This rhetoric is ridiculous. If I were to stash trillions of income overseas to evade taxes, I'd go to jail, not have the law changed.
> It may look unfair to tax consumers to compensate for a major business tax holiday -- but then such a move would give businesses a strong incentive to keep prices lower to avoid a drop in demand.
A drop in demand? People are going to eat less food because taxes are now lower? Need less healthcare? Will move to a cheaper home? Just not use internet? Drive the car less to work and sit more at home?
Supply/demand is crooked. It doesn't work for the majority of the goods the majority of the people purchase. Demand is fairly fixed and based on population, and supply is provided by the only bidder in your area.
> Besides, liberated from corporate taxes, they'd have more freedom to increase wages.
Does anyone still believe this 'trickle-down' hogwash?
I really wonder when America will have its wake up call during its third part-time job to pay the rent that maybe change is needed, and that your government has no intention of making it.
If you had millions (much less trillions) in income to stash overseas, you wouldn't go to jail for it, even if it was flagrantly illegal. People don't go to jail for white-collar crime, generally.
If he'd paid a fine after they caught him, he wouldn't have gone to jail. He very openly refused to pay. He effectively went to jail for refusing to pay a fine.
The real argument for abolishing the corporate tax is not that they avoid it and therefore its worthless (though that is true). It's that taxing corporations doesn't really make sense. Corporations don't want things. Taxing them is just another way of taxing their customers and employees indirectly. And if you want to do that, why not just tax the customers and employees more in the first place?
Indeed they don't need roads, rails, fire departments, police departments, etc. Corporations don't exist in a vacuum.
Let's have a deal: we abolish the taxes if they don't use any these.
You might say: but citizens already pay for this! True. However, if you abolish taxes for companies then citizens will have to pay more for public services. You might say: but we will increase their wages. I say ok then, let's make it part of the deal: a decent minimal wage.
Sure but notice how Samsung and BMW get to use the same roads and police departments as Apple and GM, while their headquarters (with respective taxable wallet) resides some place else.
Only domestic companies' corporate earnings get hit to pay for this.
Because if you tax the margins (as opposed to the revenue, which would be patently absurd), you're not passing on the tax directly: you're incentivizing the corporation to move money smoothly through itself rather than stockpiling.
Because corporations then become vehicles for the wealthiest in society to hide virtually their entire income from tax authorities - whilst still being able to enjoy most of its benefits, and the problem of corporations hoarding huge moats of competition-intimidating money rather than paying out dividends gets even bigger.
Can you be more specific about the benefits? Every potentially benificial outflow of cash from a corporation to a person (dividend, distribution, RSUs, options, company car, corporate housing, phone bill paid by the company) is taxed as personal income to the recipient.
Two exemptions I can think of are health/dental insurance (exempted by law) and free food at Silicon Valley campuses (highly contestable benefit as far as IRS is concerned, the jury is still out on treatment of that).
How can one hide virtually their entire income while still being able to enjoy most of the benefits?
A large group of people (plumbers, electricians, landscapers, solo real estate agents) are actually incorporated and self-employed under this model, and yet are not massively wealthier in comparison to the rest of the population.
Aren't you forgetting power? For lowly employees and freelancers, money is just a voucher for consumption. But where money concentrates beyond the personally consumable level, controlling money equals power and attention, proportional to the amount of money retained, not proportional to outflow. This part is already undertaxed as it is, compared to outflow/consumption, going all the way to exclusively outflow/consumption based taxation would only make that worse.
It seems that if you're after taxing extreme concentrations of cash, annual corporate earnings are somewhere on the list, but not very high on that list (cash cows of yesterday are bleeding money today, and vice versa).
Various non-profits, university endownments, churches and pension funds, charitable trusts and charitable foundations have far higher concentrations of cash (and by your definition, power) that avoids the tax man entirely. States and municipalities also pay zero federal taxes on profits if they happen to end up with budgets in black. If you think the (somewhat easily fungible) corporate earnings are under-taxed, what's your take on non-profits and municipals?
