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If it gets more companies here and more people employed, it can actually increase the amount of tax.

• tehabe 10y ago
  A scheme which rarely (if at all) works. Usually cutting taxes means cutting revenue.
• Noseshine 10y ago
  "Lower the taxes of businesses so that they can invest" - That's been the theory behind decades of such experiments in many countries. Worked out great, we all can see how the money keep s"trickling down". That theory is actually very un-capitalistic: It assumes that only a few people know what is best for the majority. Because it's built into the system (and with a certain perverse logic, not at all irrational of course) that those who've had success are more likely to know how to have more of it. So the system is actually incredibly anti-risk with money - in an age when "money" surely is not a limiting factor. Not overall - it is because a few have so much they don't find good investment opportunities (when you have billions, only hundreds of millions of opportunity at once make sense to even look at), but for the vast rest of us it is. So it becomes a tautology: The system is set up to make it far more likely that the successful succeed more, and that is then used as justification for itself, "see, it's too risky to give resources to the inexperienced, data prove it". So we get ever more concentration of control ("money", "power" are indirect terms, "control" is what it comes down to. Th eproblem of the 0.01% isn't their jets, their yachts, their mansions, it is their control of too much of economic life at the expense of most everyone else.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
  • nagrom 10y ago
    > That's been the theory behind decades of such experiments in many countries. Worked out great, we all can see how the money keep s"trickling down". Do you have an example? I don't know of any serious economist that backs trickle-down theory except as a strawman, but many point to lower and flatter taxes that can be used to support market-based economics as enabling high productivity. The obvious country that backs this - the US - has done pretty well from it, as have a multitude of smaller nations (Hong Kong, Switzerland, Singapore, the UK, Canada, Australia). Some countries with higher taxes but also based around a free market economy have done well - Germany is the prominent example and Sweden and Finland. Some have succumbed to corruption and are failing, or on the brink of failure (Italy, Spain, Greece). The opposite - high taxes, lack of a market and extreme governmental intervention - has certainly been tried in many, many countries. Most (all?) have failed badly in a way that has destroyed generations of productivity (North Korea, Cuba, The Soviet Union, Venezuela, etc.) and really fucked-up their societies that way - usually accompanied by secret police squads, the crushing of liberties and very low quality-of-life. > That theory is actually very un-capitalistic: It assumes that only a few people know what is best for the majority. That's actually very 'capitalistic' - the man with the capital makes the ultimate decisions as to where it gets invested. Perhaps you meant democratic? I'm not convinced by the rest of your argument either. The capital owner usually employs many people to invest portions of the capital into smaller investment opportunities - it's not like Bill Gates has to invest all of his fortune into just one opportunity is it? If anything, this site is based around the idea of giving capital to the unexperienced to start businesses with promising ideas - that's pretty much the exact theoretical definition of angel investors, incubators and VCs. One might argue that these institutions suffer from cronyism and don't do their job as well as they should, but their job is after all to re-allocate accrued capital to value-producers in a risk-balanced way across a broad portfolio which, I think, is what you seem to want to advocate.
    • Noseshine 10y ago
      > Do you have an example? A not too large and not too small and recent example - using the whole of the US is more muddled also because of larger timescales which include the ability to blame other developments - see Kansas.
• DanBC 10y ago
  Unless those companies behave like arseholes and use bizarre corporate structure to (often illegally) avoid tax. If brexit was a vote against globalisation and austerity it makes no sense to cut taxes which simultaneously gives huge corps some benefit while reducing quality of services even further.