UK Announces 'Google Tax'

mrspoonsi points out that the UK has announced a "Google tax" on corporations that send a significant portion of their profits overseas to avoid local taxation. Any "economic activity" that is pushed to another country would face a 25% tax. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer [said], "We will make sure multinationals pay their fair share of tax. We will introduce a 25% tax on profits from multinationals here in the UK which they artificially shift out of the UK. Today we're putting a stop to it. It's unfair to British people." ... [C]orporate taxes are still low, because the system does not tax sales, it taxes profits. And those profits are fiendishly difficult to pin down. Intellectual property payments to holding companies, the movement of sales activity to lower tax jurisdictions and the cost of licensing fees to holding companies all confuse the picture and allow firms with very mobile business models (such as in the technology sector) to be highly tax efficient.

Comments

Great

[Roodvlees]

Sadly it has to be done this way. Because countries refuse to stop giving the ridiculous tax benefits.

Re:Great

[Lawrence_Bird]

Because countries refuse to stop giving the ridiculous tax benefits.

Well there you have it. Exactly what is wrong with the left. A lower tax rate is considered a "benefit" as if the government is tossing a cookie out and patting the corporate (or individual) dog on the head and saying "good boy!"

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

The far better way to view it is "companies are shifting assets and income out of our country because of the ridiculous tax penalties here."

Re:Great

[dave420]

The companies profit because of the stable economies and societies countries create through spending the tax the countries have collected. Why shouldn't governments try to recoup some of this? Google can choose to not do business in the affected countries if they want.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

If the profits are made in-country, then the taxes should be paid to the country of origin. Shifting profits overseas to avoid taxation is blatantly dishonest and anyone that thinks it should be legal is a moron.

Re:Great

[visualight]

And you have no inherent natural right to electricity, plumbing, roads, safety from murder/rape/robbery, etc. Society gives that to you in EXCHANGE for your taxes.

Next, try to separate Society from Government to continue your argument. Then I'll just call you you a Liar, because you do actually understand the manipulation you (will) be making.

Or, you have another, more fair, method that results in every member of Society contributing to the whole, let's hear it. But if you think you should be allowed to live here and profit from our infrastructure and then not pay for it you can get the fuck out you communist free loader.

Re:Great

[deKernel]

You make it sound like they don't recoup any money which they do. The question is how much is fair.

Re:Great

[Lawrence_Bird]

Lets see. Oh companies create jobs that pay workers who then consume goods and pay taxes on those goods as well as their salaries. Companies also pay investors dividends (taxed) and, hopefully, result in capital gains, also currently taxed.

Re:Great

[CrimsonAvenger]

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

Nonsense! Governments have the normal natural right to take money from anyone - the Army and Police.

Or do you really believe that there's any difference between modern governments and medieval ones, other than the method of picking the rulers?

Re:Great

[Lawrence_Bird]

Society gives that to you in EXCHANGE for your taxes.

Again, more leftist chatter. No, society does not give me anything. I as well as presumably you, others (including corporations) pay for those services, whether provided by another company (electricity) or nominally the government (roads). Stop thinking of government as Mommy and start thinking of it the same way you do the corner deli or your auto mechanic. You give them money, they provide a good or service.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly it has to be done this way. Because countries refuse to stop giving the ridiculous tax benefits.

Lemme guess - you voluntarily give ALL of your money to your government. Right?

Re:Great

[Roodvlees]

Exactly what is wrong with the left.

The only where it matters who says it is when you are wrong and unable to argue the point.

A lower tax rate is considered a "benefit" as if the government is tossing a cookie out and patting the corporate (or individual) dog on the head and saying "good boy!"

When that tax rate is lower than the one people have to pay over their income and it's only paid over the profit the company makes (unlike personal taxes which are paid before basic life maintenance) - yes it's a benefit because it means people have to make up the difference on their personal taxes.

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

Of course not, but lets be realistic how else will it pay for services?
If you really don't want to pay tax you can always move to Yemen.
But you want a police force to reduce crime, fire department to put out fires, etc...
Taxes are necessary to make those things happen.
I want everyone to pay their taxes so nobody has to pay an unfair amount.

Also I think most companies will be happy to pay their taxes, so long as their competition also has to, because they benefit from government services just the same.

companies are shifting assets and income

That's so broken! These companies enjoy roads, an educated population, etc, they should not be allow to 'move' income from the place they earned it.

Re:Great

[beelsebob]

Of course they don't - governments are an entirely human construct, so they have no inalienable rights at all.

However, the vast majority of society sees creating a pot of money from which we pay for shared resources as a valuable and useful thing. We then expect everyone to pay their fair share into said pot given that they are sharing said resources.

Re:Great

[LordLimecat]

His objection was not to taxation, but to the terming of taxation as if it is the default state and any deviation (ie lower taxes) somehow requires a justification.

It may seem like a trifling complaint, but consider the difference between calling freedom of speech a right and calling it a benefit.

Re:Great

[gstoddart]

You know, corporations have no inherent natural right to anything. Corporations are a construct created and regulated by governments.

Corporations have no such thing as natural rights, because corporations are not a natural thing. They are a legal construct, and nothing more. They aren't some protected species.

So, yes, when you incorporate to get certain benefits from the government, you do it under their terms. And that has a pretty good chance of including paying taxes.

So, your status as a corporation isn't some magical, inherent thing in the universe. It's not an objective fact. It's not defined by physics.

Governments keep giving tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy under the lie that this will create jobs and stimulate the economy. And the they destroy jobs, and sit on record high piles of money and not do anything for the economy.

From what everyone who isn't a corporation can tell, giving tax breaks to corporations has NONE of the claimed benefits. All this has done is put more money in the hands of the few, and leave the rest of us begging for scraps.

But don't think for a minute that a corporation is in any way entitled or has some inherent natural right to make money which isn't taxed.

Because that's complete bullshit.

Corporations do not exist without the permission of governments. Which means it's corporations which don't have any natural rights in this equation. And they certainly don't have some inherent right to not be taxed.

Re:Great

[admiral snackbar]

That corporation relies on the government for much of its ability to make a profit. Without a government, who would protect the corporation from thugs who rob and steal? Without a government, who ensures that the roads are there to allow the corporation to move its goods? Citizens have to pay for these government services, why shouldn't corporations pay a share as well? (Alternatively, you could of course just remove the corporate income tax, and raise the capital gains tax to the same level as the regular income tax, then you just shift the moment of taxation, but not the level). But the principle remains that corporations make profits because the government pays for the police and the roads and it is no more than fair that everybody chips in to pay for the government services they use. Whether you do that at the corporate level of the personal income tax is irrelevant, but looking at it from the perspective of tax rates in the US, the capital gains tax alone is not enough to ensure that everybody pays a fair share in my opinion.

