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This is fucked up. Don't get me wrong.
But if you want to end this just start taxing loans.
That's literally the only form of income in this country that isn't taxable. Kind of nuts.
Seriously with tax loans there won't be billionaires in this country.
Have you heard of the "borrow until you die" financial strategy? I'm thinking of trying it out...
This is actually exactly what I'm talking about in my original post. Buy borrowed die is a perfectly legal way of accumulating massive amounts of wealth and paying absolutely no tax
Tax general purpose loans , but only loans that use assets like stocks as collateral. Allow a grace amount so regular people can still take a loan when they need it without being punished.
Also, you're taxed on spending while businesses generally aren't
That's not really true. Payroll taxes are still a thing, and they still need to pay sales tax when purchasing materials. It's the accounting tomfoolery that lets then get away with not paying taxes on profits.
sales tax when purchasing materials.
AFAIK Sales tax is relatively small in US. In EU it's a 20-25% VAT but B2B transactions are VAT free
If we charged taxes on revenue, vertical integration would skyrocket. Because the more hands their product goes through, the more tax they need to pay.
We could exempt B2B taxes from the revenue model theoretically though.
You basically described VAT. Which works extremely well. Some small tweaks to capture all revenue (not just sales) and a wealth tax to discourage hoarding and revenue taxation would function quite well.
The problem with VAT is that is that it's not a progressive taxation system. Whether you can afford one sandwich or one million sandwiches, you pay the same either way. We could compensate for it by giving money to the poor, but redistributive policies tend not to be popular with the general public.
April 15th
If corporations are people (under the law) then the money they make is income and should be taxed appropriately.
Better position would be that money they receive (profit) should be taxed since people also pay taxes based on the amount of money they receive (income). But that position is basically what we already have.
The problem with the system is that a corporation has different kinds of 'discounts' as workers and that those differences became excuses to greatly reduce their share of the bill (low corporate taxes are good for the economy, in general) shifting the burden to the working class (since all the money spent on education, healthcare, pensions etc does end up in the pockets of the people).
The true problem is not necessarily because the corporate tax is not high enough, it's because the benefits of a succesful company go to a small amount of people, while a serious part of the costs (infrastructure, healthy and well educated worker) are paid by a large amount of people.
The ones who should really be taxed appropriately is this small group of people who extract a lot of value from the expenses the large group of people have. Let's say a 1000 people together costs 1000 euro, while together they earn 1100, then it leaves 100 on the table. Right now the large group of 95 does not 95, but maybe 5 or 10. While the small group of 5 does not get 5, but 90 or 95. That small group that received the vast majority pay a much smaller percentage of what they received.
But since money is free speech, making corporations pay taxes is compelled speech, which we're protected against by our first amendment rights.
Corporations should pay more taxes, but since people are talking about how it all works in reality:
Not all corporate expenses are tax deductible, and people are able to deduct a fair amount from their income when calculating their taxes.
Additionally, individuals are taxed on a progressive scale where anything up to ~$15,000 isn't taxed. That number should be much higher to actually reflect cost of living, but you're still paying less to account for cost of living.
With $60,000 in income your taxable income is $44,000 after the standard deduction , and then you only pay taxes on about $30,000 of that because of the bracketing.
Poverty should be tied to livable wage and that bottom tax bracket should be too. So really, for single filer the first ~40k should be tax exempt.
100%. And a livable wage based on where you live. The cost of living in some regions is way higher than in others and you can't just say that low income people should have the longest commutes, or spend the most to move to someplace with lower cost of living.
I'd also be in favor of a negative tax bracket. Something that adjusts below poverty income to above poverty. If done right everyone would see some benefit as the system adjusts everyone's income <= $40,000 up to $45,000 or something via refundable tax credit or some such. Make over $40k and you taxes go down $5k. Make $40k or below and you pay no taxes and get a refund of however much less than $40k you made + $5k.
It really sucks when you're self employed. I can almost eliminate my taxes with expenses, except I still pay both the employee and employee tax for social security/payroll taxes which bare almost 15% I can't avoid. Billionaires don't pay that much tax ever. I can't afford to go to the dentist.
The difference is that corporations have an army of tax lawyers that tell them what the tax loopholes are to exploit. Meanwhile, for most ordinary persons, it's just them following orders from the government to pay up. One could read up on the tax rules yourself, but are people willing to spend hours reading boring documents they have no expertise of? I myself wasn't aware of some of the tax benefits I could claim until much later.
Look up direct file
Yeah, we do get tax breaks, should be way more with inflation unfortunately.
Corporation: We planned the next 2 years on an ever increasing income stream but the most minor inconvenience disrupted that so we had to lay off 9,000 employees with zero notice so we could meet our bottom line.
Government: That's a shame, here's $500,000,000 to help "mitigate" "economic conditions".
The 9000 laid-off employees: Can he get $200 a week unemployment so we can afford to exist?
Government: You should have planned better.
