Taxes are completely unnecessary when the state prints the money.
The entire point of taxes is just to punish the poor.
This is fucked up. Don’t get me wrong.
But if you want to end this just start taxing loans.
That’s literally the only form of income in this country that isn’t taxable. Kind of nuts.
Seriously with tax loans there won’t be billionaires in this country.
But then you get double taxed. You get taxed on the income you earn in order to pay off the loan, and you get taxed on the loan income itself. This isn’t viable without some serious nuance. There are far easier ways to snuff out “buy borrow and die”.
But then you get double taxed. You get taxed on the income you earn in order to pay off the loan, and you get taxed on the loan income itself. This isn’t viable without some serious nuance. There are far easier ways to snuff out “buy borrow and die”.
I agree and there should definitely be Nuance as to how loans are taxed if this ever happens and I’m sure they will I was just being expedient in my comment.
Have you heard of the “borrow until you die” financial strategy? I’m thinking of trying it out…
This is actually exactly what I’m talking about in my original post. Buy borrowed die is a perfectly legal way of accumulating massive amounts of wealth and paying absolutely no tax
Tax general purpose loans , but only loans that use assets like stocks as collateral. Allow a grace amount so regular people can still take a loan when they need it without being punished.
Also, you’re taxed on spending while businesses generally aren’t
That’s not really true. Payroll taxes are still a thing, and they still need to pay sales tax when purchasing materials. It’s the accounting tomfoolery that lets then get away with not paying taxes on profits.
sales tax when purchasing materials.
AFAIK Sales tax is relatively small in US. In EU it’s a 20-25% VAT but B2B transactions are VAT free
If we charged taxes on revenue, vertical integration would skyrocket. Because the more hands their product goes through, the more tax they need to pay.
We could exempt B2B taxes from the revenue model theoretically though.
You basically described VAT. Which works extremely well. Some small tweaks to capture all revenue (not just sales) and a wealth tax to discourage hoarding and revenue taxation would function quite well.
The problem with VAT is that is that it’s not a progressive taxation system. Whether you can afford one sandwich or one million sandwiches, you pay the same either way. We could compensate for it by giving money to the poor, but redistributive policies tend not to be popular with the general public.
April 15th
Corporations should pay more taxes, but since people are talking about how it all works in reality:
Not all corporate expenses are tax deductible, and people are able to deduct a fair amount from their income when calculating their taxes.
Additionally, individuals are taxed on a progressive scale where anything up to ~$15,000 isn’t taxed. That number should be much higher to actually reflect cost of living, but you’re still paying less to account for cost of living.With $60,000 in income your taxable income is $44,000 after the standard deduction , and then you only pay taxes on about $30,000 of that because of the bracketing.
Poverty should be tied to livable wage and that bottom tax bracket should be too. So really, for single filer the first ~40k should be tax exempt.
100%. And a livable wage based on where you live. The cost of living in some regions is way higher than in others and you can’t just say that low income people should have the longest commutes, or spend the most to move to someplace with lower cost of living.
I’d also be in favor of a negative tax bracket. Something that adjusts below poverty income to above poverty. If done right everyone would see some benefit as the system adjusts everyone’s income <= $40,000 up to $45,000 or something via refundable tax credit or some such. Make over $40k and you taxes go down $5k. Make $40k or below and you pay no taxes and get a refund of however much less than $40k you made + $5k.
It really sucks when you’re self employed. I can almost eliminate my taxes with expenses, except I still pay both the employee and employee tax for social security/payroll taxes which bare almost 15% I can’t avoid. Billionaires don’t pay that much tax ever. I can’t afford to go to the dentist.
Yeah, we do get tax breaks, should be way more with inflation unfortunately.
The difference is that corporations have an army of tax lawyers that tell them what the tax loopholes are to exploit. Meanwhile, for most ordinary persons, it’s just them following orders from the government to pay up. One could read up on the tax rules yourself, but are people willing to spend hours reading boring documents they have no expertise of? I myself wasn’t aware of some of the tax benefits I could claim until much later.