Re:Great

[thaylin]

Companies do not create jobs, demand for goods creates jobs, companies fulfill that role of producing. If that company was not there the job would still be there. That is a myth created by the right.

Re:Great

[Maxwell]

And companies don't get any of those services, nor do they benefit from any of those services. Services like IP property rights, employment laws, public education for workers are of no benefits to corporations. As none of that benefits the corporations, they should be free to ship all the profits to Ireland/no tax jurisdictions while continuing to do business in England! Right? Right, not left, right!

Re:Great

[thaylin]

So you have a fire department that protects your house, do you pay the full cost of the fire house and the full pay of the firemen?

Do you pay the full costs for the roads you travel on?

When you go to the deli or the auto mechanic you pay the full cost of the goods you buy, with government services you do not.

Re:Great

[thaylin]

What does being happy about it, and being correct about it have to do with each other?

Re:Great

[__aaclcg7560]

If you have a job and filled out a W2, then you're paying your taxes voluntarily.

Re:Great

[admiral snackbar]

True, but does the combined level of taxes on capital add up to the same level of taxation as someone earning the same amount through labor? In my opinion it should add up to the same amount. If I as a citizen make 100k a year through dividends and capital gains, I profit about as much from the government as another guy making 100k a year through working a job. We should pay roughly the same level of taxes, as we gain roughly the same amount of benefits from living in an orderly, governed society and we make roughly the same amount of money. Corporate income taxes are a valid way to ensure that all sources of income can in the end be taxed at roughly the same percentage. There may be alternatives, but corporate income tax is no more or less valid than a personal income tax or a capital gains tax. How the government achieves that same level of taxation is less relevant to me. My problem lies with corporations that evade taxes. Not only does that problably lead in some cases to a situation where someone making 100k in capital income pays less tax than someone making 100k in labor income, it is also unfair compared to for example smaller companies that don't operate internationally and therefore can't use dodgy tax evasion measures. Why would it be fair if the mom-n-pop store on the corner pays a higher percentage of corporate income tax than Walmart, just because the latter can shift its taxes to whereever it wants? Is that fair competition?

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the vast majority of society wants to contribute as little as possible to these "shared" resources and to let other people pay instead. Ideally, they also want to profit from the resources as much as possible, but not let other people profit it if they can at all prevent it. This is often rationalised with political systems such as socialism and social democracy, where "solidarity" typically stops at the level where the proponents stop profiting from it (i.e.: "share" with the rich in their own country, but not, or not to the same extent with the poor elsewhere). In practice, this creates some sort of stability, but I would not ever consider calling it fair.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

You pay for those services through tax. Or society gives you them in exchange for your taxes. Which is what OP said. So where's the argument? Are you really trolling over a non-existent semantic difference between "giving X in exchange for Y" and "paying for X with Y"?

Re:Great

[DNS-and-BIND]

Governments don't create stable economies and societies. They people that live there do that. Governments just chuckle and fleece the people for as much as they think they can get.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

Companies has no inherent natural right to exist, or own property for that matter.
If the company owner was held accountable for everything the company does and if he moved with the company to the place the company pays taxes then we could discuss if natural right is an illusion and if not, if right to property extends beyond what you can carry and defend, but that isn't the case.
We are still talking about an artificial construct that doesn't have natural rights.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

"The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone."

That Libertarian claptrap is complete horse shit. Without money there cannot be government. Without government there is anarchy. Anarchy is not acceptable.

While there are certainly downsides to government, without it the world would undoubtedly be much much worse off than it is today. The computer I am typing this message on and the internet that connects us would not have ever been created without a regulatory framework to allow it or the government investment that made it happen.

The problem with the RIGHT is that they can only see in black and white. They have no concept of right sizing or balance. They only see Big Brother vs No Government or No guns vs everyone can buy a 50 cal machine gun at the corner store with no background check or waiting period.

While I welcome the debate on exactly how big government should be, I am not willing to engage in an argument with idiots who think complete absence of government is acceptable. The government does have a right to take taxes as income because we the people granted them that right. The fact that you don't like the amount of taxes is irrelevant. The relevant discussion is then deciding as a people what size of government is acceptable.

Personally I'd start by reducing the size of the military 50% (mostly by eliminating pork programs like the F-22 and F-35), cutting 75% of the spying budget and disbanding TSA. At that point we'd be close to balanced if not running a surplus.

Re:Great

[MightyMartian]

That is up to the electorate to decide.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The natural state of companies is to not exist. In the natural state property can only be owned by real people, not artificial ones.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

People have natural rights. People don't give up their natural rights when they form an organization like a corporation. Whatever harm you mean to cause corporations, that harm will be felt by the people involved.

Re:Great

[frank_adrian314159]

Picking the rulers?!

Oh, how quaint hat you really think there is any difference other than in the level of technology involved.

Re:Great

[Krojack]

Companies can create jobs if they want. 40 years ago an auto manufacturing factory might have employed 3,000 workers. That same factory today would most likely only employee 1,000 because robots replace most of the workers on the lines. In the meantime the company makes more income because they don't have to pay 2,000 employees various wages and benefits.

Companies today are requiring their current employees to do the work of 2-4 people so they don't have to hire more.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

A choice made under duress is no choice at all.

"If you have a job..."
So your option is to NOT have a job? Then you go hungry, live homeless, etc.? That's not much of a choice.

And if you have a job... filling out the W2 is mandatory, as well as paying taxes. That's not a choice at all.

Let me guess, your next BS statement will be "you can choose to go to jail"?

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I see someone has bought into the idea of a zero-sum economy.

Please let me know when you've finished eating your tiny slice of pie. I'll be over here baking a dozen more in key lime.

Re:Great

[Krojack]

Last I checked all my utilities other than water are private companies. My taxes won't pay my electric, gas or phone bill. If I don't pay any of them then they get shut off.

Also I pay my water bill to my local city and it's not even part of my taxes.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

No. Everyone has the inherent natural right to be safe from murder/rape/robbery.

