| | | I'm going to treat you like an adult and respond to that post, simply because its author didn't know WTF he was talking about. Don't abuse this unwarranted escalation in your status.
>> The corporate tax is an important balancing mechanism in an era of great inequality.
Thoughtful people don't have an issue with "great inequity." Some people are exceptionally good at making money, others are not. That someone is better than me at making money does not, in any way, adversely affect my ability to do so, other than I have to be better at what I do to compete. That is a benefit, not a detraction.
>> When corporate profits as a share of national income are the highest on record, with data going back to the late 1920s, it suggests that the current corporate tax system, with all its shortcomings, is hardly killing the competitiveness of American companies.
Jobs are moved overseas. Hell, entire BUSINESSES are moved overseas. Companies like Apple, in the US, are competitive solely because of cheap labor found elsewhere. At least as important is the fact that once profits are earned OVERSEAS they STAY overseas.
>> Here’s another element to understand why abolishing the corporate rate would go badly: In order to avoid corporate taxes, more than a third of business income is now “ passed through” to the owners to be taxed at the individual level. That’s up from 13 percent a few decades ago, and it’s one reason corporate taxes as a share of G.D.P. and a share of federal revenue have fallen from about 4 percent and 20 percent in the 1960s to less than 2 percent and 10 percent today.
S Corporations and other pass-through entities are popular for a multitude of reasons but they can't be used by large corporations. And how the above represents anything to do with abolishing corporate income taxes going "badly" I have no idea.
>> The problem is that to do so risks turning the corporate structure itself into a big tax shelter: If income generated and retained by incorporated businesses should become tax-free
We already have excess accumulations penalties that are used very effectively to deny any such benefit. That is not part of the income tax and either that measure or something similar might be provided.
>> You could tax the accrued earnings on corporate stock held over the course of a year, but taxing shareholders on unrealized gains represents a huge change in tax policy that would be aggressively resisted by patient holders of equity.
You cannot tax unrealized gains because there is no wherewithal to pay. The few instances of the tax code that do provide for this kind of taxation are collections disasters. Unrealized gains are not taxable, should NOT be taxable, and even if they were, the tax is very difficult to collect.
Well, that's enough to shoot down the entire article. But yes, I could go on for a very long time. |
|