Look up direct file
I totally get what you’re saying… but to be fair if you did allow people to deduct all the money they spent in a year from their income, it would specifically encourage a lot of people to spend every single dollar they earned just to avoid the taxes.
They’d be like “hang on, if I spend $3000 a month on rent I get taxed on the $1000 I have left over? What if I move to a place that costs $4000 a month? No taxes? That’s what I’ve got to do then!”
Is that sensible? No. The tax they’d pay on the $1000 is way less than the extra $1000 they’re planning on spending to avoid it, but people seem to have a real aversion to a little tax, and many would feel they “got something” for the extra money they spent on groceries or restaurants or rent, compared to the taxes which are simply taken from them.
I’m not saying it couldn’t work, I’m not saying there aren’t better ways to do it, and I’m definitely not saying there aren’t weird cliffs in programs like this that lock people into poverty. But I’d be worried that people who are already wrong about graduated tax brackets, for example, would make a lot dumber choices if they felt they could spend $40 on fancier bread to avoid “$40 of taxes”
Wouldn’t spending every last dollar result is more sales tax?
This just sounds to me like a strong argument for not letting corporations deduct expenditures from taxable revenue.
Sorta, but despite what some governments have decided, corporations typically aren’t people. Most companies don’t want to accumulate savings, the way humans do. Profit is cool, for sure, but companies don’t save up for retirement, or go on vacations, or have kids. So some buffer to survive a less profitable year, or a costly watermain break or something, is prudent but that’s where it might end.
Anything more than that, and maybe you hire some new staff, in which case that expense to you becomes income for your new employee, which they pay income tax on. Or you buy more merchandise, which the government may collect sales tax on. Or you may expand your office, and the government collects tax from the construction company and property tax on the new unit. Or you may offer a bonus to your existing employees, which is again income tax for them. Or you could issue dividends to shareholders, which they’re taxed on when they receive them.
So the logic is that the things a company spends its money on are taxed in different ways, and the corporate income tax is basically the catch-all for “and then the rest of the money you didn’t spend some other way”
Now, do we lowly humans typically get double-dipped when we have our income taxed, but then after that also sales tax when we buy stuff? Yes. Yes we do…
It makes plenty of sense for them to not be taxed on their gross revenue.
You’re thinking of this from a mega-corp standpoint when you should be thinking of this from a small business standpoint. Mega-corps really should be forced to abide by different rules, in my opinion.
Let’s imagine you own a bakery shop and it brought in $1,000,000 in revenue this year. You spent $400,000 on raw ingredients, $250,000 on salaries and personnel, and $150,000 on maintenance and equipment…etc
At the end of the year, your business would go bankrupt if it was expected to pay taxes on that million dollars, despite your operating expenditures eating up the grand majority of your year. Similarly, every dollar you spend and every dollar that is spent on wages or salaries is taxed anyways, first or second hand.
That’s why that exists.
It makes sense for small or even large businesses.
Where the whole thing breaks down is when you have mega corporations like we do today. Who have accumulated wealth, power, and influence well beyond the scope of what any of these laws and regulations were meant to handle
People have a real aversion to a little tax because right now in many (all?) places it means “money I earned through hard work is going to fund some rich asshole’s party, safe some breadcrumbs that somehow made their way into funding something beneficial to me or other folks like me”. With this fixed, at least I will have no problems with taxes
Isn’t this what business do to avoid paying taxes also?
nO YoU dONt unDErsTAnD iTS a ComPAnY iT sHOuldNT pAy TaXEs!!!
Yes.
Company A gets 1k. 1k is revenue.
Company A spends 1K at Company B. 1k is expense.
Company A has made 0 profit. 0 taxes.
Now if Company A owns Company B did it really lose 1k?
This is how money laundering works. More money more problems. You just have to leave a convincing paper trail an accountant will follow. Eventually they won’t be able to follow that the flour supplier Company Z that Company B buys from for it’s cookies is funneling Company B’s money back into Company A. The accountant doesn’t know that B isn’t buying flour or making cookies. Sometimes they even make cookies…
That’s not money laundering, though. That’s just normal fucking loophole and corruption in our tax system that only the larger players get to really benefit from, while all the small players, a.k.a. all your local businesses or even regional businesses, usually aren’t large enough to take advantage of that sort of thing.