And there's more to life than roads, plumbing, and electricity. They are only worth what they cost, not an infinite amount. We don't owe "society" an unlimited tribute for a few watts of electricity. Government is supposed to serve the citizens, not the other way around.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Blatantly false and more than likely intentionally dishonest

To continue your own line of questioning - when you go to the deli, do you pay for their electricity? The kitchen equipment? Their garbage removal fees? Of course you do. Those are all costs of producing the tasty sandwich that you buy, the price of which was set to allow the deli owner to make up their direct and indirect costs sufficiently so as to stay in business. The fire department is no different - everyone's taxes go to pay a portion of the cost of the service. Your attempt to claim otherwise is ridiculous.

Re:Great

[__aaclcg7560]

My uncle ran a landscaping business for 30 years under the table without ever paying any taxes on the cash he made. Of course, he came from Mexico.

Re:Great

[Des Herriott]

As the parent poster stated: "in EXCHANGE", or in other words you're paying for it. You can't rebut an statement if you've only bothered to read half of it.

Parent poster is right: western nations with higher tax rates generally do offer more stable, safer, societies, and corporations are all too happy to take advantage of that without making their contribution to that society.

And yes, governments do have the right to tax you. You can bleat about libertarianism all you like, but elected governments get to make the laws, and you can either abide by them, or piss off somewhere else without any pesky laws. I understand Somalia is nice at this time of year.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a simplistic (and incorrect) view of things. People create new markets and in the process need to hire people to help them serve those new markets. When they do that - wait for it - they create a companies that create new jobs.

People like you pretend that everything would just magically happen.

Re:Great

[nautsch]

Of course you pay the full costs of everything the state provides. Except a small amount, which is covered by state-debt.
Who else do you think pays the full cost of all that stuff?

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a terrible argument. Do you pay for the full cost of running a deli when you buy a sandwich? Did you buy all the tools, pay the full rent, hire and pay the salaries of all the guys at the repair shop when you had your car repaired?

Did you even think for a second before you wrote what you wrote? No, I didn't think so.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The people acting together form a government. A government that does not listen to the will of the people is a false one. This is why democracy is the best form of government which changes often, as it is the least worst created yet. I suppose that makes the ultimate form of government, that without a government where individuals would be secure in themselves and not want what a centralized organization can offer them.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a job and filled out a W2, then you're paying your taxes voluntarily.

ORLY?

You don't appear to understand the concept of "withholding".

I'd love to see what would happen were withholding eliminated. Make every tax explicitly payable by the individual. No "hidden" taxation. You get your money, then you have to give a huge chunk of it to the government. Make $100K a year? You'd have to explicitly write checks totaling $40K or more for your taxes.

Why do I get the feeling you'd be vehemently opposed to such a move?

And if you ARE opposed to such a move, one has to ask WHY you think taxes need to be hidden?

Re:Great

[Kierthos]

People don't give up their natural rights when they form a corporation, but that does not mean that the corporation has all those same rights.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

Then I guess corporations are also not interested in being protected by police, have a highly educated workforce and even people on social support able to buy their crap.

It may be news to you, but governments don't just eat tax up and spit on you in return. They tend to do something with that money.

Re:Great

[OhPlz]

Ask Ed and Elaine Brown of New Hampshire how voluntary paying taxes is. They didn't, and were besieged by government agents.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the things you list are dependent on 'Society' or require taxation to pay for, and are all produceable in a free market exchange.

'Society' is an artificial construct, it's not a thing, it's an abstract concept. Separating it from government is therefore trivial.

Fair is easy, people pay for what they actually use, instead of coercively taking their money at gunpoint. That's not 'freeloading' - your example is so full of bullshit it's hilarious. These companies already pay for their electricity and plumbing, they wouldn't bat an eye at paying for privatized police or toll funded roads. So who's the freeloader?

Re:Great

[gstoddart]

People have natural rights. People don't give up their natural rights when they form an organization like a corporation. Whatever harm you mean to cause corporations, that harm will be felt by the people involved.

And, what 'natural right' of the people who form corporations is given up when those corporations are taxed? Yes, that's right ... NONE WHATSOEVER.

Are you claiming that corporations magically acquire more 'natural rights' than the people who made them? Because I sure as hell don't have a "right" to not be taxed.

That's a bullshit argument -- humans are taxed, corporations exist by permission of government, so why the hell wouldn't corporations be taxed by government?

Taxing corporations isn't "harm" unless you're stupid enough to believe corporations are entitled to not be taxed. And, why would that be again?

What's insane is the idea that somehow Google as a corporation is magically exempted from paying taxes in places where it has incorporated, because they feel entitled to not be taxed, and because they can play a shell game to move the money to other places.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

Well, let's look at a country without any kind of sensible government system in place. Let's take, say, Somalia. Now imagine you're doing business there. Ponder for a moment how much you'd pay to be protected from looting, to have your workforce protected from being mugged, to create and maintain an infrastructure so you have gas, water, power and transportation, ...

Then you know what's fair.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

Sorry, no. Jobs are to a company a necessary evil. No company in their sane mind creates a job for the sake of creating a job, only if said job generates more revenue than what the worker costs that job will be created.

I create jobs. I buy goods and services.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is that some tiny country with nothing to lose can give amazing tax benefits without having to deal with the burden of infrastructure that these same companies rely on for their business. They profit from the country and its population yet go to another country to pay its taxes. That makes no sense.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

If governments are just an organized scheme to get money away from people, then yes.

If governments exist to serve the citizens, then they shouldn't try to take as much as they can get. They should try to do their job as efficiently as possible so they can leave a maximum amount in the hands of the citizens they serve.

Re:Great

[Kierthos]

Mind you, corporations do seem to have much better access to tax exemptions, shelters, and oh yeah, access to our elected officials.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

But first of all you need demand. No demand, no reason to supply. No need to supply, no job creation.

Re:Great

[bickerdyke]

That held true for maybe the car companies of yore but does not help the economy if a) the relation between jobs created and revenue gets out of hands (just stick with the google example: we here have rather few engineers responsible for the ernings of one of the worlds biggest companies) and b) the jobs created aren't in the same country where the revenue is created.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

This bring up the question of how we plan to handle an economy where nearly everything is automated. When the only "jobs" left are owning companies because the entire company is automated by robots and software, then how does someone get paid in order to consume what is produced by those companies?