Foundations are the embodiment of using money for power instead of as a consumption voucher. They might still be the lesser evil compared to unbounded dynastic wealth.
I am quite accepting of churches, as long as they keep their beliefs to themselves and fulfill their role as keepers of cultural heritage. Better keep them running than artificially converting churches into living history museums after they died. I would consider it a great cultural loss if, say, St Peter's would be just another ruin owned by the Italian government.
University endowments, at the scale they apparently exist, are weird indeed. Do they grow because giving money to add to the pool gives (temporary) influence over the application of the pool? That would be a surprisingly nasty scheme. A donations race like that is how the Roman bishopric originally became a political force in late antiquity/early middle ages, slowly displacing secular authorities.
The "pay your bills" part gets tricky as IRS considers that a fringe benefit taxable at regular income tax rates. A corporation also is not eligible to deduce a certain variety of bills (e.g. dependant spending, medical bills over certain amount, interest on home mortgage) so it's mainly a way to increase the amount of paperwork and decrease the amount of eligible deductions with very little to show in return.
I am not sure how "make investments from your company" is just an overwhelmingly better option than "make investments from your personal account". Not only the corporation doesn't get a variety of tax advantages, such as 401(k), IRAs and Roth IRAs, there's an added burden of an additional K-1 for the investment vehicle.
Have you ever actually attempted any of the "obvious" optimizations you provide here? Has anyone ever used your advice for their tax planning?
Contrary to popular disbelief, folks at the IRS weren't quite born yesterday.
You could say that about anything that isn't personal income tax. There's nothing about personal income tax that makes it any more authentic than any other kind of tax. The federal government spent most of its existence supported by other forms of taxation, without a personal income tax. An equally valid argument (though it still wouldn't be true) could be made that we should just abolish personal income tax and have nothing but corporate taxes.
Corporations are given many rights by the government, such as diffusion of responsibility.
It seems only reasonable that they pay for this, as it costs society every time a company breaks the law and the directors wring their hands but change nothing.
Food, healthcare, housing, land, education, etc. are almost always taxed differently from everything else, so changing the corporate tax reality should have no effect there. Also note that healthcare and food, (food especially) are heavily subsidized by the government already. While I personally believe that distorts the market and should probably stop, even in some doomsday tax-burden-shift scenario that you fear, a bump to subsidies could resolve the worst effects.
Really this is just like any other situation where the government due to structural weaknesses can't set/enforce policy effectively. Just like in the Prohibition or the War on Drugs, neither of which the government was equipped to make happen, the solution is to remove the problematic policies and take a more realistic approach.
>healthcare and food, (food especially) are heavily subsidized by the government already. While I personally believe that distorts the market and should probably stop
If you want to see riots in the streets because people literally can't afford food and healthcare, yeah, sure, go for it.
This is the big problem that has accumulated after generations of government-intervention and fiddling with the market.
The price of labour is now artificially cheap because the price of food is not taken into account due to subsidies and foodstamp programs, as well as the huge labor/population supply that such policies have created. There is no way the market could peacefully absorb such a massive distortion and so if we were to ever attempt it, no doubt there would be countless individuals chanting "see, we told you the market isn't the solution". These things need to be phased out over generations so as to avoid massive starvation and riots by the poor.
Obamacare is quite recent, and Medicaid has only been available in all states since 1982. There are some tax deductions for medical care, though those usually only apply to middle-class workers with benefits anyways.
Which healthcare subsidy would result in riots in the streets?
Also keep in mind that the US has been without the 16th amendment longer than it has been with it, so anything based off of an income tax must not be intrinsically important enough to automatically result in street riots. Though of course an irresponsible and sudden withdrawal could certainly cause problems.
> Which healthcare subsidy would result in riots in the streets?
