I was hoping the pandemic taught people to read. I didn't say profit was bad. The discussion point was not about razor-thin margins. The 5% was just notiona

I was hoping the pandemic taught people to read. I didn't say profit was bad. The discussion point was not about razor-thin margins. The 5% was just notional for discussion. The same problems occur with fat margins. Building on your point that profits are necessary for growth, stability and job security, presumably you have in mind that the company gets to keep the profit, to use for those things as needed. The GP proposal I replied to is a tax system which sets a legally required minimum profit margin, and then takes 100% of that required minimum as tax, though I expect the poster didn't think of it that way. As the proposal is to force the company to make some profit percentage and take that directly from the company, the remaining profit the company can reinvest in growth, stability and job security is reduced. Aside from reducing the amount available to plow back, this also acts to amplify variance in profit from period to period, increasing instability in the company's finances. Reducing profit that can be used by the company and amplifying instability both reduce growth, job security, upward mobility etc. So much for understanding business. It's also ridiculously harmful to the "food chain" because it would tend to destroy independent supply chain companies, and prevent new ones from being competitve. The GP proposal takes the legally required minimum profit margin from every individual company in a supply chain, so the total tax taken is the required margin multiplied by the number of companies in the chain. I.e. more companies in a supply chain == proportionally more tax. This creates an extreme pressure to merge small supply chain companies into a giant conglomerates that pay less tax for the same task. I say extreme because it is: Merging brings a benefit of 10-100x tax saving. If you like giant conglomerates that's fine, but if you want a food chain of independent companies, it's a disastrous policy. The tax level in that proposal could be set low enough to allow small supply chain companies to survive without succumbing to tax pressure to merge, but if that was done, giant conglomerates would pay a tiny amount of tax, compared with small companies. There would still be a 10-100x tax advantage available to giant conglomerates. Since this entire discussion is a complaint about giant companies paying too little tax, presumably that is not the intended effect. Some accounting could obviously be done to ensure giant companies pay a similar share to small companies in a chain doing the same thing, to remove the tax pressure to merge. But that's what we have already, that's corporation tax.