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

fine then they don't give up their responsibilities either - that means we should tax the collective-of-individual's profits as simple income tax on its members.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

And who pays for that inherent natural right? Because there's got to be someone who upholds that protection. Maybe in utopia where there are no bad people it ain't necessary, but down here in reality, people are selfish assholes who'd be all too happy to ignore your inherent natural right and rape your ass before killing you for the 10 bucks in your wallet.

Re:Great

[bickerdyke]

I agree with the problem that Lawrence_bird noticed: a state deciding to NOT take all of your money is not exactly giving a "tax break"

But there is another problem: You don't need countries to actually GIVE a tax break: Unfair tax advantages might be created by simple differences between tax systems that are fair and balanced within themselves.

Re:Great

[Gr8Apes]

So you have a fire department that protects your house, do you pay the full cost of the fire house and the full pay of the firemen?...for the roads you travel on?

When you go to the deli or the auto mechanic you pay the full cost of the goods you buy...

Since you do not pay for the full costs of the first 2, you will not pay for the full costs at the deli nor the auto mechanic, as both are subsidized in the same way you are for the first 2 and whole set of other services (water, sewage, etc).

Re:Great

[__aaclcg7560]

I'd love to see what would happen were withholding eliminated. Make every tax explicitly payable by the individual. No "hidden" taxation. You get your money, then you have to give a huge chunk of it to the government.

This does happen. When I worked for the community college bookstore, my monthly paychecks was issued by the county government. No federal, state, county or local taxes were withheld. I got every dollar I earned. As a college student, my tax liability was next to nothing. The full-time staff had to set aside money during the year or take out a loan to pay their taxes. Every April was a bitch-and-moan festival. Been there, done that.

Re:Great

[diamondmagic]

Automation doesn't destroy jobs, it increases the amount of goods that a single worker can produce, making everyone richer. Supply and demand in the labor market ensures that jobs are redistributed accordingly in the most efficient manner.

Re:Great

[Gr8Apes]

No. Everyone has the inherent natural right to be safe from murder/rape/robbery.

Technically, society has decided that we have those rights. There are no "natural" rights, other than survival of the fittest, per nature.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon, it's not *you* and *they*, government/society represents *you* (and a bunch of others), so it's *us* and *us*. Sorry to tell *you*

Re:Great

[blue9steel]

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

Unless you're an anarchist I don't think that's a supportable position. Even in a small government you still have to pay for things somehow, generally that means some kind of tax. At the very least you're going to have to fund a military or you're not going to be an independent state for very long.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The same could be said for corporations.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not? Roads could be toll roads. Fire protection can be a per incident cost or subscription basis, and most people would subscribe since it'd be required by your home insurance provider (if you want lower rates), and home insurance is required by your mortgage company. Why should the government own 100% of the fruits of my labor (them allowing me to keep half of it only makes me stay productive which means more revenue for them) to provide services I may or may not want? Most things the government provides (through involuntary means), can be provided by the market.

Re:Great

[diamondmagic]

True that entire markets would not be possible if there were no demand for them; but that's not to say entrepreneurs don't create jobs. They do: They own the capital and decide how to allocate it.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

I was only addressing your idea that it's OK to do unlimited harm to (people involved in) corporations because they filed some paperwork to create an organization.

Fairness of taxation depends on the amount. Obviously, a 100% tax is indistinguishable from outright theft. Anyone would be justified in evading such a tax by more-or-less any means, just as a home owner is justified in protecting his home from burglary or arson.

If you want to argue a tax is fair, you have to specify the amount you're taxing.

Re: Great

[cyber-vandal]

Because only "leftists" levy taxes.

Re:Great

[blue9steel]

Sorry, no. Jobs are to a company a necessary evil.

Yes, from a corporate point of view the optimum number of employees is zero.

Re:Great

[diamondmagic]

The most important thing for a productive economy is rule of law. Taxes (under threat of violence) are one way to prevent that; as is actual violence.

Re:Great

[__aaclcg7560]

They didn't "voluntary" pay their taxes. They refused to pay their taxes. A huge difference. After being convicted in a cour of law for not paying the taxes they owe, and refusing to surrender to authorities, they got besieged by government agents. Idiots.

Re:Great

[blue9steel]

Either way there is an exchange of value. You pay money as taxes, you get some services that you may or may not value as highly as the money you paid as taxes. As long as most of the populace feels they're getting a reasonable exchange society is stable, when they don't then pressure builds until eventually you get revolution and we start the whole thing over again. Humans are tribal, government is inevitable, all we can do is try to make it as least bad as possible.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Those companies get government benefits in the form of public rights of way, guaranteed monopolies, etc. Without all of that, you won't have said services, or you'd have a mess of infrastructure as dozens of companies string wires / pipes all over the place (possibly even affecting other companies, due to lack of regulations).

Yup. That'd be MUCH better...

Re:Great

[gstoddart]

I was only addressing your idea that it's OK to do unlimited harm to (people involved in) corporations because they filed some paperwork to create an organization.

No, that is your idea, not mine.

I said that corporations don't have natural rights, and certainly don't have the right to not be taxed.

Did I ever say "unlimited harm"? No, I didn't, because you're just making shit up.

Re:Great

[blue9steel]

So you have a fire department that protects your house, do you pay the full cost of the fire house and the full pay of the firemen?

Umm, yes? The cost is spread over all the people in the district rather than being born only be people who actually have the fires but it is fully paid.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Dave420 got pwned by apk already http://news.slashdot.org/comme.... You pwning him more's gonna upset do nothing dave.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but without police I'll come cut you off for laugh!

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[Kohath]

A group of men have the power to rape a woman when they catch her. They don't have the right. The ability to do something is not the right to do it.

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[diamondmagic]

Sorry, no. Jobs are, to a company, a calculated exchange. Everyone wants to minimize costs and maximize value produced, and often hiring people is better at that than any alternative, so they do that.

There's nothing inherently good about "job creation" though. Ideally, I should just think "Coca-Cola" and instantly it starts going down my throat. (In reality, I have to get up out of my chair and fork over a dollar bill or two. Oh the horror!) The market gets us pretty darn close, though, no one person could possibly have figured out how to manufacture things so cheaply; it's something that's emerged from a positively staggering amount of entrepreneurs acting independently on prices of inputs, combining them in all sorts of ways, and seeing what they can sell the result for.

Re:Great

[blue9steel]

We don't owe "society" an unlimited tribute for a few watts of electricity.