Off the top of my head, Medicare and veteran's health benefits. I don't know that ceasing flexible spending accounts (money put in an account, pre-tax, just for medical/health expenses) and the tax deduction for medical expenses above a certain amount would be riot-worthy.
The subsidies probably overall increase the cost that the consumer is paying. The federal government pays farmers to not plant or reduce the overall supply thus leading to higher prices. There tend to be more tariffs in the US on food stuffs as well which prevents cheaper imports that would benefit the consumer.
One item in consumer's favor is that food items are usually exempt or treated at a lower sales tax rate.
Climate change has near unanimous support from climatologists. Most (rightly, imho) point that as a reason why it should be accepted by the general public. And those doubting the experts are considered ridiculous.
Here, however, we have an issue to drop corporate taxes which has near unanimous support from economists (across the political spectrum). Yet we call the experts ridiculous.
Why the flip? Why should the general public accept the expert advice in one field, but then turn around & call it ridiculous in another?
Scientists are often correct in their predictions, whereas economists sort of aren't. It's an epistemology question; these experts are not the same as those experts.
Unfortunately economics is one of those areas where many people who have never studied it think they know everything about it. It doesn't help that politicians (of all types) take advantage of this ignorance to pander to their potential voters to tell them what they want to hear.
Actually, I'm not 100% opposed to abolishing corporate tax altogether and finding other ways to structure tax. I'm not an expert, so I wouldn't know what the most robust structure is.
But I am calling the arguments that they use in the article ridiculous, and in particular the parts that I've quoted in my post above.
It's easier to convince people who have no priors. The majority of people doesn't ever consider the temperature at the polar ice caps unless they are climate scientists, so they'll take accept it easily. But lots of people with a folkish understanding of local weather, specially after some huge snow storm, will mumble something like "so much for global warming".
Even if you put all methodological issues (and citations from Richard Feynman) aside or even whether corporate taxes work or not, lots of social science findings would seem dubious simply because they deal with human behavior, which is something which is almost impossible to not have an opinion on, specially because it attempts to describe our own behavior.
The problem is that, if I were to understand reality through my own behavior, it would be through an unwarranted generalization of my own conditions to the population as a whole. It's like that joke of "why don't they just buy themselves some money?".
Your HN comments have repeatedly been uncivil. We ban accounts that do this, especially when they ignore our requests, and we've asked you to fix this before. If you want to keep commenting here, please be civil from now on.
I don't recall what you're referring to, but if we sent you an email that wasn't a reply, it was probably with the intent of giving you helpful information about your HN account. Most people like it when we do that, so I tend to assume it's ok. I'm sorry that I guessed wrong in your case.
You've been downvoting all my comments for months now. Would you please stop doing that? Abusive downvotes are dropped by the software, but they still add noise to the data.
Edit: Ok, since you've responded by doing even more of it, I'm going to take this as a signal that you're not using HN in good faith and ban your account. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.
> Besides, liberated from corporate taxes, they'd have more freedom to increase wages.
Can someone explain this to me? I was under the impression that wages were expenses and non-taxable. So if they paid higher wages so they ended up with no profits they would have to pay no tax.
Shareholders want a certain amount of profit on their invested capital, say 10%. The exact percentage depends on type of company and the industry it's operating in. Tax is an expense, one that comes after all other expenses are paid, but an expense nevertheless. If I have $100 in profit, and I have to pay 30% tax, I'm left with $70.
If a company today is returning 10% to its shareholders per annum (and is paying, say 30% tax), then reducing the tax rate to 15% frees up additional cash to reinvest in the business that wouldn't have been available / would've otherwise gone to taxes. Or that money could flow back to shareholders, who could then reinvest it in other businesses.
If I'm a shareholder I don't want 10%, I want as much profit as possible. This is why economics is based around the assumption that stakeholders are profit maximizing.
The last three are already being attacked on separate fronts, a compromise would be hard to make. My state just eliminated its estate tax and Republicans have been clamoring to attack it at the federal level as well.
