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The 'double-taxed' argument is so lame. Money circulates in a system and gets taxed basically infinitely. Worker gets paid and pays income taxes and retirement

The 'double-taxed' argument is so lame. Money circulates in a system and gets taxed basically infinitely. Worker gets paid and pays income taxes and retirement taxes. Worker spends their pay, and has to pay sales taxes. Business gets revenue from that purchase, and has to pays taxes. Business gives it to employee as salary. Taxes. Employee spends it. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. There is no such thing as 'double-taxation'. It boggles my mind that people try to defend tax evasion by insisting that a dollar can only be taxed once... and then never again as it is used?

literallycancer 7y ago
People always look at it differently once it's their money being taken away. Anyone who thinks running a business is easy or more profitable than it should be should try to run one.
- criley2 7y ago
  If running a business wasn't profitable no one would do it. Simple as that. Running a for-profit is not altruistic. It's not a service. You're not serving your community. It doesn't make you inherently good. People run businesses to make money. Full stop. Some nonsense comparison like "harder than it should be" doesn't mean anything, it's an opinion-based weasel phrase with no definition. Considering how dramatically wealth and income inequality has exploded over the past 2 generations in America, the only priciplied, data-based perspective is that corporations and the astronomically tiny number of people who control them have gotten fabulously more wealthy at the direct expense of workers who are working longer hours, more productively, doing more jobs, for less real money and wealth. You can spin it however you want, but corporations and the capitalist class are more wealthy now that at any time in our history except the Gilded Era, and the working class is poorer now that they have been in many generations, and tax policy is really the only tool the people have to try and right this listing ship before another Wealth Destruction Event, another Great Reset.
  - seibelj 7y ago
    I cannot disagree with this analysis any harder. It is so fully incorrect my eyes are bleeding. Although the entire paragraph was riddled with falsehoods and misconceptions, I will just say that the biggest investors and gainers from corporate success are pension funds and sovereign wealth that benefit average people through their retirements.
    - criley2 7y ago
      After reading Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century and his literal hundreds of pages of hard sourcing of the claims I made regarding wealth and income inequality and how corporations have served to massively concentrate income and wealth into the hands of a tiny class of managers, I have become used to folks like you who react extremely emotionally and inappropriately to the cold hard reality of how capitalist economies work. P.S. in America, the retirement system is failing, from social security to public and private pensions. All of them are either being redone to ensure folks won't get their money when they retire they way they were promised, or they're just monetizing debt to keep up. Perhaps European style systems are better funded (which would likely correlate with dramatically higher taxes) but massive pension protests in France starting today would seem to suggest otherwise).
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > People always look at it differently once it's their money being taken away. Yeah, they tend to take on a more selfish attitude. People will also believe all kinds of dumb or awful things if they think it justifies their self-interest (hence the cliched quote I won't repeat). That's why I think moderation rather than ideological purity is probably the way to go. > Anyone who thinks running a business is easy or more profitable than it should be should try to run one. Making ends meet isn't easy for a lot of people, either. For them, their hard work doesn't have as much of an upside at your hard working business owner.
Mirioron 7y ago
You're right, the current taxation systems are already very complex. Governments have done a very good job at obfuscating the tax burden. Sales taxes (VAT), income taxes, and payroll taxes are all largely the same thing - they are all essentially dependent on your income to some degree. If we added all of them together into one income tax (or sales tax) then people would probably find high taxation a bigger issue, but because people encounter these taxes one by one the problem doesn't seem as big. Although, I will say that this issue is much less of a problem in the US, where the tax burden is lower than in Europe.
tim333 7y ago
Double tax can be an issue but there are ways around it. In UK you used to get a tax credit on money paid out as dividends for the corporate tax already paid so if the company paid 20% tax on a profit, paid it as a dividend and your personal rate was 30% you'd just pay the extra 10%. Of course they've now complicated the whole thing up with extra rules and loopholes as politicians tend to do.

literallycancer 7y ago

People always look at it differently once it's their money being taken away. Anyone who thinks running a business is easy or more profitable than it should be should try to run one.

criley2 7y ago
If running a business wasn't profitable no one would do it. Simple as that. Running a for-profit is not altruistic. It's not a service. You're not serving your community. It doesn't make you inherently good. People run businesses to make money. Full stop. Some nonsense comparison like "harder than it should be" doesn't mean anything, it's an opinion-based weasel phrase with no definition. Considering how dramatically wealth and income inequality has exploded over the past 2 generations in America, the only priciplied, data-based perspective is that corporations and the astronomically tiny number of people who control them have gotten fabulously more wealthy at the direct expense of workers who are working longer hours, more productively, doing more jobs, for less real money and wealth. You can spin it however you want, but corporations and the capitalist class are more wealthy now that at any time in our history except the Gilded Era, and the working class is poorer now that they have been in many generations, and tax policy is really the only tool the people have to try and right this listing ship before another Wealth Destruction Event, another Great Reset.
- seibelj 7y ago
  I cannot disagree with this analysis any harder. It is so fully incorrect my eyes are bleeding. Although the entire paragraph was riddled with falsehoods and misconceptions, I will just say that the biggest investors and gainers from corporate success are pension funds and sovereign wealth that benefit average people through their retirements.
  - criley2 7y ago
    After reading Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century and his literal hundreds of pages of hard sourcing of the claims I made regarding wealth and income inequality and how corporations have served to massively concentrate income and wealth into the hands of a tiny class of managers, I have become used to folks like you who react extremely emotionally and inappropriately to the cold hard reality of how capitalist economies work. P.S. in America, the retirement system is failing, from social security to public and private pensions. All of them are either being redone to ensure folks won't get their money when they retire they way they were promised, or they're just monetizing debt to keep up. Perhaps European style systems are better funded (which would likely correlate with dramatically higher taxes) but massive pension protests in France starting today would seem to suggest otherwise).
CharlesColeman 7y ago
> People always look at it differently once it's their money being taken away. Yeah, they tend to take on a more selfish attitude. People will also believe all kinds of dumb or awful things if they think it justifies their self-interest (hence the cliched quote I won't repeat). That's why I think moderation rather than ideological purity is probably the way to go. > Anyone who thinks running a business is easy or more profitable than it should be should try to run one. Making ends meet isn't easy for a lot of people, either. For them, their hard work doesn't have as much of an upside at your hard working business owner.

Mirioron 7y ago

You're right, the current taxation systems are already very complex. Governments have done a very good job at obfuscating the tax burden. Sales taxes (VAT), income taxes, and payroll taxes are all largely the same thing - they are all essentially dependent on your income to some degree. If we added all of them together into one income tax (or sales tax) then people would probably find high taxation a bigger issue, but because people encounter these taxes one by one the problem doesn't seem as big. Although, I will say that this issue is much less of a problem in the US, where the tax burden is lower than in Europe.

tim333 7y ago

Double tax can be an issue but there are ways around it. In UK you used to get a tax credit on money paid out as dividends for the corporate tax already paid so if the company paid 20% tax on a profit, paid it as a dividend and your personal rate was 30% you'd just pay the extra 10%. Of course they've now complicated the whole thing up with extra rules and loopholes as politicians tend to do.