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No it's not. That's how change happens. It's still perfectly legal to destroy the environment in many ways, it doesn't mean we can't complain about it. If we
by mattmanser 7y ago
No it's not. That's how change happens.
It's still perfectly legal to destroy the environment in many ways, it doesn't mean we can't complain about it.
If we don't talk about it, nothing happens.
- FDSGSG 7y agoThe problem isn't with the corporations, the problem (if it exists at all!) may be with the legislation. Complain about the law. E: CogitoCogito is absolutely right, there are companies spending lots of money around the world to push these regulations. I just seriously doubt that Activision Blizzard is one of these.
- jayd16 7y agoIt's helpful to have real world examples for context.
- FDSGSG 7y agoOh, absolutely. But then the headline would be "$country missed out on $amount in taxes because of lacking regulations" or something similar.
- deogeo 7y agoWho do you think lobbies for such laws?
- lukevdp 7y agoPoliticians don’t have to listen to lobbyists. The blame lies with politicians.
- Retric 7y agoEveryone talking to a politician about an issue is a lobbyist, that’s what lobbing means. It’s easy to think only those people you disagree with are lobbyists, but even just sending a letter to your congressional representative is lobbying. And there are paid lobbyists on both sides of almost every issue.
- anm89 7y agoThis is at best half true. There are professional lobbying organizations that have vastly more resources and know how than individuals. And when people complain about lobbyists everyone knows that a this is what is being referenced.
- Retric 7y agoThe well connected, paid, lobbyists, who need to register, are only the tip of the iceberg. So called grass roots lobbying generally involves well funded groups organizing or convincing individuals to do the talking. Pretending that’s somehow different from paid lobbyists is missing how politics works. Companies and Unions for example are often at odds on specific issues, but they both get sincere individuals to be doing some of the communication.
- headsoup 7y agoI only assume the poster above is really referring to corruption, where companies with vested interests are not just 'lobbying' for their outcome, but buying them outright... Otherwise there is (or at least should be) no difference.
- mycall 7y ago> Politician's lies are to blame. FTFY But with the high cost of being elected, of course politicans follow the money and the corruption that goes with it.
- j88439h84 7y agoWhat happens to politicians who don't listen to lobbyists? Do they win reelection?
- CogitoCogito 7y ago> The problem isn't with the corporations, the problem (if it exists at all!) may be with the legislation. > Complain about the law. Do you not suppose that these large corporations with so much money at stake do not in fact use their resources to ensure that laws take their current form? Do believe they are somehow innocent actors in this drama?
- FDSGSG 7y agoI'm absolutely sure Activision Blizzard (a relatively small company) had no significant impact on how these laws were written.
- CogitoCogito 7y agoIn fairness the quote I responded to was this: > The problem isn't with the corporations... Are you saying that _none_ of the corporations with large money at stake are taking the financially rational approach of influencing the current state of the laws to have these "loopholes" or are you just saying that Activision Blizzard hasn't done so. If you're saying the latter, maybe you should edit the post I responded to to make that clear. Edit: Small edits fixing terrible writing.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI doubt they dreamed up these schemes themselves. Rather they hired some big accountancy firm that does have impacts on how laws are written to do this work.
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- plufz 7y agoWhy can’t we complain about both the laws and the companies? I will complain when companies make low quality products, treat their staff badly or whatever. If our only requirement on companies is to follow the law I think we are setting the bar extremely low.
- aloknnikhil 7y agoHmm. When the date rolls around to file your returns, I'm assuming you don't actually attempt to maximize your returns?
- andrewprock 7y agoFew people do. Most people attempt to fill out their returns in a rather straightforward manner as laid out by the forms. The loopholes are not published in the tax forms.
- aloknnikhil 7y agoThat's my point. They're not opting to do so morally. They're not aware such loopholes exist. I'd be willing to bet most people you talk about wouldn't think twice to reduce their tax bill
- refurb 7y agoI don’t think it’s a few. Did you put money in a 401k? Did you buy a house and calculate the tax deduction? Did you hold onto a stock so you’d get the lower long term capital gains rate? Did you contribute to an HSA or FSA? The majority of people make decisions that optimize their tax rate.
- andrewprock 7y agoIf you think minimizing your tax rate starts and ends with line items on the 1040, you are not minimizing your tax rate. Not by a long shot.
- Danieru 7y agoIt is double think to call the act of minimizing the state of having achieved the absolute minimum while still using the word to describe corporations which are indeed paying more than the absolute minimum. You are being dishonest in discourse to use that word with different definitions depending on who you apply it to. Either regular people are minimizing taxes when they use rules to reduce taxes, and thus so are corporations. Or neither regular people nor corporations are minimizing taxes because neither has achieved the absolute minimum.
- oconnor663 7y agoNo one designed the environment to be destroyed. But tax laws are often designed precisely to incentivize people to behave in a certain way. If we raise taxes on cigarettes, and then people smoke less, and tax revenue goes down, does anyone complain? Of course not; that's why we raised taxes on cigarettes. Now sometimes you have tax laws that are poorly designed, where we don't like what happens when people follow the incentives they create. Or other times you have tax laws where people debated about what things to incentivize, and one side won the debate, and you might be on the other side. It's perfectly fair to want to change them. But it doesn't really make sense to criticize people for responding to incentives per se.
- sdwisely 7y agofollowing the cigarette example though at some point the trend seems to stop declining and the black market fills the gap in some sense tax havens are kind of like black market banks
- jjoonathan 7y agoIf you find a legal loophole that lets you steal cars and subsequently take advantage of it to steal cars then you are still a car thief, still a bad person, and the theft is still newsworthy. The fact that your were "merely following incentives" does not make it right and does not make it uninteresting. Quite the opposite. You're even more culpable if it is later discovered that you lobbied for the loophole. Society's reaction should be to disseminate the surprising story and use it to drum up support to fix the law. At that point, the only reason to not pursue the matter further is to serve the higher principle of avoiding ex post facto legislation. It's an important principle, so we allow the crime to go unpunished, but the morality of the situation is still that the theft was wrong.
- golemiprague 7y agoWhat do you mean by loophole to steal car? stealing is taking something that doesn't belong to you, that's what government do when they tax you, they just encode it in law. You forgot that money you earned belongs to you, that's the default, not to the government.
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