Who was suggesting that taxes should be unlimited? Other than some die hard communists I think you'd have a hard time finding someone that thinks taxation should be set at 100%.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. As long as there are districts, localities, zones and borders there will be local incentives. Even some cities do this to entice companies to set up shop in their borders. The problem here is that these companies are shifting entirely virtual assets into localities which don't necessarily need to provide base services. Can you afford your own militia? Then why would you put your HQ in the US? Put your HQ in a backwater and hire Blackwater. No need to pay for police you aren't using.

Of course this is tipped waaaaaaaaay over in favor of corporations. They're free to move anywhere to avoid the tax burden. As a green card holder I'm expected to pay American taxes "no matter where I'm living, here or abroad"...even if I don't drive on American roads or use American police or have kids that go to an American school or even talk to a single American ever. Does that seem fair? Also, my tax rate is higher than theirs.

It's not about fair, it's about power. Corporations are your financial engine...they ARE your economy. Without them we wouldn't have an economy. That tends to give them a lot of power.

Re:Great

[cornjones]

Ok, fine, do it as efficiently as possible. But there was around 100MM GBP shortfall in the UK budget last year. This isn't about take as much as they can get, this is about we need to bring in X to provide all the things we have decided to spend on.

Note that arguing about the validity of the things we spend on is a separate (but related) discussion.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

They're hybrids. Highly regulated private companies that makes heavy use of private property without direct compensation and have a minimum quality, and I am guaranteed to have access to these services, assuming I can afford them. Getting disconnected requires a lot of red-tape and getting reconnected is quite trivial.

My electric company has a lovely service where they forecast and average your utility costs. At the beginning of the year, they quote you a certain monthly amount based on your past usage or normal local usage, then you pay the flat rate throughout the year. This averages out the seasonal swings. If you so happen to pay extra, it gets discounted from your next year, if you so happen to pay less, they add it on to your next year. In the end, you do not pay any more or less, but it smooths out your monthly bill. This service is part of the local regulation requirements.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

If they don't have any rights at all, how does that not justify unlimited harm?

Historically, when someone has proclaimed that certain people have zero rights, it has meant those people were in for more-or-less unlimited harm.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

"But if you think you should be allowed to live here and profit from our infrastructure and then not pay for it you can get the fuck out you communist free loader."

Land/Property taxes, income taxes, existing corporate taxes, and the like cover this..

But it is nice to see the ignorance of the left is not limited to the USA...

Hey, cool, tax the hell out of them. When they bail on the UK (you), we'll be ready to take them over here. THANKS!

Re:Great

[thaylin]

That is not creating a job. That is changing the type of way the job is done. The job is still there, they are just using robots to perform that job. Removing the robot does not create a new job, just changes who does it.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

When did pro-taxers ever say there was a limit? What's the maximum amount anyone should ever have to pay?

Re:Great

[happy monday]

The government doesn't need a "natural" right, it just needs a legal right. There's no such thing as a "natural" right - who would endow it? Go and live in the jungle and you'll see what your "natural" rights are.

Re:Great

[MrHanky]

Mmm, wrong.

Re:Great

[Bouncelot]

Well put!

Re:Great

[thaylin]

I pay the portion of it used to make the food when I go to the deli. It is a line item directly related to the cost of the good.

Actually your statement is the intentionally dishonest one. My statement is to counter that SOCIETY does not provide anything.

No, society does not give me anything

It does. It provides a portion of the cost for those services. Without society providing those extra monies you probably would not have those services.

Re:Great

[ArmoredDragon]

If that company was not there the job would still be there. That is a myth created by the right.

That's very much false. Even left wing economists say it's false, so it's not just a right wing myth as you claim:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We've actually even seen what happens when economic policies are set by governments that assume that there's a lump of labor, and the results are always bad. In order for what you say to be true, economies would have to be zero-sum, and they're just not. If economies were zero-sum, they could never grow for example.

Re:Great

[thaylin]

It is not fully paid by him. His argument was that society provided him nothing. Did you even read the parent post?

Re:Great

[thaylin]

In both cases someone else ownss the fruits of your labor, either a corporation or the government. The government is typically the one that is supposed to have your best interest. A corp just cares how much of your labor it can steal and how little service it can provide.

Re:Great

[thaylin]

Did you read the parent to see what argument I was making? No, I didnt think so. The argument is great in terms of what society brings. Society gives a lot of things that would otherwise be unavailable.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

If a corporation wants to be treated exactly like a person, then it should include going to prison for the exact same reasons a normal person would. If someone dies because of a bad decision, then someone needs to get charged with homicide. Instead they just issue a recall and levy a fine.

Re:Great

[qbast]

Automation doesn't destroy jobs, it increases the amount of goods that a single worker can produce, making everyone richer..

Except for the worker who gets fired.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the company want to keep as much of their workers' produce and pay as little as possible back.

And the worker has no choice because starvation is their option with the welfare state unable or unwilling to pay a living wage for anyone unable or merely *unwilling* to work.

Without that minimum wage, the employer can hold penury and starvation over the head of any worker and demand they take the wage offered, even though the work done is higher than the wage.

To see how REAL economies work, consider this fictitious company.

The CEO leaves, never to return. How long will the company last? Forever?
The workers who create the produce leave, never to return, assuming they have no warehoused stock, how long will the company last? Until next payday?

SO WHO IS MORE IMPORTANT TO THE BUSINESS???

Sure management, and even the CEO can make the workers more productive, but they are absolutely NOT essential, yet they're paid vastly more.

Why?

BECAUSE THEY CAN. The CEO never has to work again, they have enough assets to refuse a job unless they get paid a lot. The worker cannot.

Re:Great

[Anne Thwacks]

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

We in the UK think you are a moron. The Government is the people, and companies exist on our terms. We are quite willing to let them exist, if they make a fair contribution to society. If they don't, well they have no right to incorporation here.

There is a precedent:

King Charles the first said "I am King, God made me King, and I will do what I want.

The people say "You are King cos we let you be king. We can stop you if you won't behave!

The King replied "I am King, God made me King, and I will do what I want.

So the people put an end to him.

You Americans might want to have a word with Robert Johnson on the subject or cross-roads.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

If that were the case then there would be no need for marketing... lets face it, demand is regularly created by companies.

Re:Great

[gstoddart]

If they don't have any rights at all, how does that not justify unlimited harm?

Oh, I see ... either you're actually ignorant and clueless, or you're being willfully ignorant and clueless.

