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TL;DR Treat sports franchises differently from other businesses. “Please excuse any typos, wrote this on my phone in a hurry” It’s less about sports owners vs
by jagtesh 5y ago
TL;DR Treat sports franchises differently from other businesses.
“Please excuse any typos, wrote this on my phone in a hurry”
It’s less about sports owners vs person on the street than it is about any business owner and their employees. The business owner most likely does pay an overall lower tax rate. It is a broader philosophical conundrum.
On the one hand, you want to encourage entrepreneurship. Without a disproportionate reward, why would anyone be willing to take on the regulatory burden of a owning a business. On the other hand, we wish to promote equal treatment. Same laws for everyone.
So maybe, the real conversation should be about simplification of tax law to promote a less disproportionate divide between being an employer and an employee. The compliance frameworks and tax laws are as it is horrendously complicated in every country I’ve ever worked in. How about simplifying them? Have income > X? Pay Y tax. Not only will this promote egalitarianism, it will ease the complexity of running a business.
A good compromise then? In theory. In practice, that’s never going to happen. Governments are not autocratic. They need consensus to move forward. Making a change like this will involve appealing to all kinds of govt. leaders with differing vested interests. It’s the very reason behind our (US/Canada) countless tax rebates clauses and provisions. Local leaders creating new subsidy programs to attract more businesses (that translates into jobs) for their constituents.
Hmm..what can we do then? Treat sports franchises differently from other businesses. Somewhere in the countless points the author makes, they brought this up. I think there’s some real substance here.
- nicoburns 5y agoI feel like the tax code ought to be biased towards benefitting small businesses, but super-tight on those processing larger amounts of money. And it ought to all be tied back to a person who controls the business so you can't just game this by creating more legal entities.
- kristjansson 5y agoAll those sorts of flat tax ideas tend to fall down when considering how 'income' is calculated. Unless the policy says the state gets x% of every dollar of revenue, which creates wild disparities between industries with different margins and generally upends the idea of 'income', such a policy is quickly in the business of deciding what expenses can be netted against which sources of income by whom ...