They make older people spend all their money to get long term care with Medicare.
Nursing home care is incredibly expensive but Medicare will only help you pay for it if you get rid of all your income and assets until you get to their cutoff limit before they’ll help you pay for it.
There is a whole industry built in helping older people spend their money so they can get health care.
This. They may also make you sell your house too. I spoke to a family who was trying to get a loved one in a nursing home and they said they were quoted something like 20,000/mo. I asked if they meant per year and they reiterated that it was per month. All that money for a place that will let you stew in your own feces…
Or, hear me out, corporations pay taxes on their total income as well.
Business spent 3.9B dollars on vaporware. That’s the problem. Or stock buybacks. Or settlements or CEO bonuses. Not on better wages or anything opex related. Basic capex to keep things up to code/inspection/regulation/etc.
It’s where the money is going that makes it a scam.
No business would survive without doubling or tripling their profit margins, and we’d all suffer insanely high prices
Cut CEO and upper management wages then. Those taxes should be guaranteed to the country and should have been there from the start. There wouldn’t be any national debt and publicly funded projects wouldn’t be starving like they are now. Hell, even income tax could be wiped away from the money they’d pull in from taxes.
If in the US, a corporation is technically a person, they should also be taxed like any other person.
What do you think all that tax revenue is for?
A corporate environment without wiggle room for excess would also shake out a lot of grifters.
The government has plenty of money already, they just spend it in the wrong places. They could double welfare tomorrow if they wanted to.
You know what, that is a fair point!
If corporations are people (under the law) then the money they make is income and should be taxed appropriately.
Better position would be that money they receive (profit) should be taxed since people also pay taxes based on the amount of money they receive (income). But that position is basically what we already have.
The problem with the system is that a corporation has different kinds of ‘discounts’ as workers and that those differences became excuses to greatly reduce their share of the bill (low corporate taxes are good for the economy, in general) shifting the burden to the working class (since all the money spent on education, healthcare, pensions etc does end up in the pockets of the people).
The true problem is not necessarily because the corporate tax is not high enough, it’s because the benefits of a succesful company go to a small amount of people, while a serious part of the costs (infrastructure, healthy and well educated worker) are paid by a large amount of people.
The ones who should really be taxed appropriately is this small group of people who extract a lot of value from the expenses the large group of people have. Let’s say a 1000 people together costs 1000 euro, while together they earn 1100, then it leaves 100 on the table. Right now the large group of 95 does not 95, but maybe 5 or 10. While the small group of 5 does not get 5, but 90 or 95. That small group that received the vast majority pay a much smaller percentage of what they received.
But since money is free speech, making corporations pay taxes is compelled speech, which we’re protected against by our first amendment rights.
This just in: Saying that is now terrorism as well. Its apparently a form of protest against the government which is now totally illegal.
Bro, I am the biggest psychosexual narcoterrorist in the world. I lead a cult! It’s protected by the government, and I get benefits, too!
The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.
–Rutherford B. Hayes
Corporation privilege has been a problem in the US and the western world for a long time.
Edit: I found the longer version of the quote by Hayes.
Corporation: We planned the next 2 years on an ever increasing income stream but the most minor inconvenience disrupted that so we had to lay off 9,000 employees with zero notice so we could meet our bottom line.
Government: That’s a shame, here’s $500,000,000 to help “mitigate” “economic conditions”.
The 9000 laid-off employees: Can he get $200 a week unemployment so we can afford to exist?
Government: You should have planned better.
I think part of OP’s frustration is that corporations (and the wealthy, for that matter) have a lot more loopholes to be able to claim deductions compared to the average person. And people are spending money to just survive, which seems more important than making a profit. The average person doesn’t have the resources to access these loopholes.
