seems closest to what I'm getting, flat number of shares after 4 years). That's a very....low amount.

Worse, when I moved to Chicago the state of Illinois wouldn’t even accept my taxes electronically because their form required one of a handful of authentication methods—the only one of which that ought to have worked for me was to use my Illinois driver’s license number—a 12 digit sequence; however, their form only permitted 8 digits. It was a significant hassle just to get them to take my money.

I’ve also had difficulties figuring out how much to withhold. In the US they give us a form that calculates “allotments” (or something—I forget the term) but it’s unclear whether more of those correspond to more or less withholdings and in any case the form computed incorrectly for me for several years (I’m sure it was user error somehow and senior engineers are just not reliably smart enough to figure it out, even with the help of HR) and I would end up owing thousands in taxes as well as a separate penalty for not withholding enough.

It’s maddening that our government makes it so difficult for earnest people to pay their taxes.

I don't think Intuit has anything to do with why the tax code is complex. Their lobbying is for making filling out the forms complicated, such as by stopping the IRS from pre-filling forms with the information they already have.

The tax code complexity almost all stems from people not wanting to pay tax. That complicated the code in two ways. First, it means that we get exceptions and special cases written into the code either because people that want to pay less tax convince Congress to make a special case for them or Congress takes advantage of the desire to pay less tax to provide exceptions to motivate people to change behavior.

Second, it means that if there is any ambiguity or wiggle room in interpreting something, someone will exploit that to pay less tax than Congress intended them to pay. The tax code gets patches to fix that, usually resulting in an increase in complexity.

A great example of the later was that a long time ago a big company was going to give shareholders a dividend. This would be taxes as ordinary income to the shareholders.

Someone came up with an idea to turn that into capital gains instead. Rather than give a divident, the company first did a stock split, say 100 for 99. So each 99 shares each stockholder held became 100 shares. This is not a taxable event.

Then the company did a stock buyback, 1 out of every 100 shares. That decreased each stockholders holding by 1%, so every 100 shares a stockholder held became 99, and the stockholder got some cash. That is a taxable event, but it is capital gains.

Net result: every stockholder ended up with the exact same percentage of the company that they started with, with some cash from the company, and got to pay the lower capital gains tax on that cash instead of the higher income tax.

The tax code was patched to fix that. Buybacks became ordinary income. But it didn't end there. Consider a family owned business owned by four members of the same family. One of them is moving away and will not be participating in the business. The company wants to buy him out. It was generally agreed that this was not a buyback to dodge taxes--it is a legitimate buyback and should get capital gains treatment.

And so the patch to fix the buyback tax dodge needs an exception to try to recognize "legitimate" buybacks. It ends up having a formula that involves looking at the distribution of ownership before and after the buyback and having several criteria for recognizing when the distribution change signifies a legit buyback that should get capital gains treatment.

This was a fairly simple instance, so it only added maybe a few paragraphs to the tax code, plus some more to the regulations.

But that sort of thing is all over the code, sometimes just adding a few sentences, and sometimes pages.

You don't even file.

You could choose to use them (for example, the self education one) and get SEK5000-SEK10000 (~€500-€1000) BUT then you would have to fill out a tax return.

That is just one exemption. Another one relevant for our field is working from home. Similar amount.

In order to claim those, though, you will need to file a tax return. If you do not consider that money to be worth the time, then not filing one is a good choice.

The Australian system - which could definitely be improved by at least pre-filling things - forces you to actively choose to leave the money behind. The default in the UK, Europe and the Nordic countries is that the money is kept by the taxaxtion office.

Defaults are powerful. And they thank you for entrusting them with your extra SEK that you do not want to claim.

Think tax breaks for solar panels or even just getting insulation added to your home. There are thousands of this type of tax break available to nudge people to move toward the gov's goals.

The land tax has zero deadweight loss, because what it's taxing is pure economic rent, rather than production of value:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Any tax imposed on anything except scarce natural resources will be penalizing the creation of wealth, and impose deadweight losses.

This isn't even why gas is tax heavily in developed economies. First, gas taxes pay for roads. Second, the negative externality that Europe, at least, is trying to reduce is dependency on Middle Eastern oil, since that opens a huge can of worms with respect to world stability. If they really cared about air pollution, they wouldn't have pushed diesel so much.

So taxing something bad like CO2, great idea. Taxing something good like income or creating jobs - bad idea.

Land tax would be simple, and very progressive, the tax rate of most young people renting world now be 0. It's more complex than that because the landlord pays the tax and hikes the rent appropriately. It enforces that land is used efficiently, which is so dysfunctional in many large cities.

It's a great idea in my opinion. You'd solve taxation, eliminate personal accountants as a class, and solve the housing crises with one stroke (there is still zoning, but this makes poorly zoned land undesirable to hold because it bleeds money - creating an incentive for the land owners to vote for zoning the land better). But politicians deal with popular ideas, not smart ideas. The odds of any country trying it seem slim.

It's worked well in some cities but been repealed in others because people were upset that mansions weren't taxed enough relative to smaller SFH.

I frequently come to a conclusion personal income tax should be abolished as it punishes work.

CIT, VAT, capital gains and inheritance taxes should be enough to sustain a budget. These are all unrelated to performed work.

Now that I'm remote, I plan to move to a rural area and grow some of my own food in a single family home. I don't think that should be considered hoarding.

That said, I'm a crazy pro individualism and no tax no government guy, so I have no real place in this thread. : p

That land would probably serve society better if it had more than a single family dwelling on it, you could have 10 families in walking distance of their jobs rather than one, and 9 families commuting via car.

Now, that argument doesn't help with switching too an LVT, but there are other reasons to be optimistic. Taxing Jeff Bezos at any level is worthless in comparison to a) Paying enough UBI that the warehouses would unionize, b) directly expropriating the warehouses into the postal system. (post : IP :: warehouse sku system : content-address based networking).

Basically, trying to account for the power of billionaries and mega corps in monetary terms is a dangerous exercise where they can probably out-loophole you.

