For instance, consider Mark Zuckerberg. By and large, Mr. Zuckerberg will owe his taxes when he decides to cash out. But why should he cash out? An entrepreneur can build a multi-billion-dollar company up from nothing, earn a comfortable salary doing it, and as long as he is reinvesting all of the business's profits and not cashing out, not pay significant taxes!

Corporate person-hood, and corporate taxes don't really make so much sense.. I'd be in favor of limiting corporations, and pushing for disbursements to the owners... Limiting corporations from holding onto unutilized and under-utilized assets and capitol. Make it work, or give it back to the shareholders/owners.

I think that these things could really simplify legal/tax structures, and reduce a lot of government bureaucracy... Some people just wouldn't work.. more power to them. Some people will want more, and there will be competition in the workforce... I'd also be in favor of either open trade, or trade sanctions with countries that don't have similar environmental protection requirements to our own. Yes, that means that smart phones may double in price, but I think actions like that would help a lot more than simply putting up military bases all over the world.

Plus this whole issue of 'companies returning money to shareholders' is again only favoring the rich. It will be a long time before any significant portion of my income comes from dividends and capital gains. To make money in this way, you have to have a huge amount of capital invested already. Just to prove this point, if you made a very nice 10% per year before taxes on your investments, you would have to have 100,000 invested to make an extra 10,000 per year. If you are only making 50,000 per year, that would take a 20% contribution to your pre-tax retirement account for TEN years before you reached that level of invested capital. Sure, it would happen a little faster because of compounded interest and reinvested earnings, but I think my point is clear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax#Flat_tax_wi...

Edited to add: It's worth noting, though, that you can't produce every possible progressive tax rate curve with this method. It's certainly possible to prefer some curve that is unattainable this way. But a simplistic "a tax flat in dollars is regressive in utility" isn't applicable.

I'm in favor of a much simplified structure, applied evenly, as fairly as possible, and much smaller government needed to operate it. A lot of spending comes down to complicated bureaucracies, reducing those is a big step. Another benefit of a basic income, is it would allow the revocation of a lot of welfare and stimulus programs, and their own layers of corruption and bureaucracy.

I'm also in favor of cutting the overall defense and operations budgets by at least 2/3 ... There's a lot of ways the federal government could be much more effective, and reduce expenditures at the same time.

And although I don't know how much I feel it is the government's place, a baseline healthcare system could even be funded in a much better way than Obamacare. I tend to lean libertarian, but I'm a pragmatist. I just want solutions that are responsible, and have a chance at making things better, while avoiding as much chance for corruption and bureaucracy as possible. Not to mention reducing the footprint of the federal government, and reducing the impact of corporate protectionism along the way.

Corporate personhood (as far as I understand) is required by limited liability, which makes a lot of sense to me. Separating a company's debts from the owners' debts (and preventing creditors from going after the owners of a company when it goes bankrupt) is very encouraging for new and small businesses. The debts of the company become separate from the debts of its owners. It encourages people to start businesses and take loans, not having to worry that they'd lose everything if their startup goes under (at least theoretically).

OMHO one of the biggest arguments for corporate personhood is they are tax paying entities... if you reduce corporations to only allow shared ownership and limited liability, while also limiting the holding of underutilized assets and capital, it would even out. I'm not talking about liability, I'm talking about holdings, taxes and political sway.

While I agree with the idea itself, I don't think you can prevent that realistically. In the end, it's not "corporations" that donate money, but the people in charge of those corporations. If those people (the CEOs, VPs, board members and so on) want to make a donation, they can always do so privately (and most of them certainly have the money to do it).

I feel this is the heart of the issue, that people think of money and wealth as "mine" vs. "not mine." It's the whole American individualism at play, where it's you vs. everyone else, where you getting richer is a Good Thing, even if (or maybe especially if) it increases the gap between you and others.

Whereas a much healthier mindset is "mine" vs. "ours." You have money that belongs to you and you have money that belongs to your community. This community can be a neighborhood, a city, a state or even a country. Once you flip this mental switch, you realize that the taxes you pay are not really taken away from you, but rather shared with everyone in your community (of which you are a part).

I understand that taxation is necessary. I also understand that people like to keep what they earn. I draw this line at half... and I would draw that same line for the wealthiest (who bend current tax law to pay far less than half) to the poorest, who would recieve a basic income (along with everyone else) to subset the half that they earn and get to keep.