Tell you what, why don't you learn the difference between natural rights and legal rights.

Corporations, by definition, DO NOT HAVE NATURAL RIGHTS.

The process of incorporation (a process granted by governments) confers upon them legal rights, but a corporation is a purely legally defined entity, and is not naturally existing. A corporation can only exist as defined and overseen by governments, they are not a natural phenomenon, and never have been

So, corporations have precisely the rights governments tell them they do. Not paying taxes isn't one of those things.

Corporations seem to think they magically have the right to decide how much taxes they will pay and on what terms.

They don't.

Re:Great

[Anne Thwacks]

accordingly in the most efficient manner.

For some really wierd definitions of efficient, perhaps. Supply and demand ensure there is a market that can be manipulated by anyone with the tools to do so (which includes taxes), and quite possibly others too.

Automation makes the owner of the machine richer. The man with no machine is stuffed. It is not just a law of economics, its the truth!

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

If that company was not there the job would still be there.

WT actual F? If the company was not there, who would pay the worker to do the job?

Companies do not create jobs, demand for goods creates jobs

So these "jobs creation programs" that governments undertake are focused on creating demand? Because I thought it was about creating incentives for companies to hire more people. Often by reducing the burden of taxation. That doesn't create any more demand for labor. It reduces the company's overhead so they can hire more people to fill the already existing demand for labor.

Starbucks didn't create jobs with it's success? There would be the same general number of baristas if the company had not created the demand that equates directly to jobs?

The introduction and success of Apple's iPod/iPhone didn't create jobs? The demand for that labor already existed? If Apple hadn't introduced those devices, the people who manufacture these devices would all still be employed building different devices instead?

It's foolishness to say companies don't create jobs.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you pay your annual border defense bill or your judiciary fee? How about your annual policing and fire service bill?

All of these things can indeed be broken out as individual private operations, but in practice many of them aren't because there's an ongoing need for people to have access to these sorts of services regardless of their ability to pay. Otherwise you'd see entire parts of cities burning down because people didn't pay their fire service bill, or riots because a neighbourhood fell behind on their private security fees. And don't expect anything better than street justice.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

I already responded to this in the "people have natural rights" post up above. Some of the natural rights of the people who organize a corporation should limit the harm you can do to them in your quest to harm the corporation they have formed.

No one has argued that corporations have the natural rights to avoid all taxes.

Re: Great

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK we have the concept of an individual being "self employed". If companies did not exist, then every job, where there is demand, would be done by a person. He or she would pay tax on their income. Corporation tax only exists because corporations exist. And it is not fair that a self employed owner of a coffee shop has to pay tax on their profits, whilst a large multinational like Starbucks pays no tax, even though the shops are located in the same street and sell the same goods.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

Because lots of people would invest in companies if buying a share meant you could go to prison for something a middle manager did wrong.

Re: Great

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are paying for all of those things, then why are you complaining about the price? The government owns the country and all infrastructure, and under the natural right of property ownership, the government therefore has the right to to charge you for using it and managing it. The charge is billed through tax.

If you think of the government as a private company, owning and managing everything in the country except the personal property of citizens, then it would indeed have the natural right to charge you whatever it wants for being allowed to use its property. And if you don't agree to the contract, then you are free to leave and find another government to pay.

Re:Great

[scottme]

Or maybe you'd just decide not to bother trying to earn a buck there.

Re:Great

[blue9steel]

What's the maximum amount anyone should ever have to pay?

That's a matter of considerable debate. We can't all agree on what we want government to do. Want a big military, well that's expensive and we have to pay for it. Want socialized medicine, that's expensive too and we have to pay for that. The problem is that in a simple majority rule system you're going to have a significant minority that aren't happy with any particular policy. Most of the time, much of the populace is going to feel like they're paying for things that they don't really support. The only good thing about representative democracy is that everything else we've tried has been worse.

Re:Great

[blue9steel]

His argument was that society provided him nothing.

Then he's an idiot. He may or may not feel he's getting full value for his dollar but to suggest that society provides nothing is just false.

Re:Great

[Forgefather]

I had a big argument in another thread about automation in McDonald's and long story short somewhere along the line you need humans to make the robots. All automation does is push the jobs further up the supply chain.

The real danger of automation is for the people who don't have the experience or education to get the more specialized jobs that automation creates, making a divide between those who are able to afford schooling for those positions and those who can't.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you. "

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

Anyone who doesn't use roads built with tax money, doesn't breathe cleaner air as a result of clean air laws, doesn't use government-backed currency for trade, and doesn't use water that comes from any government-funded project does have an argument that they may have the right to be exempt from taxation.

Re: Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you made an argument for demand creating jobs.

Re:Great

[Forgefather]

And what happens when the fire department finds out you can't afford to pay them for putting out your house fire? Do they just let your house burn and put out the fire when it spreads to the houses of people that can pay? We subsidize these things as a society because it benefits the entire society to do so. By ensuring that the fire department shows up we can insure that we don't have a Chicago style fire every few months which protects everyone from the added cost of subduing a wildfire as apposed to a house fire.

Even in your own stupid example about paying for a fire subscription you state that such payments would be required by a mortgage company. In what way is being required to pay for a service from a private company different from being required to pay for a service from a not for profit public institution other than conflict of interest? What safeguards do we have that the fire station will properly maintain its equipment? Or do you propose that we regulate these industries to ensure that conflict of interest is handled appropriately? Of course that would put a few holes in your bubble regarding a perfect libertarian fantasy.

The best societies are built on the understanding that a mix of laws, regulations, and services that are applied using data driven thought rather than blanket ideologies that have no foundation in anything other than academia.

Re: Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Who issues the currency?

When you answer that, then think about who has rights to it.

Render unto Ceaser that which is Ceasers.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Because countries refuse to stop giving the ridiculous tax benefits.

Well there you have it. Exactly what is wrong with the left. A lower tax rate is considered a "benefit" as if the government is tossing a cookie out and patting the corporate (or individual) dog on the head and saying "good boy!"

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

The far better way to view it is "companies are shifting assets and income out of our country because of the ridiculous tax penalties here."

Well, no.

What's "wrong" with the left is the same reason your post has been downmodded - the left is so certain of their correctness that they literally hate anyone who disagrees with them, and they stifle and suppress opposing thought, despite their self-congratulatory claims of "tolerance".

To wit:

Democrats sell "I Hate Tea Parties" merchandise.

Nice to see them owning their hatred.