It's weird how much the Republican side of politics is against the estate tax, given the high level of 'founding fathers desire!' rhetoric coming from that side. The estate tax was put in place for a philosophical reason, not a revenue-raising one, so it is part of the mosaic of the 'ff desires'...
If the idea of having part of your hard-earned wealth confiscated rather than passed on to your children doesn't boil your blood, you're made of different stuff than I am.
From experience, passing substantial unconditional wealth to my children (above and beyond education) seems far more likely to turn them into assholes than decent citizens.
I'm always amazed at the distaste that the idea of generational wealth receives here. For me, it is the foundation stone of my well-being. My great-grandparents scrimped and saved in the depression, and passed on a small nest-egg to my grandparents. They scrimped and saved and passed on a slightly larger nest egg on to my parents. My parents lived and raised me in many years of poverty, saving what they could, and then inherited the wealth of generations. I expect that I will inherit that nucleus of the family's fortune in due time, and will do my utmost to husband it and grow it in trust for my descendants.
Whatever I achieve in this life is not my own, it is the culmination of the efforts of all the generations that put me in position to do what I do, and a legacy to leave to all the future generations of my family.
At micro-economic level this makes sense, at macro-economic level it reduces economic mobility. In countries with no artificial taxes on generational wealth the richest families of 2016 are likely to be largely the same as richest families of 1916 and richest families of 1816.
As their wealth is typically preserved via real estate and
land ownership, there's a politicial motive to decrease the cost of that, so economies also suffer from high barriers to entry and need to inflate taxes on something else to pay for the government services.
Repealing estate tax would work when combined with higher property tax rates or land value tax, but is rarely politically doable, as well-connected political families and large landowners tend to be the same families.
I value the spirit of passing something on, but I despise the inequality that emerges from repeated iteration.
The value lies in long term thinking, sustainability. A farmer can either maintain the soil, carefully rotating crops so that it will be able to feed future generations as good or better than his predecessors, or he can go for the agricultural equivalent of strip mining and move on to the next plot when the previous one is depleted.
But when you replace the soil with fungible assets, all that long term thinking benefit goes out the window. Sticking to the farming example, repeated slash and burn farming will only encourage more of the same, as long as there is something left to burn. Larger operators will grow faster than smaller ones, and after a few generations, when there is nothing left to burn, the descendants of those who burnt the most will employ the losers to tend the desert.
The same can be said of any tax, period, corporation tax included. Money that some person or corporate entity has paid tax on gets taxed again at or after the point it changes hands; estate tax is no different in that respect,
If the income was legitimately made from sales overseas fine that's a fitting analogy, but many companies will have a company in a low corporate tax area hold all the IP and the portions of the company that are making money and selling products will 'license' that IP to make it seem like they have lower profits. The overseas income is just from the company paying itself to shuffle money into a cheaper tax location.
I was under the impression that the trillions in question were made here, accounting tricks (e.g. IP licensing) were used to pretend that the money was made overseas, and then it was left overseas until the political system could be bribed into allowing a tax holiday. CMV.
Yes, in the United States, even if you don't come back, you have to file income taxes on that foreign income. There is no differentiation between foreign and domestic income (although you can get tax credits for foreign taxes paid).
That's true if the "you" we are talking about is an individual. If the "you" is a corporation, they are taxed by the US when they bring that money back to the US, not when they earn it abroad. They can defer the tax arbitrarily by not bringing back the money.
> Does anyone still believe this 'trickle-down' hogwash?
Absolutely not. Corporation will choke employees and consumers alike if they are allowed to have their way. This quarter my company decided to cut the quarterly bonuses to zero because Y-oY growth targets were not met. Although profits were higher then last year. Now it looks ridiculous to me to expect an fixed pefcentshe growth forever and then punishment employees who didn't even knew that increasing Y-oY growth is part of their responsibility. If at all anybody should have been punished, it should have been the top management. But since they make the rules, there is no downside.