I don’t think this is the best idea to solve tax issues in the modern world

The problem with corporate taxation is that...we really want R&D and employment to be tax deductible for them, but a company like Amazon can just plow all their profits into R&D and focus on growth (even without R&D tax credits, they would still take a loss on earnings due to R&D outlays). Of course, all of that R&D money is still mostly taxed (via tech worker income taxes), so its not like the government isn't seeing any of it. Corporate income taxes really come down hard on a successful company that doesn't have any avenue to grow...maybe they should?

Yes it would, but you see that will not be popular for many obvious reasons ( less jobs for tax collectors/consultants/auditors etc.) A more non-obvious reason is that the ordinary Joe on the street hates the rich so much that he wants the rich being taxed rather than see the simplicity of taxing no one.

>His ideas are now considered eccentric,

He actually seems a level headed guy to me :)

I would go even one step ahead and say that even land should not be taxed except for the cost of keeping land records.

What if we got rid of all taxes, and the only thing the govt. could do was print money at some fixed %GDP rate to induce inflation.

Then everyone would try to spend faster than inflation and the velocity of money could be quite fast (to increase GDP and spending, etc.)

Maybe a flywheel-economy?

Make residential, owner-occupied homes and special categories (like public transit-related or infrastructure-related improvements like healthcare/power/water/waste/telecomms/etc. property) exempt. All other property post their assessments at tax jurisdiction's office. Anyone, at any time, can post to that office cash that is 10% more than the assessment upon the property. If the owner does not challenge the cash assessment, they must accept the cash offer within 180 days or are evicted. The catch is, that cash must be absolutely unlevered and unencumbered, the property is carried on everyone's books as a cash asset of the prospective new owner, and the property cannot be pledged as collateral, for the next 21 years (with an upward adjustment for deep-pocketed backers of offers) or until the property is sold, whichever comes first. The offering party must provide full disclosure and auditability of the source of the cash and the "Source Of Truth" controlling interest, no shell games. The legal jurisdiction enforces this transactional structure by refusing all cases entangling the property.

The owner can respond to the price discovery cash offer by paying the tax jurisdiction the "back taxes" implied by the cash offer, back to the last time the property transacted on the open market. No penalty. If the owner can deliver proof that the offering party hid their ties to deeper (ultimate beneficial controlling interest) funding sources, then the entire offer is forfeit to the owner.

This creates an incentive to discover badly out-of-alignment prices, but the intention is to gate out anyone playing financialization games or asymmetrically deep pockets parking cash badly distorting a small player-dominated market's historic valuations.

We pay taxes for services we expect from governments, defence, policing, justice, water, sewers etc etc I don;t see why corporations that use all these things shouldn't pay their share

I think the right answer is VAT + externalities taxes (LVT, Cabon tax, etc.) + UBI, which is both very easy to enforce and perhaps net progressive enough. Re "progressive enough": I don't so much care if BWM owners are screwed over relative to private jet owners on paper, I think reducing work hours and propping up demand at the bottom with UBI will have a trickle-up effect.

There might be room for a wealth tax, but I think it might be less loophole-prone and better theoretically to attack that problem more directly and less monetarily in terms of socializing key natural monopolies, promoting coops, etc. Trying to financialize the big question of "who controls the means of production" I think might be just too difficult.

Wow, it's a good thing we don't do that. Good news, the income you spend to further your business is deductible. We include a personal exemption for generic costs, child exemptions, mortgage exemptions, healthcare cost exemptions, retirement savings exemptions, and numerous others.

Additionally, the whole concept behind a progressive income tax is to tax people in a similar way to taxing them on profit. After all, percent of income spent on necessary goods goes down as income goes up.

But I don't think anyone wants a system where this is done by itemized receipts instead of with generalizations.

The personal exemptions are a sham and do not reflect the reality of high cost of living areas.

Tax policy isn't set by moral arguments, it's set by government need for revenue which is then tweaked by political pressure groups.

The reason why you can deduct mortgage interest but not rent has nothing to do with fairness, which is undefined and a massively ambiguous term, but because banks, which are the primary beneficiaries of mortgage subsidies, have a lot more political power in Washington than landlords, who would be the primary beneficiaries of national rent subsidies.

For small, opening (usually developing) economies the matter is different, and they should have more capital controls accordingly.

That’s an intriguing comment. Can you explain further?

For states like the USA that print their own currency and enjoy tremendous global demand for their currency, taxes are less about revenue and more about controlling behavior and unemployment outcomes. Some argue that taxes are just a way to force demand for a currency the government has a monopoly on to ensure it always has _some_ value.

(Note: this is a rather polarizing theory and still somewhat young. The US Fed pulled off printing trillions last year and things haven't gone to hell yet do there's something there )

For a house, your net worth hasn't decreased by the cost of the house. A company wouldn't be able to deduct that. They can deduct for assets that depreciate.

Real estate tends to appreciate in value, especially in cities. The company would have to get unlucky with their real estate to be able to write off a loss. Buildings don't usually depreciate.

They could allow their buildings to fall into a state of disrepair, hoping it would lower their value. But why would they? The can deduct the repairs. It's a legitimate expense.

I’m not an accountant, but I’ve studied enough of it in University to be dangerous.

Depreciation isn't a cheat code that lets you avoid tax on profit. If you depreciate the building more than its actual market value depreciation, you owe back what you deducted when you sell the building.

1. Pension (up to a maximum amount, and tapered down from 40k to 4k depending on income) 2. Cycle to Work bike 3. Childcare vouchers

There's also some allowance if you're required to purchase things for your job, e.g. a uniform or tools, but vans, cars etc. are out.

Here in NZ there are NO tax exemptions for normal humans (well there is one single one for low income families with small children) - it means that our taxes are incredibly easy to file - if you have one employer you probably don't need to file at all, if you want to it's 2 pages on a web form, if you don't file and the IRD owes you money they'll probably pop it in your bank for you.

Oh, and our high marginal tax rates are ~10% lower than I was paying in California, and that includes free public healthcare

VAT's regressiveness would probably become a real problem in that situation, but that's a different problem.