Re:Great

[Rich0]

Last I checked all my utilities other than water are private companies. My taxes won't pay my electric, gas or phone bill. If I don't pay any of them then they get shut off.

Also I pay my water bill to my local city and it's not even part of my taxes.

Sounds great. Now what will you do when I show up at your house with a gun and steal your stuff?

Oh, that's right, local government covers that, not Federal government. It is just Federal taxes that are bad. Well, what happens when I retreat with my stolen goods across the county line? Oh, and what happens if I hop in a helicopter with the stolen TV? Are you going to have a locally funded air force, or are you going to instead have a locally-funded antiaircraft battery with local taxes for anybody flying into your township air defense identification zone?

Better still, why don't we privatize all that stuff? The next airliner that flies over my quarter acre plot can be transferred to my ATC service and pay the $10k transit fee for the 50ms journey over my yard.

None of these public services live in a vacuum. Your local electric utility only functions because people can't charge them to run wires over their yard, and because the local police stop people from cutting down the poles and wires to sell them on the black market. The local police function because they only have to deal with idiots with guns and not armies with howitzers. The federal government functions only because due to public education (or what passes for it) the vast majority of the population is employed and not rioting over food all day long.

In the end we're all stuck with each other, so trying to save $5 on infrastructure that makes the world a far better place to live in is a bad move.

Re:Great

[Zephyn]

And what happens when the fire department finds out you can't afford to pay them for putting out your house fire? Do they just let your house burn and put out the fire when it spreads to the houses of people that can pay?

Exactamundo

Re:Great

[Cederic]

It's difficult though: What's the country of origin?

If Starbucks sell me a £2 coffee, is the country of origin:
- the UK, because I drank the coffee here
- the US, because I went into Starbucks because I recognise the brand and it's licenced from the US
- Ireland, because the person serving my coffee needs HR, Finance, legal and other corporate support and all of those staff are based in Ireland
- Luxembourg, because Starbucks in the UK bought the coffee beans from Starbucks in Luxembourg
- Jamaica, because Starbucks in Luxembourg bought the beans from there

Frankly after paying for premises, staff costs, licensing the brand, buying the beans and paying corporate overheads we're lucky Starbucks in the UK even stays in business. Where the hell is the profit you think they're shifting overseas, legally or otherwise?

Transfer pricing is horrendously abused, but it's actually very difficult writing tax laws that properly acknowledge global business operations and interdependencies but prevent abuse of the system. I'm actually intrigued to find out how the UK Treasury think they can achieve that.

Re:Great

[Obfuscant]

Ponder for a moment how much you'd pay to be protected from looting, to have your workforce protected from being mugged, to create and maintain an infrastructure so you have gas, water, power and transportation, ...

Except that those employees ALSO pay taxes to create and maintain the same infrastructure so they get gas, water, power, and transportation. In fact, because those employees are employed and earning income they pay MORE than people who are unemployed.

So the government is double dipping here. Tax the company who creates the jobs that allow the people to pay more in taxes, and tax the people who exchange their time and labor for money.

The real issue is not whether there should be corporate taxes, but whether a corporate tax rate of 25% is reasonable when a company earns that money someplace else. Great Britain has no business taxing multinationals for money earned abroad, and even less business threatening them with an exorbitant penalty when they don't free pay up on those external profits.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

And if you raise another 100MM, what keeps them from spending another 200MM on really great government stuff? A shortfall is just a number. Spend less and then the tax levels will be adequate. Spend a lot less and all of a sudden all these tax payers are being super generous -- paying more than is needed.

Re:Great

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

And yes, governments do have the right to tax you.

They have the authority, granted by law, but not the right. Only individual people have rights.

Re:Great

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Instead, government serves the corporations.

Re:Great

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Corporations are not people. Corporations are property. The government has the authority to tax property.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

But without the company to pay the salary it wouldn't be much of a job.

Re:Great

[CrimsonAvenger]

Automation makes the owner of the machine richer. The man with no machine is stuffed. It is not just a law of economics, its the truth!

Which no doubt explains why we're all generally poorer now than in the 19th century - all that automation of farms (tractors, combines, that sort of thing) left most everyone unemployed (remember, once upon a time, 80% of the workforce was farm labour), except for the 2% of farmers who managed to scrape together the funds to buy those neat new farm-toys....

Alas for all of us that farming was automated! If only we lived in the good old days of horse/mule drawn plows (ploughs for you Brits in the audience) and harvesting by hand!!

As for me, I'll take the increased wealth and leisure that resulted from all that automation - 40 hour work weeks instead of 60 hour work weeks, enough wealth that even the middle class can afford an occasional trans-Atlantic vacation, that sort of thing....

Re:Great

[davydagger]

Lets be fair, using another dissimilar country for comparison is not a fair comparison

Lets be frank and you have no real intrest in fair comparisons.

Somolia's situation is complicated, and as the country has no real "government" as we know it, does not mean its "ungovernen", the capital is a warzone, but the rest of the country is a somewhat peaceful being ruled under tribal leaders. This is not Anarchism, or even capitalism, but simply old school tribalism, something much better suited to the locals than imposing a western style state.

We can also look at neighboring states, not doing much better *with* government.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, you create the demand by making something better and advertising it.

.

.

.

BINGO

Re:Great

[Kohath]

A great argument for small government. Why should individuals pay for and support big government when it serves them so poorly?

Re:Great

[Triklyn]

where do these rights you speak of come from? by what right do you speak freely? and what is the guarantor?

Re:Great

[Kohath]

Government's authority to tax property is limited by the individual natural rights of the property owners. It is not unlimited.

Re:Great

[Triklyn]

what was the interest rate on those loans?

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

How would you suggest funding the rule of law?

Re:Great

[praxis]

I agree with you that writing fair and sensible tax regulation is difficult, but I feel like your example, being specifically contrived to make your point, weakens your argument. Your purchase of coffee from is one transaction. Starbucks UK buying beans from Starbucks Luxembourg is a different transaction. Starbucks Luxembourg buying beans from Jamaica is a different transaction. Starbucks Ireland providing HR services to Starbucks UK is a different transaction. One could write regulation on a per-transaction basis. By pointing out that a simple cup of coffee purchase can be broken down to a lot of supporting transactions, while true, you are adding complexity which hides the really insidious complexity of webs of corporate entity ownership.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

That still requires someone with the ability to pay for whatever you plan to offer to create that job.