Loophole example: say you’re just a common multimillionaire. You want to own multiple properties, but to just go out and buy them, you’d need to spend your income on them, which you can’t deduct from your taxable income. Instead, you incorporate a private consulting company (just yourself) and instead of you buying those properties, your business buys them for you. You know, so that you can have somewhere to stay when you travel for business. Those become deductable expenses, and your company doesn’t pay any tax on the income used to purchase them. You pay yourself a meager $50k per year, pay almost no tax, live luxuriously, and write condescending posts on LinkedIn. Congrats, you win capitalism.
When you say that OP is “frustrated” it feels like what I see everywhere. People see the most abhorrently FUCKED UP shit and go, “huh.”
I WANT YOU TO GET MAD, GOD DAMNIT. I WANT YOU TO GET UP OUT OF YOUR CHAIR AND SCREAM, “I’M I HUMAN BEING GOD DAMNIT! MY LIFE HAS VALUE!”
I do get mad. I get banned on a near-daily basis for spitting facts, like how the Earth doesn’t exist and how we live in a police state, which is obvious when you think about it.
People have been doing that. There have been more protests in the US recently than in memorable history. But it would seem that screaming is falling on deaf ears. So it’s the next escallation after screaming that people are doing that seems to be making more of an impact. And while it’s unfortunate that we need remorseless Italian plumbers, it does bring a sense of relief that it seems to be rattling some of the wealth class.
For what it’s worth, humans have historically been really great at ignoring absolutely abhorrent things. Our brains are wired to help us survive, and sometimes that means normalizing the fucked up stuff so that we’re not completely overwhelmed with the absolute fuckery of the world around us. It doesn’t make it okay, but there’s a biological reason for people going, “huh.”
That was the point of Occupy Wall Street. The movement formed in response to the subprime mortgage crisis and resulting bailouts, in defiance of capitalist principal, and without similar response to the people suffering thanks to the crisis and following recession.
In fact, even though Obama navigated through the crisis, almost everyone with financial investments gained profit through the ordeal while the common US worker was in worse straits, which made the people, specifically, uneducated white men, angry and frustrated and set them up to be manipulated by Trump.
Either this is highly exaggerated, or whoever is doing your taxes hasn’t explained to you the various deductions you should be claiming or enjoying, from standard/basic deductions, to tax credits and programs, not to mention tax brackets.
That being said, is there a massive discrepancy in how little tax corporations and the rich pay compared to the little guy? He’ll yeah there is.
What they’re saying is that it is bullshit for a corporation to dodge taxes on their expenses (no matter how frivilous) but normal people can’t deduct necessary expenses.
You can deduct your rent. You can’t deduct your food. You can’t deduct your vehicle to get to the job you’re getting taxed to do.
It’s not “dodging”, and your bills would be a lot more expensive if the government insisted on billing companies by their revenue instead of profit.
But you shouldn’t be paying any income tax if you barely make ends meet.
My hypothesis is that the tax system does not explicitly favor the rich - it favors those who can navigate its complexities. Which is the rich. Not because they are smarter - because they can hire accountants and tax consultant.
Nope. While you can exploit complexities and loopholes, the top 0.1% is propotionately taxed less by basic design anyway. No need of fancy double Irish dutch sandwich or whatnot.
For nearly everyone the standard deduction is the way to go lately. If you itemize it’s absolutely not the same as businesses being able to deduct their business expenses. There’s a good argument businesses should be able to deduct these expenses in my opinion, but for individuals itemizing their deductions it’s absolutely not comparable.
I’d rather just start with them taking the appropriate taxes out of my check rather than me paying a company for them to tell me I owe another 2-5k
Thank that company for lobbying against automated taxes.
Intuit bribed trump to kill irs autofile.
And the money they spent on that bribe came out of the pockets of its customers. But, not to worry, with no IRS autofile, those customers now have limited options so Intuit can now raise its prices to recoup the bribe money and more.
It’s just good business.
Yet in the entire this isn’t all on Trump, just the most recent insult
It’s on Sasan for making the bribe
True
May?
They’re giving them an extra month, how charitable?