(VAT + UBI is great for everyone but those 90th percentile luxury-car-and-McMansion-owning inner ring suburb types that are the Democrat's favorite constituency :/)

If the taxes and transfers are diverse enough, one can reduce that problem by making them compensating each other, but if you make VAT + UBI make the lion share of the government's money flow, it will be a really large problem.

It might sound like I'm being a culture warrior chest-thumper about those "liberal elites", but I really do mean something more material / economic here. I think most of that classes struggles (and they do take on huge debts) would not be worsened by taking away their money.

- This is the class most thirstiest about getting their kinds into good schools without being able to donate their way in. But the scarcity of "good jobs" that motivates this credentialism relates to inadequate demand of the masses. Giving them more money won't help the fact that the Keynesian feedback loop has broken down, causing the job scarcity. (And really, consumption not work is the goal, we should fix the feedback loop by working less not consuming more, beyond guaranteeing basic needs.)

- This the class hitching lots of their wealth on real estate, but it's precisely because our cultural obsession with owning single family homes that good land (i.e. that with good access to the other good land where people need to go) is in perpetual short supply. Even if they are the "vacation home" winners of the current ponzie skin, the portion of winners will bleed away in successive generations if housing continues to be a "good investment" --- and thus unattainable to increasingly many people.

- Perhaps this class is less affected by expensive healthcare (other than the richer ones above), but would still benefit from it being cheaper. Not a majority of them is doctors or biotech researchers or whoever else benefits from our shitty healthcare system.

So yes, I think even if they are at the tax advantage nadir, they still are benefitting:

- Richer masses fix their job anxieties

- We should separately fix real estate and transit so they can be at peace in condos not mcmansions

- We should separately fix healthcare to their slight advantage.

Also, I sincerely hope and empowered working classes / lower classes will prevent the richest billionaires from emerging (at least more than transiently), so the 0.1% stuff should be far more of a theoretically problem as we get a "thinner vertical tail" power law.

In reality I understand that this would harm the employees and the public to an unacceptable degree so maybe some form of “jail time” whereby all profits go directly to non-executive employees and price discounts would be more effective. Depriving shareholders of dividends may lead investors to “vote with their wallets” and we’d see more of an actual free market instead of what we have today where economy-destroying decisions go effectively unpunished and in some cases are rewarded by bail outs.

You’d fine then the same amount?

Progressive fines on people are based on their income, not how much they have left in the bank at the end of the month.

You don’t meet many people who make $1M in a year who have unavoidable expenses of $900k.

https://edition.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20...

Fauci was wrong. Simple as that. Better to just own up to it.

I agree, but like you mentioned, the externalities on innocent parties would be too great. Also a lot of companies do not issue dividends, so focusing on them would do no good in a lot of cases. I think a threefold strategy would need to be implemented:

1. Direct action against executives in the board (e.g. heavy fines amounting to a large fraction of their total compensation and/or jail).

2. Confiscation of dividends for a period of time.

3. Forced issuance of new shares to dilute existing shareholders, with sale proceeds going to the government.

One issue is that shares can be traded, so it's possible for a shareholder to benefit from some bad action, then avoid any punishment by selling the shares before the punishment is implemented. Maybe such people could be shared a per-share fine based on shares held at a particular date?

I think it’s nearly impossible to expect most shareholders to understand the business underpinnings to this degree within the existing system. Think of pensioners with mutual funds, do you think most even understand all the businesses in those funds let alone the operations of those businesses?

To me, this is akin at employees being punished as well. Both benefit from the business operations but it’s hard to expect employees to have knowledge and be responsible for the decisions of the C-suite.

That's true, but I don't think that matters. Those same shareholders both profit and lose based on all kinds of other factors they don't understand. Adding new ways to lose tied to illegal activity doesn't really fundamentally change anything.

Also, there's something important to note: pensioners with mutual funds have savvy proxies (fund managers) who should very will understand the business underpinnings to this degree, and vote their shares to avoid losses due to these kinds of fines.

I think it does because it creates a adds a dimension to the loss that will disproportionately affect the assessment that of risk. For one, this added dimension has only a downside. Think of an auto insurance company who operates in no-fault States. Their behavior (and by extension, the policies they offer) is changed because the risk they incur is higher despite their customer being a good driver. (The analogy being a “good” company still gets punished in the form of less investment under the proposed rules because the risk to the investor is increased).

Second, while people are well attuned to think about risk, they are very bad at judging it. That’s why the fund managers are not generally capable of out performing the market for extended periods. They are either not as savvy as you assume or work under such constraints that they can’t use it to their advantage. Behavioral psychology/economics shows that people are disproportionately risk-adverse so if you think increased risk without an even higher commensurate increase in reward, they tend to avoid taking on any extra risk.

But ultimately, it's supposed to change the paradigm. Because currently the economy is run by paperclip maximizers that no human is held responsible for. Which is not ideal.

In theory this would give an incentive to some employees to mess up if they know they won't get caught.

This guides the trend in enforcement actions or lack thereof

There are some books on this

The sad reality of the world is that once a business is past a threshold of power, it's nearly impossible to hold them accountable. Craven sociopaths know they can do what they do, and worst case, suffer some bad press while they move on to the next thing, banking 100's of millions the whole way.

Make those people truly terrified of the consequences of their actions and politics will be utterly transformed.

Corporations can be taxed on the money coming in, that would look like a sales tax or VAT. The problem with that tax is it falls on the consumer (since what really matters is which transaction you tax, not which side pays the tax).

But this brings me to a solution to the corporate tax avoidance issue that has already been figured out by economists, but rarely gets discussed.

This is a simplification, but basically corporations have one place money goes in, and two places it goes out, like this:

sales = expenses + profits

If you tax the sales, but deduct the expenses, this leaves the incidence of the tax on the profits. Unlike profits, it's usually much clearer where the sale takes place so it's much harder to avoid than the existing corporate tax. It's called a border adjustment tax. [1]

Where this gets complicated is international trade - how this works is only domestic expenses are deductible. At first glance that seems protectionist, but apparently the currency exchange rates adjust which balances is it out and although it's not obvious it ends up trade-neutral.

It was actually seriously proposed as part of US tax reform in 2017, but some big companies were against it so it got killed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border-adjustment_tax

Not true. States like WA have general B&O taxes which are a tax on revenue, not profit.