When you say the majority of goods people purchase are fixed in demand, and there is only one bidder (supplier?), can you give a few examples of what you had in mind?
Dodge v. Ford is garbage and has been understood to be garbage for a long time. If you need convincing, please provide a link to the shareholder lawsuit filed against Costco management for not paying Sam's Club wages.
Google turns up nothing on that case, which is making it hard to become convinced. Why not provide the link yourself? :)
From what I can find, Dodge v. Ford isn't considered "garbage", but it is often misrepresented.
Directors have a primary responsibility to work for the benefit of the shareholders, but they also have virtually total discretion in how to achieve that. In the absence of clear evidence of the intention to shirk the responsibility - such as, in Dodge v. Ford, telling the shareholders you're putting public interests ahead of their profits - the onus is on the shareholders to prove that the directors aren't fulfilling their fiduciary duty.
America (as a whole) needs to shed its sense of superiority and its traditionalism.
For the record: I'm Dutch. I have free healthcare, good infrastructure, fast and cheap internet, sensible employment law, no police abuse, etc. All for ~40% tax (http://www.expatax.nl/tax-rates-2016.php).
Why? Because our government actually works. Why? I don't really know. It's a compound of hundreds of little effects.
The solution isn't 'less government', it's 'a working government'. Every time I learn something new about how the U.S. government is structured I shake my head a little. First-past-the-post voting of a single president that holds way too much power. A congress with life time based assignment that interpret a 200 year old document to their wishes to structure law. Case based law with uninformed juries, where the selection of the jury is optimized for maximum disinformation. It goes on.
On top of that there are financial taboos with origins that as a 199x er I do not understand: 'socialism', 'communism', 'higher taxes'. These ideologies (just like a free market) do not work on their own. Both ideologies have good ideas, and you need to take the best of both to make it work. But the American public is brainwashed.
I'm rambling a bit. There is no easy solution from what I can see. The U.S. government is structurally flawed and only massive changes can fix that. On top of that the public is misinformed and does not have its own best interests in mind.
One reason Europeans tend to misunderstand America is that they come from comparatively more homogeneous and therefore higher trust societies. America is overall better at integrating immigrants, but a solidarity deficit remains. Result: we don't get the nice socialized benefits. It's not the government as much as the polity.
Europe is anything but homogeneous. There are places in Germany, France, etc that have been under rule by numerous nations. My grandparents considered themselves German and spoke German despite living in Russia.
Regardless I've been screwed over by plenty of folks that look just like me, so what you say comes across as an excuse for the state of affairs rather than owning the issues and seeking to improve it.
The agony of WWII and its collaborators is still within living memory, as is life under the Soviet bloc with its secret police and disappearing people, likewise wars of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. There are also several large secessionist movements where people actually want to secede, unlike in the US, where that kind of talk is rhetorical[1]. I don't think that kind of blanket statement of 'higher trust societies' can be made; the situation is a lot more nuanced.
For that matter, I think that Americans had a lot more trust in their government before the last couple of decades.
Speaking as an American, I'm terrified of the "massive changes" that would be required to "fix" (replace, really) the Constitution. It could mean civil war or the disintegration of the nation into a bunch of probably-warring nation-states.
Moreover, I'm not convinced our current problems are purely local. Trump followed on the heels of Brexit, and right-wing nationalist/populist movements are on the rise across Europe. The world is going through some weird changes right now, an angry reaction to future shock, and recent US politics are just a symptom.
I call it "the state rewrite problem", which consists of two assumptions: one, that the quality of any constitutional framework degrades over time as political actors adapt to it over generations (except maybe if the constitutional framework was particularly bad from the start) and two, that any rewrite/reboot intended to counteract that degradation would be even worse than that if the established set of political actors is involved. This traditionally is only ever avoided in the aftermath of some particularly violent crisis. Now the art would be to avoid that crisis.
