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I am once again asking for a progressive tax on corporate revenue. Scale breeds corruption, monopoly and power imbalances which lead to market distortions. If

by cwkoss 5y ago

I am once again asking for a progressive tax on corporate revenue. Scale breeds corruption, monopoly and power imbalances which lead to market distortions. If you love the free market, you should support a progressive tax on revenue that would allow small businesses to compete with megacorps by taxing revenue based on corp size - make it financially beneficial to spin off smaller companies to be independent entities. Billionaires are largely a symptom of excessive corporate power in our nation.

sidhuko 5y ago
This is the answer really. Wealth accumulation and powerful enterprises lobbying and dividing societies in their own interests. Whether its BP making you believe your own carbon footprint offsets there or social media giants playing to one-side in an election to keep favourable rules in place. You won't see this common sense in politics though as it would open more competition if they weren't able to using lobbying to support their own reelections.
legitster 5y ago
Milton Friedman of all people actually had a really clever solution for this all back in the day: > …the abolition of the corporate income tax, … with the requirement that corporations be required to attribute their income to stockholders, and that stockholders be required to include such sums on their tax returns. Basically treat all corporate income as pass-through income to shareholders. So if Acme Co has 1 million shareholders and they generate $100 million in revenue, each shareholder adds $100 in income to their personal income taxes next year. If corporations want to keep shareholders, they will need to pay out dividends at least enough to cover the tax bill. But that's between shareholders and corporations.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  So here's a grocery store that has profit of 1% of revenue. They (or their shareholders) have to pay tax on the revenue? That can't work - not without them raising prices 20% or so...
  - legitster 5y ago
    You could easily devise it so that expenses are also passed through, but I wouldn't mind if corporate grocery stores lost their tax advantage and had to raise prices to be more competitive with mom and pop stores that operate as S Corps.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Pushing megacorps out of low-profit high-revenue businesses is one of the benefits of this policy. We'd be better off if every grocery store was independently competitive with other grocery stores.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      But would we be better off with 20% higher grocery prices so that the government has the money they want?
    - refurb 5y ago
      What? No we wouldn’t. A small mom and pop cant get the same prices based on volume. In the end consumers just pay higher food prices.
refurb 5y ago
No thanks. Scale breeds efficiency which the consumer often benefits from. Can you imagine instead of Tesla we had half a dozen electric car companies pumping out a few thousand units per year? That would suck bad.
rsj_hn 5y ago
> I am once again asking for a progressive tax on corporate revenue. Just call for a national sales tax and be done with it. Later on, you can transition to a VAT once you see it fixes some of the problems with a pure sales tax.

by cwkoss 5y ago

sidhuko 5y ago

This is the answer really. Wealth accumulation and powerful enterprises lobbying and dividing societies in their own interests. Whether its BP making you believe your own carbon footprint offsets there or social media giants playing to one-side in an election to keep favourable rules in place. You won't see this common sense in politics though as it would open more competition if they weren't able to using lobbying to support their own reelections.

legitster 5y ago

Milton Friedman of all people actually had a really clever solution for this all back in the day: > …the abolition of the corporate income tax, … with the requirement that corporations be required to attribute their income to stockholders, and that stockholders be required to include such sums on their tax returns. Basically treat all corporate income as pass-through income to shareholders. So if Acme Co has 1 million shareholders and they generate $100 million in revenue, each shareholder adds $100 in income to their personal income taxes next year. If corporations want to keep shareholders, they will need to pay out dividends at least enough to cover the tax bill. But that's between shareholders and corporations.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
So here's a grocery store that has profit of 1% of revenue. They (or their shareholders) have to pay tax on the revenue? That can't work - not without them raising prices 20% or so...
- legitster 5y ago
  You could easily devise it so that expenses are also passed through, but I wouldn't mind if corporate grocery stores lost their tax advantage and had to raise prices to be more competitive with mom and pop stores that operate as S Corps.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Pushing megacorps out of low-profit high-revenue businesses is one of the benefits of this policy. We'd be better off if every grocery store was independently competitive with other grocery stores.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    But would we be better off with 20% higher grocery prices so that the government has the money they want?
  - refurb 5y ago
    What? No we wouldn’t. A small mom and pop cant get the same prices based on volume. In the end consumers just pay higher food prices.

refurb 5y ago

No thanks. Scale breeds efficiency which the consumer often benefits from. Can you imagine instead of Tesla we had half a dozen electric car companies pumping out a few thousand units per year? That would suck bad.

rsj_hn 5y ago

> I am once again asking for a progressive tax on corporate revenue. Just call for a national sales tax and be done with it. Later on, you can transition to a VAT once you see it fixes some of the problems with a pure sales tax.