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You could tax the top 20 US companies global REVENUE at 20% and still only cover half of the deficit.
by drivebyhooting 2y ago
You could tax the top 20 US companies global REVENUE at 20% and still only cover half of the deficit.
- drivebyhooting 2y agoDid ChatGPT do the math wrong or is this fact inconvenient?
- ceejayoz 2y agoOne should generally assume ChatGPT did the math wrong.
- daveguy 2y agoWow, that seems like a good chunk of the problem. You could probably get through another good chunk with taxes on the billionaires and multimillionaires. Just spit balling here.
- ceejayoz 2y agoSo with a small tax on just the biggest handful of companies we could fix half the problem in one go? Where do we sign up?
- drivebyhooting 2y ago20% tax on revenue? That’s insane. Wr’d all be fired if this were implemented.
- ceejayoz 2y agoThe EU and Australia seem to survive a 20% VAT. What if we did the biggest 100 or 1000 companies at a smaller rate, instead?
- missedthecue 2y agoa 20% tax on revenue would put them out of business, because it's greater than their net margins. Revenue, not profit.
- Marsymars 2y agoI wouldn't expect many of them to go out of business - they'd just all raise prices by 20%, and profit would remain largely similar as before, notwithstanding supply/demand elasticity of a 20% price increase.
- missedthecue 2y agoSo... not a tax on corporations then but a tax on middle-class consumers. Why not just raise the income tax?
- Marsymars 2y agoWell... that depends on supply/demand elasticity. A tax on revenue relatively disadvantages companies that both sell goods that consumers aren't willing to pay more for, and that don't have the margins to support keeping prices to whatever consumers are willing to pay for. So in some senses it's a consumer win - they lose out on the goods with the least marginal benefit to them, and margins get squeezed into public/consumer coffers for other goods. Conversely, raising the income tax relatively disadvantages companies in a different way, depending on which way you raise the income tax. Who pays taxes is always based on supply/demand elasticity. There are various reasons that some tax or some combination of taxes might be preferable to some different combination of taxes that don't have to do with "who pays". Taxes are largely zero-sum-or-less in the effect collection/application effect, so the winners/losers aren't e.g. consumer vs corporations, but rather corporation A vs corporation B or consumer A vs consumer B.