Drafting random collaborators for a rewrite could be one approach, but they would still be prone to getting influenced by the establishment. Maybe dozens of randomized committees working in parallel, with all but one draft discarded at random, to make sure that writing happens out of the spotlight, and with little incentive for self-serving elements?
If you mean for citizens living abroad, then you are correct (although I do not know about Etriea).
If you mean for companies... I don't exactly know. But I do know that we aren't exactly clean in the global playing field for tax havens, and I wish we would change that.
Small economies often tend to be leechers off of the global system. This applies to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, various tropical islands, etc.
The Netherlands is one of the countries significantly facilitating tax avoidance, and this is (obviously) by design. Hundreds of billions in royalty payments flow through the country every year to tax havens.
>Every time I learn something new about how the U.S. government is structured I shake my head a little. First-past-the-post voting of a single president that holds way too much power. A congress with life time based assignment that interpret a 200 year old document to their wishes to structure law. Case based law with uninformed juries, where the selection of the jury is optimized for maximum disinformation. It goes on.
There are problems with American government, but these are really not them. The only thing here that might hold water is the President having too much authority, and that's been a relatively recent trend.
I dunno. As an American, the case-based law thing really pisses me off because it means you can't know what law applies to you in a given situation without knowing the entire history of legal cases that touch that area. And I'd prefer something more like preference voting for the president. I'm obviously not holding my breath on any of these points.
That's just an excuse. Germany and UK have much higher populations and manage to achieve similar results. The "more homogeneous" argument is weird to me. Most immigrants that I've dealt with are more inline with the European mentality (regardless of their country of origin) than US natives. Are you saying the problem is with the locals?
A valid question and one that is getting much less attention than it deserves (probably because some of the answers are rather uncomfortable).
Locally, welfare can be egoistically motivated. Just about everybody would be willing to pay serious taxes to raise that one beggar off his doorstep - if only to keep him out of sight. We like to think of that as altruism, but it hardly is. Now ask those same people to pay serious taxes for the benefit of poor people thousands of miles away and you get a completely different picture.
Enter mobility: If you raise "your" beggar, someone else might just hope that theirs will go to a place where they will be raised (your doorstep). Clearly, egoism won't work as a motivator anymore because you don't want to be the new charity central. Therefore, welfare has to happen on the same organizational level as freedom of movement and that's where the relative unwillingness to help those thousands of miles away comes in again. Even basic income suggestions quickly lose their pie in the sky utopia feel when it comes to the question of access/citizenship/migration.
The US was literally built on mobility as a substitute of welfare, but once the original anti-welfare "stay poor or go west" was exhausted, the inherent antagonism between mobility and welfare continued to stay obscured behind other ideological concepts, "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and all that. The EU is learning the hard way, but it is impossible to separate valid concerns and solution-finding from all the noise of and about stupid racism.
As technologists, we also know that getting popular is one of the worst things that can happen to a community. Scaling community and relationships is super hard.
> If I were to stash trillions of income overseas to evade taxes, I'd go to jail, not have the law changed.
Yes. But you see, if the state did that to you there would be no unpleasant consequences, whereas doing that to a big corporation will bring on a wold of pain.
> It may look unfair to tax consumers to compensate for a major business tax holiday -- but then such a move would give businesses a strong incentive to keep prices lower to avoid a drop in demand.
A drop in demand? People are going to eat less food because taxes are now lower? Need less healthcare? Will move to a cheaper home? Just not use internet? Drive the car less to work and sit more at home?
Supply/demand is crooked. It doesn't work for the majority of the goods the majority of the people purchase. Demand is fairly fixed and based on population, and supply is provided by the only bidder in your area.
> Besides, liberated from corporate taxes, they'd have more freedom to increase wages.
Does anyone still believe this 'trickle-down' hogwash?
I really wonder when America will have its wake up call during its third part-time job to pay the rent that maybe change is needed, and that your government has no intention of making it.