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With regard to shareholders and corporate and dividend taxes you are correct. My statements on this were wrong. The general principle I stated is the one empl
by yequalsx 11y ago
With regard to shareholders and corporate and dividend taxes you are correct. My statements on this were wrong.
The general principle I stated is the one employed in the U.S. Generally, when one receives money there are tax implications. There are some exceptions to this principle but this is the general idea. The different ways of receiving money have different tax rates and this causes a skewing of how "income" is begotten in the U.S. by the very wealthy. They prefer getting money via capital gains since the tax is less that route.
I don't think one can reasonably argue that not taxing one form of income would lead to people preferring to get income via that tax free route. The objection I had to your original post is that the U.S. tax principle is bad. It is reasonable to tax all income streams. I don't know the optimal for each stream but given that taxes in the U.S. are low relative to the past 70 years suggests the rates aren't burdensome.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoYeah, I wasn't disputing that this is how the US does it. I was disputing that absent this, things would be skewed. The issue is not taxing personal income, the issue is taxing corporations. A nearly ideal situation would be to eliminate all corporate taxes and tax individuals at a fixed rate when corporate wealth is transferred to shareholders. The only better situation would be eliminating all income taxes and replacing them with consumption taxes. Unfortunately, this is a political non-starter - it would eliminate the ability of politicians to pretend they aren't indirectly taxing people when corporate taxes are raised.