This makes it much harder to operate thin margin businesses like groceries and manufacturing, while favoring high margin businesses like software.

But when people are discussing the corporate tax and corporate tax avoidance, usually they're talking about the corporate income tax, which is also what the article is about.

If I understand it correctly (I don't know the details for every state), a gross receipts tax doesn't even adjust for value added (the VA in VAT).

For example say a few companies are involved in producing a good (starting from raw materials) so the supply chain looks like this:

$7 (raw materials) -> $8 (components) - > $9 (finished good wholesale) -> $10 (store price)

With a VAT, the total taxed amount is $10, which is divided up among the companies based on how much value they added (so if they move from $8->$9, they pay tax on $1).

With a gross receipts tax, the total taxed amount is $7+$8+$9+$10=$34. Goods that are produced by many small companies working together will pay a lot more taxes than those produced by huge vertically-integrated ones.

There's some good reasons to use a VAT if you want to tax revenue, and one of them is to avoid problems like this.

It's very elegant and fair, but imposes a lot of accounting. Sales tax is easier in that it only collects at the end, but it's actually hard to define "end". (Buy a screw and you pay tax, buy a manufacturer buying the same screw usually does not.)

There are still problems about regressive taxation (are stock profits value add? Services? Plain old labor? What's the difference? Usually poor people end up paying the taxes on everything while rich people buy things that aren't subject to the system). Still, if you want to tax profits on consumables, it's remarkably straightforward.

Agree that VAT/sales taxes are regressive and shift more of the tax burden to lower-income people. Although the only US political candidate I can remember recently proposing a VAT was Yang in which case his UBI proposal would probably more than balance out the effects on after-tax income.

Where you draw the line for "middle class" is somewhat arbitrary - I think you could be middle class and still earn over $120k, especially in a high cost of living area - but probably most people who consider themselves middle class would fall under that. Especially because people who earn $120k are probably not spending $120k/yr once you factor in retirement contributions, income taxes, etc.

A relatively high-profile economist wrote positively about the UBI idea last year. [1]

Not that you couldn't make it more progressive. I think I've seen proposals for a progressive individual consumption tax, which would look something like a progressive income tax but then removing the limits for IRA contributions. The theory being you would put money you want to save in the non-taxable account, then you would only withdraw what you want to spend in a given year, which could be taxed at a progressive rate.

[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/how_to_increa...

It’s a convention so, yes, it’s arbitrary (and people tend to change that definition to fit their points, and of course it’s relative to COL) but the most widely used definition is the middle quintiles. I believe this puts the upper bound around $120k for a household (not individual) in the US.

And you’re right, most people do consider themselves middle class. Some studies show as much as 90% of people think they are middle class which, unless we use a very loose statistical definition, is obviously false. The problem is people subjectively compare their life to their own peer group rather than society as a whole, so they are misled about defining the societal norm.

For how higher incomes could end up middle class I wasn't thinking of a different threshold, but ways of defining social class that are more qualitative than quantitative.

For example you could define middle class as people who live a modest lifestyle financed by selling their labor to a company, and upper class as people who can live off wealth. So someone from a wealthy family living off a trust fund and going to an elite graduate school might count as upper class despite being low or middle income, and an engineer making $120k in the bay area might still count as middle class that way.

Defining it like that would probably produce a small upper class relative to the size of the middle class, but in historical societies where social class was a bigger issue what's considered upper class is usually a pretty small percent of the population, so it wouldn't seem too crazy to me to define it like that.

And that's fine, but if such a company ever needs to call the police and go to court, etc., they then would have to pay all of that out of their pockets (i.e. the work of the police, the lawyers and judges, and so on).

Uber benefits from streets more than the average citizen.

if corporations had to pay per use, they would prefer to build their private infrastructures and police forces, while public infrastructure would lag behind chronically underfunded.

The company could just pay for the usage of the road (in some way) and the government makes sure the roads exist. Besides the bureaucratic overhead, I don't see why that couldn't work.

I think you could probably preface the above with the word “citizens” and it would still be true. But both citizens and corporations have the right to lobby their representatives in their own interest. It’s the politicians job to try and create policy that balances the interests of all their constituents.

I, personally, would happily pay -more- in taxes, if it meant that, for instance, we stopped all fundraising for elections (and instead candidates had a set amount to spend per race), and also if we provided healthcare to everyone.

Having a multi layered tax policy is complicated and has proved difficult to enforce. Multinational corporations have shown time after time that they are able to get around the first layer of taxation (corporate tax), so why not just eliminate it and put more of the burden on the second layer (income, capital gains, sales tax, etc).

The general idea is not to raise or lower net taxes, in this particular instance we could keep net taxes the same while allowing for less corporate avoidance and more targeted tax collection.

Companies like Amazon historically have minimized their profit to grow revenue, assets and shareholder value. They barely pay corporate tax while profitable small businesses will pay corporate tax plus the second layer.

Share buybacks lead to greater stock value and therefore income when sold for the owners, who in term are taxed as individuals.

You theoretically could have a hold Corp that never paid out anything and instead funded the lifestyle of the owners/employees, but I’m sure there are ways to close that and the current 15% min is a far cry from what most people pay.

We don't do that, though, not by a long shot. There are some cases where the rules are the same but many, many cases where they are different. So I don't think that can serve as an argument that they should be taxed the same.

1. Spent on goods or services

2. Spent on rent

3. Spent on capital purchases

4. Spent on debt repayment or other forms of financing

In fact income tax does not have the last two points that you admit are bad, so maybe we should eliminate income tax and use corporate tax only?

The thing is low corporate taxes create an inequality between labor and capital gains. It's already the case that wealth inequality is quite unrelated to income inequality, the highest wealth individuals often don't register in the high income brackets.

https://voxeu.org/article/effects-employer-payroll-tax-cuts

I am aware of the difference between capital gains tax and corporate tax (also note that not every country has a capital gains tax). My argument applies to both, i.e. one of the reasons for raising inequality is the inbalance of labour and capital and the low corporate and capital gains taxes definitely contribute.

About the effect of income tax on salar, I'm not quite sure what that has to do with my points. I was not arguing that we should eliminate corporate tax and just let income tax handle it. Unless your argument is we should use income tax instead of corporate tax because it lowers salary?

Now it’s true that invested savings become goods and services, capital purchases, etc. for the companies you invest in. But the idea is that government will take over some of that role and invest the taxes collected in more socially beneficial activities, with returns accruing to the public.

Corporate tax is, by and large, a fiction to placate voters. It could (should?) be replaced with a more flexible system that isn't as susceptible to the usual deduction and profit shifting.

Nobody benefits from a company growing indefinite wealth without distributing it to actual people.

> So for example the company can rent houses, cars, and airplanes for every employee

If they could do this, all companies would do this already to avoid taxes. In reality, this is dealt with by (in the UK) considering those things "benefits in kind" aka equivalent to cash.

No, many would benefit in very obvious ways, if you just think about it a little bit: if you want to accumulate wealth you prefer to be taxed on what you spend rather than what you earn. That allows you to save more quickly, it allows you to create a dynasty where wealth is passed to your offspring, who in turn would prefer to pay taxes on their consumption rather than their income.

So if a company served as a type of money making engine but didn't distribute anything, you can save by purchasing shares and letting compound interest work to your benefit and then spend some of that in your retirement by selling some of your shares and give the rest to your kids. You would have a lower overall tax burden as you could earn like a king but live just a middle class lifestyle, allowing your kids to live like kings even if they earned just a middle class lifestyle, and with some left over due to the magic of interest.

This is why if your income >> your consumption, you really want only consumption taxes.

There is also the issue of precautionary saving. Most people prefer to have money in the bank to insure themselves against future loss of income, and this type of precautionary savings benefits people even if there is no consumption, just as having insurance provides a benefit even if you never get into an accident. So if you don't need to pay taxes on savings, then you can shield yourself more easily from future income losses and smooth consumption so you always prefer taxes on consumption, which do not make consumption smoothing more difficult, than taxes on income, which do. Think of it in this way -- a tax on insurance makes insurance more costly and thus more difficult. But financial savings are a form of insurance for when you lose your job or face some other financial setback.

So in summary, one can argue that the purpose of money is consumption so "nobody benefits" by acquiring money that they don't spend on consumption. But this is a naive view that ignores the role of risk, time and inter-generational concerns.

> So in summary, one can argue that the purpose of money is consumption so "nobody benefits" by acquiring money that they don't spend on consumption. But this is a naive view that ignores the role of risk, time and inter-generational concerns.

It's also not what I've said.

Isn't this exactly what companies like Apple etc. are doing? As it accumulates wealth, the stock price (which is supposed to reflect the value of the company) goes up as well. And thus the shareholders benefit.

If you have piles of cash and don’t plan on spending it, somehow, on your business then you can’t expect your stock to rise and in fact if you’re so inept that you don’t know how to spend your billions your stock price may actually drop.

The more cash they gather, the higher the lower bound of the share price.

And don't apple pay dividends?

Company B has X revenue, Y in profits, and $1T in cash.

Which of the two would fetch a higher price in an acquisition?

yes I realize it’s nuanced and depends on country.

And yet companies actually do this. Perhaps your model of what motivates companies is wrong?

Shareholders do. And shareholders own the company.

there's already laws in the books today that those are taxable as in-kind compensation

What goes away is the incentive to locate all of the company's IP in a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands, and then rent it all back to the subsidiary in New York at wildly inflated prices that ensure that all income is technically earned in the Cayman Islands. Because it would no longer matter where the income was earned, it would only matter to whom it is paid out to. Less protection for billionaires who are primarily interested in asset inflation.

I'm pretty sure this would actually increase total taxes collected because it shifts tax burden away from low and easily avoided corporate taxes, and towards individuals that pay higher income tax rates that are much harder to avoid. But even if it doesn't fully compensate, you can easily adjust top bracket rates to fill the gap, without any worry that it will hurt workers like the corporate income tax does.

https://taxfoundation.org/labor-bears-corporate-tax/

Any entity that has to pay obviously has other ways they can more productively (as seen from the entity level) deploy the cash.

But ideally we are not optimizing for a single entity or class of entity, we’re trying to optimize at the societal level.

We know that corporations can bear some burden, because we are taxing profits. I couldn’t tell you whether this is an optimal place to tax, but it intuitively feels reasonable - corporations are large non-governmental concentrations of wealth and power. This seems like a valid pool to tap for funding the state, and better than many alternatives (e.g. taxing the poor and powerless).

Some interesting alternatives to corporate taxation have been proposed[1][2], and I think they merit consideration for their potential to remove disincentives to invest or hire labor. I personally like Michael Pettis's argument that continued economic growth depends on increasing economic demand through redistributing wealth from capital (or more generally the wealthy) to labor [3], so I am skeptical of reforms that stop taxing capital.

[1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/value-added-tax-revenue-neutral-al... [3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/29/capital-flow-united-sta...

This is an important point, and is misunderstood in (US) politics and deabtes, IMHO. Supporting capitalism and taxation aren't mutually exclusive positions. Well thought out taxation is crucial to balance the inherent network effects of large corporations. There's huge network effects, especially in tech [1], that leads to less ability for smaller firms or new players to compete. If anything, I'd wager that appropriate taxation of network effects is crucial to a well functioning capitalist society, especially as so much of success is due to luck and network effects in addition to hard work and talent [2].

Just because you have capital doesn't mean you have capitalism, where most any individual(s) can access capital to bring about new companies and products. The trick is defining empirically and scientifically sound taxation measures rather than giving into simplistic models of Socialism or Reganism.

1: https://medium.com/@nfx/70-of-value-in-tech-is-driven-by-net... 2: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068

There isn’t a clear equivalent where if you ditched income tax some other tax would make up for it.

There is a sweet spot, where the amount we tax generates more than it costs, this is known as the "fiscal multiplier." Tax breaks are among the worst incentives ever to exist and have the lowest net-return to society. A corporation paying no taxes, is then completely freeloading off of the countries they operate within. Tax breaks are handouts, full-stop. Tax breaks ONLY increase deficits by necessarily decreasing input (tax revenues) without a corresponding decrease in costs or increase in output. It's literally saying "you don't have to pay your share of taxes because you already make so much money." This is the precise reason Republicans run up the deficit. No one realizes tax breaks are a fucking hand out, we have a budget. "Tax breaks" are just the same kind of spending as food stamps, except they provide a negative return where as food stamps provides a positive one with something like a 1.73 multiplier (which is fucking awesome[1]). If we were taxing multinational corporations at a 70% tax rate, sure, then maybe a tax break might actually help stimulate some growth... but we sure as shit ain't even close yet.

The corporate tax rate should be something like 35% in the USA, but if you do the math it's closer to 17.5% on average that's paid (or was when I checked a couple years ago, I can't imagine it has improved). I can promise all of you, that the overwhelming majority of corporations aren't able deploy international tax avoidance strategies (and are paying really close to that 35%). So... then, 'cuz like averages, 'n' shit, that means (did I get a pun?) a handful of extremely large players are likely paying literally nothing in taxes to get the USA's average rate down to 17.5%.

It's pretty easy to go calculate these numbers for yourself, and to look into what things actually cost. I'd recommend anyone and everyone go take a gander at https://www.bea.gov/ and actually go do it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier

People love to tax companies, because they think it's "someone else" paying those taxes.

Maybe there is also some anthropomorphising going on where you think of the company as another person who is much wealthier than you.

I think you can very safely generalize this to "people are always in favor of more benefits for themselves that they don't have to pay for".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Case_la...

Frankly, if OP doesn’t want me to anthropomorphize corporations for tax purposes, they’ll need to go back in time and stop the courts from anthropomorphizing them for various rights.

If a company gets 1A rights under citizens united, then it can have tax obligations as well.

I’m pretty over this double standard where companies are handed various rights, but not commensurate obligations.

"I work hard and pay my taxes, Ford makes billions and pay much less tax!"

But Ford is an abstract entity that is not a person and doesn't have a better life than you.

All those billions are eventually paid to living humans, who do pay taxes on that income.

This is the economist perspective, but it requires a level of analysis not compatible with rage.

If you say: we’ll only collect taxes from the individuals that are paid by Microsoft, instead of taxing Microsoft, that’s fine by me. But, I would then say that Microsoft also doesn’t have free speech rights as a corporation, after all each individual in the corporation has free speech rights.

If we decide that a corporation *is* entitled to some rights granted to people (such as a right to free speech), then the corporation should also be subject to taxation, separately from all the individuals that compromise it.

I’m unwilling to give one without the other. If a company want rights, it should have obligations. If it has obligations, then the company should have rights.

Linking taxation and free speech, among all possible rights and obligations, does seem completely arbitrary though.

Well, it was completely arbitrary as it's serving as an example. I'm not saying my policy would literally be X Taxes and Citizens United, just using each as an example of the general class of things that I think should be linked.

I've seen corporate personhood used aggressively to argue that corporations should have more rights, but then when we're in a tax policy discussion, suddenly we are squeamish about anthropomorphizing corporations. My argument is that the amount that we anthropomorphize corporations should be equal whether our discussion is about rights (with free speech as one example) or about obligations (with taxation as one such example)

Instead of writing separate but very similar laws for personal and corporate property, you say that the law is the same for both cases, aside for a few exceptions.

Same goes for financing, while dividends can only be paid out from post tax profits loan payments and even stock buybacks can be structured in a very tax efficient manner. Yet that doesn’t happen that often either.

But if you don't accept these deadweight losses, which means that there is no way of funding a government, which means that the essential services a government provides - notably a monopoly on violence and a peaceful way of adjudicating disputes - no longer exist. This is more damaging to businesses - when business every business needs to hire a protection racket to avoid being ripped off and killed, productive activity tends to come to a halt.

For instance, land value tax has no dead weight loss. Corporate tax has one of if not the highest dead weight loss.

But the very reason they didn't repatriate it and spend it in the US is the corporate tax the GP is arguing against.

This is an important point people miss. The owners of those companies eventually pay taxes on the profits, so a corporate tax is a double tax.

There are a lot of things that get taxed: property, income, sales, corporate profits. You can vary these rates and still come up with a viable government revenue model. Oregon doesn't have a sales tax; Washington state doesn't have income tax. The only problem, and it's what this deal is about, is when these varying policies interact, or one jurisdiction does something very different from others.

What you end up taxing is a social policy lever, but it's otherwise not all that important. The important part is getting some degree of alignment so you don't encourage people to live in Vancouver, WA, but buy everything in Portland.

Will they? Countries have a wide set of positions from "tax only corporate income" to "tax only dividends", with a lot of them sizing both taxes taking the other one into account.

The tax avoidance industry now shifts to servicing individuals, and again we find ourselves with inequality between individuals who can afford those services and those who cannot.

An alternative way to tax would be to simply raise interest rates, and discourage capital from not being deployed productively.

I guess one solution could be to classify various types of corporations and tier them. And then tax rules change accordingly.

Similar to how tax breaks are given to startups.

They need furniture, computer, food, and a home for that business, so boom...using the money 'for the business' tax free.

Think about it, a no tax corporate tax, yet taxing the recipients of dividends and distributions would:

* eliminate tax heavens * foreign companies would come to the US * stimulate the economy * benefit the shareholders at large

Of course the shareholders would pay taxes, and distributions to foreign entities could be taxed at the source.

Easy, smart, logic.

However there are some loopholes that companies still figure out. In Estonia's case we have big international banks that found a juicy loophole. The local Estonian branches pay no corporate tax, but they also never pay dividends. Instead they give out a no interest loan to their foreign mothership and have no intention of ever getting it back. This loophole has since been patched, but it shows that companies will still hire teams of lawyers to find new loopholes to not pay a single cent.

That is life.

And that should not be an excuse to impede improving society.

Do you feel the cost/value of having the ability to a call a number and have a well trained team put out a fire in minutes that could ruin your business is 0 or free? What about rules/services that allows your business to have an advantage over another in a different region?

Taxes need to be paided by everyone. Corporations use more services than you would think and rely on a stable government that they need to contribute to.

It will end up being: increase in price -> increase in government spending. Everyone will pay the increased prices, governments will pocket a % to keep their employees busy or employ their friends for public work, some of it will be redistributed to a portion of the population.

I believe taxes shouldn't be paid by anyone and governments should disappear.

No, of course not. (Why the insulting tone of your rhetorical question?)

> Corporations use more services than you would think ...

How many publicly traded companies have you started?

Furthermore, these taxes are not paid by all of us. They are paid by the owners of the corporation who and which receive considerable benefit from the government services they are paying for.

Consider corporate taxes, if you will, as use taxes for using the economy.

For example, if a corporation has no profit, common for startups trying to get off the ground, they pay no corporate income tax. This is the case because corporations pay income tax on profit not revenue. Having no corporate income tax would only shift that burden from the economic use case to elsewhere which is what happens with the FAANGs and multinationals. That elsewhere ends up as brick and mortar and individuals. BTW, tax fairness means lower as well. Brick and mortar and individuals would pay less if the FAANGs and multinationals paid fairly.

a) similar to KYC laws, make knowing all persons who own part of a company mandatory, regardless of how many structures (corporations, trusts, whatever) you have to go through.

b) preemptively tax every individual on profits/salaries/perks/payments from the company at some established rate.

c) come tax season, ask for a global income statement from everyone taxed. Adjust their taxes based on whatever bracket they land in.

Any individual in the EU buying anything from a foreign company operating in their EU nation pays the VAT on the good or service. That's usually 21% and up to 25%. And that's not on the profits.

That's already quite something.

10. Astroturfing

As different sectors of business have different structures of material costs, labor costs, profit and investing. Maybe having at least some kind of equal corporate tax can be seen as being fair across different types of businesses.

Additionally many forms of business have externalities which are negative for the rest of the humanity. Often it has been the public sector which has to pick up the slack or clean up the mess.

Also most people agree that there exist at least some forms of infrastructure which are best managed publicly and are difficult organize privately in a way that encourages competition. Also corporations often directly benefit from different forms of public infrastructure, so in this sense it can be seen as fair to directly tax them.

But your 9 and 10 are captured by the income tax of the people tasked with executing these operations.

If you only taxed dividends the problem would not go away.

The problem is not that the money disappears from earth, but that is shifted from one country to another.

However I think the main downside on the abolition of corporate tax is that companies are hiring even fewer people with time (automation, subcontracting, etc) so the taxation "opportunities" are reduced if you only have "payroll"/income taxes and sales taxes.

The current situation leads to things like Starbucks having an exaggerated advantage over local cafes for example, since they 1) pay much lower effective tax 2) can have more advantageous rental agreements which leads to some ridiculous situations where one Starbucks is visible from another.

(Though yes, governments do overtax people and companies IMHO)

[0] https://apnews.com/article/438fae12f9204b1fbd8e8b1985ae554f

This already exists in the United States.

An "S-Corp" is a passthrough corporate entity wherein the corporation (or partnership) is not taxed at all and all profits flow to the owners of the entity who are then bound to pay the taxes on their personal returns.

Almost all small businesses incorporated in the US are such entities. It is not exotic in any way and is totally accepted and normal.

The trick is ...

With some minor exceptions, all of the profits need to flush out of these passthrough entities every year. You can't just keep piling up untaxed profits in the company bank account. The corporation is required to disburse the profits and create taxable income for the owners.

Big coporations which are not passthrough entities can keep the money and do not have to disburse it ... but they have to pay taxes on it.

So there are pros and cons to these structures.

I personally feel that passthrough corporate entities are much simpler, much more comprehensible and do not have the societal inefficiencies (pursuing tax avoidance strategies, for instance) that you mention. But at the same time I think we're asking for trouble if we let (big multinationals) just pile up bigger and bigger mountains of cash in their bank accounts, untaxed.

So, in absence of a better solution, taxing non-passthrough entities seems like the least worse solution ...

And while 1-5 are good, they don't pay for the massive infrastructure and other investments that governments have made the enable corporations to do business in the first place. Those resources have to come from somewhere. I don't see it likely, for example, for dozens of corporations to come together and fund interstate highway and bridge maintenance.

I might agree with you more if corporate profits were plowed back into higher pay or better benefits for employees, significant voluntary investment back into society, etc. But benefiting from government investments in their ability to do business without paying taxes essentially means they are extracting their profits indirectly from all individual tax payers whether or not they are even customers.

I do #1, #3, #4, #5 and I'm still expected to pay taxes.

Firstly, that infrastructure is for everyone to use and I think it's semi-useful to view private business as infrastructure as well. They exist to provide goods and services to the people.

Second, it seems obvious to me that you'd simply increase other taxes to make up the deficit. The impulse to create special taxes is a bad one, imo. It only serves to complicate the tax code, obfuscate how much we're actually paying in taxes and makes it more difficult to actually provide incentives when they are needed.

I'm not saying that corporate behavior becomes uninfluencable when profit taxation is removed, but rather that it will require a different incentive mechanism. That is assuming that we still want to influence corporate behavior through government without legislating it.

Trickle up economics, right?

Now make a list of all of the things the money could do if it is taxed and gets to the government. Schools, roads, etc.

I don’t see the problem.

is that a bad assumption?

If one entity owns the farm, the food distribution, and the grocery store, they have one revenue transaction to be taxed. A small farmer selling their eggs to a distributor who sells them to the grocer who sells them to you is taxed three times on what amounts to same activity.

It's a very elegant tax on paper, but significantly complicated from an accounting POV. It's one of those areas where there are huge gains to be had from digitizing financial records, and countries that have succeeded in this (like Mexico) create a very powerful revenue source.

Take a look at the history of tax. And make a judgement on the necessity of tax yourself. Stop wasting time coming up with some seemingly clever explanation of things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax#:~:text=The%20first%20kn....

I think the attitude you are talking about is largely driven by media.

My country has a $20 minimum wage, and yet the unemployment rates, small business survival rate, and inflation are all around the same levels at the USA, so all the talk of impending economic catastrophe if we give poor people a few more crumbs seems to be hot air from where I'm sitting.

For example: hiring one of two candidates, Nick and Joe, would be profitable under 30$ per hour. Nick asks for 15$, its Joe's first job so he's willing to take 10$, I go to Nick and say, "look Joe will do it for 10, so I really can't justify paying more, but I'd prefer to pay you those 10, since you're experienced". If Nick has a better offer elsewhere, he has no problem. If not, Nick gets just 10.

If the state says 15 is the minimum wage, not only Nick but also Joe must get 15, so my best move is to take Nick at 15. Clearly, a higher minimum wage _can_ benefit the worker, and not only the very weakest one.

Capitalism allows each participant to seek only the best available deal that is agreeable to them, sure, but availability is subject to negotiating power, and that is distributed very unevenly.

Sure, this makes stock prices lower. But it encourages dividends by comparison, which is probably a good thing, or at least everyone seems to think it is, and then these are taxed as regular income (not usually subject to gains rate).

* Property tax is 1 obvious place, you want the land in this country? You pay the tax for it.

* VAT is another obvious one. You want to sell in this country? You pay the tax.

There are plenty of things that can be taxed which are undodgeable, we just have to be creative.

Not only is this massively regressive, it ignores how much of our public infrastructure is built to support the economy. This proposal would effectively allow shareholders to turn infrastructure tax dollars into shareholder money without having to kick a single dime into the bucket. That’s absolutely nuts.

The idea is that if you want to tax rich people do it directly. Don't make it complicated.

Like Apple likes to do: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/29/apple-q4-cash-hoard-heres-ho...

Forget tax, but if I want access to the Canadian grant ecosystem they take 7%.

I want Delaware Chancery courts the U.S takes 8%

Swedish bank secrecy, 6%

And we access states more like VCs and their value add.

Obviously all numbers are made up

Ownership gives you two things. It's a right to future profits, and the ability to resell that right to someone else. Company tax gives the government a percentage of the profit, and capital gains tax gives them a percentage when the shares are sold.

The only thing your proposal would do is delay when the government gets it's slice because the company doesn't have to pay a dividend right away.

as a stock holder there’s no difference between the stock going up 10 cents from a buyback versus me getting a 10 cent dividend. other than the fact that i can have more control as a shareholder in the buy back

Dividends lower stock price by moving cash from company to owner, buybacks increase stock prices[1] by de-diluting, so only one of those is evidence of the CEO (whose compensation is often tied to stock price) acting on his own interests. Also taxation is different.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/073015/...

Here is a better idea: companies should be the only entities paying taxes in a capitalist society. If you think about it it really makes perfect sense :) since they already do all the boring accounting stuff and with the power of their lobbies they could make tax law simpler and more efficient (something that normal citizen will never be able to push forward).

This is #4 "spent on wages" no?

We already tax wages. A graduated income tax targets specifically the problem you are flagging here. Taxing corporations exclusively would do away with this.

If you're making an equity argument, why not argue for the opposite of what you're saying: reduce corporate taxes to zero, then make up for it by taxing only the highest earners' wages? Not advocating for a policy position here, just pointing out that the argument in the GP post is precisely that they lack of those granular policy levers is a drawback of taxing corporate income. Policy levers which could be used to nudge the income gap down by taxing the "excessive" executive comp at a higher rate, for example, don't work if you collect that tax revenue as a monolithic corporate profits tax.

It would be pretty awesome if companies increased salaries for everyone at the same proportion of their interment of profit.

> It would be pretty awesome if companies increased salaries for everyone at the same proportion of their interment of profit.

It would be pretty awesome if corporations didn't pollute our air too. But corporations are sociopathic profit maximizers. Presumably you support regulating their emissions, rather than just wringing your hands at the bad people. Moral suasion arguments are not effective as tax policies.

However I can see how that system would be abused. E.g. instead of buying that yacht from your personal money (which you need to pay 70% tax on when you transfer it from the company) you simply have the company pay for it and say this is a company yacht. Then I can see how people would continue to hide their wealth in off shore shell companies that they never have to pay a tax on. So even with this scheme it is still ripe for tax havens.

If your money counts as speech because you have first amendment rights, then your income counts as income because you have IRS obligations.

I’m 100% over letting corporations pick some of the benefits of citizens but skate away from all the obligations. If you want the rights, you get the obligations. If you don’t want the obligations, you don’t get the rights.

How about the person who has so much wealth that they will never need to work in their life?

Government is labor that benefits the people. The only way an individual can escape the duty is if they are incapable or if society deems that they deserve a break.

Taxing only income misses the mark by a bunch.

But in my ideal world inheritance is considered income and is taxed as such. And on a logistical curve a billionaire inheritance is taxed really close to 100%. Anybody that has earned so much money they no longer need to work has paid as much in taxes (and continue to do so as interest is taxed as income). Additionally on a logistical curve it is almost impossible anyway to earn this much since a huge earning is taxed close to 100%. For example, someone making 5 standard deviations above the mean pays 99.33% tax on it, so they will probably end up with less after taxes then someone earning 2 standard deviations below the mean (11.92% tax).

As for the farmer who is self sustaining. I guess they are not using up much of the shared infrastructure anyway, I see no need for them to be paying taxes.

It could work but where do royalities fit in? Estate taxes?

The elephant in the room is that the main difference between US and European tax rates is that the middle-class tax rates in the US are much lower than their European counterparts. If you are in the top tax bracket in California, the income taxes aren’t that much different than in most of Europe and the capital gains taxes are typically lower.

In the US, capital losses can reduce capital gains and up to $3000 of regular income. If losses are $3000 more than gains, you can carry them forward to future years.

If you make 90,000 in Florida City, Florida. You purchase a home for 100,000 sold for 200,000 your capital gains is: $15,000 15% federal 0% state 0% local

In VermountVille New York State 21409 15% federal 6.41% state 0 local

In Sf 24,500 21,000 if you are married.

In order to pay 36% you have to be earning over 500,000 to pay that rate and single.