YOU can't create jack. Your customer will enable you to. No customer, no job creation.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

They are natural and inalienable. They exist as a part of each individual's humanity. First and foremost, you guarantee them yourself by exercising your self-defense rights.

Re:Great

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

I'll support small government if and only if it has the authority and political will to dissolve corporations for malfeasance. A small government that doesn't crack down on corporations is just privatizing tyranny.

Re:Great

[Kohath]

Every government of every size has this authority. It's called the criminal justice system.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The old argument that goes like this:

"First they came for the uneducated. But I'm educated, so I was quiet".
"Then they came for the educated, but ones that worked in a different profession. But I wasn't one of them, so I was quiet".
"Then they came for me".

Automation has destroyed a massive amount of jobs that required quite a bit of education. For example, accounting mathematics before computerization were extremely complex job that required very good understanding of complex mathematical structures and their management.

And today, automation largely builds itself. By far the greatest automaton that replaced more people than any other automaton, computers are for example mostly built by robots controlled by other computers.

And if you want to come even closer to home of modern slashdot user, consider how many assembler coders are needed nowadays. Why so few? Because computer languages became high level, AUTOMATING generation of actual assembler code.

How long do you think it will take until much of the coding is finally automated and most of the people doing it are out of job?

Re:Great

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

The only natural right people have is the right to a life that's solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. At least, that's what Thomas Hobbes thought, but he had survived a nasty civil war. Funny thing about rights: they don't seem to exist until enough people agree that they do, and choose to honor them. That suggests they're an artifact of consensus reality, rather than physical reality.

Otherwise, an atheist living in Saudi Arabia could invoke the right to freedom of religion and not get beheaded for not worshiping the demon Allah. Better to be an atheist living in the US, where you're still free to reject the demon Yahweh and his weakling of an only begotten son.

Re:Great

[__aaclcg7560]

The full-time staffers didn't bitch about the interest rates on their bank loans. Back in the early 1990's, it was probably three percent.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that the rule of law comes from those with power.

Re:Great

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Notice what I said about political will? The US government hasn't had the balls to enforce existing antitrust statutes since they went after Microsoft in the late 1990s. IMHO, any corporation that's "too big to fail" should be an antitrust target. Also, Comcast, because fuck those clowns. :)

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

People have natural rights.

Nature has no notion of "rights". A "right" is an entirely artificial construct that society defines by consensus.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

Ok, let's use a fictitious country since Somalia might have a negative connotation. In this country you don't get anything from the government, you need to pay for everything yourself. In return, no taxes are being paid. EVERYTHING is privately owned and run for-profit because, well, you have to run it for-profit because there is no other way to do it sensibly when there ain't nobody going to back you.

What remains is that you need to hire security (and I mean 24/7 security, since nobody would give a shit about anyone breaking into your place), and pay them rather well because they need to have an incentive to have that job still tomorrow instead of simply using their position to sell off your belongings themselves. You should also take care that you have some firefighters and other technical emergency services on your payroll, at least if there are any assets that you don't want damaged in case of an emergency.

Depending on what kind of company you have, you will also have to find someone to pipe some water your way, along with someone to transport off your sewage. And unless you want to keep it or treat it yourself, find a treatment plant to enter a contract with you. Put aside a bit of money every year to pay for the necessary inspection and maintenance of the pipes. Or, of course, pay someone to do it for you. Since you will probably not find anyone else willing to share a pipe with you unless you pay him handsomely to use his pipe (after all you'd have to rent it from him, and like I said before, everything in our fictitious state is for-profit, and so is access to this pipe), you will want your own pipe, so expect to pay a bit more than you'd do in one of these "socialist" countries where the sewage is bundled. How else do you think the treatment plant could find out how much to charge you if they can't measure your amount of poop?

Same goes of course with your waste. Find someone to dump it for you or drown in it.

You will probably also have to do with a relatively lower qualified work force. Since only people who come from a well off background can afford education, the pool of educated people is smaller. Unless you just need menial workers, this may mean that you have to pay more due to supply and demand. Of course, if you only need monkeys you'll get by paying peanuts since that pool would certainly grow correspondingly. In general, the less training you need to give your work force the better, since fluctuation can be serious. Especially if work related injuries can be an issue and if your workers cannot afford medical care they might stay deformed. Whether this is a crippling problem for you too or just for them depends of course on the kind of work you offer. Though as experience has taught us, workers in jobs where injury is likely are also easy to replace because such jobs usually need no lengthy training, so I think you should be ok without having to implement any worker safety precautions. It's not like there's a government that would pester you with such, if you come up with something like that it would only be in your interest, and as long as workers are easy to replace (remember monkeys and peanuts from above), there is no pressing urge for this.

And so on. It would be interesting to find out whether it would be cheaper or more expensive to produce in such a country. One thing is certain, though, I would not want to LIVE in such a country.

Re:Great

[SillyHamster]

Companies do not create jobs, demand for goods creates jobs, companies fulfill that role of producing. If that company was not there the job would still be there. That is a myth created by the right.

Where's my supercomputer for $1?

Who wouldn't want it? Demand is nigh infinite! Why hasn't it popped into existence from all that pent up demand?

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

As soon as a company actually creates a job, we can talk. But I guess I can try to explain that to the Supply Side Jesuses of the world 'til I get old.

The cynic in me would just say that if corporations are treated like people, why not tax them like people. But even without cynicism I cannot follow your "double dipping" theory. Yes, I pay taxes too. I pay my share of the sewage pipes, the electrical lines, the roads. Why shouldn't a company pay their share, too?

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

Of course. But funding for it generally comes from those without power.

Re:Great

[puzzled_decoy]

This is completely unrelated to what he said. He never stated that tax penalties are bad, or should be abolished, or the government shouldn't impose them. His statement was that it is more accurate to say "penalties" rather than "benefits", as you can't be given a "benefit" from something you own, and if someone takes something you own (legitimately, to cover costs), that would be more of a "penalty".

And then you respond by saying that the government has the right to impose those penalties.

.....

Person: "That dog is very unique! I almost never see dogs like that."
Him: "I think you mean 'uncommon'. Things can't be 'very' unique."
You: "But that dog is so rare. Just because there are other dogs, doesn't mean that dog isn't rare."

...You didn't disagree with him, you just stated something completely different.

Re:Great

[SillyHamster]

And you have no inherent natural right to electricity, plumbing, roads, safety from murder/rape/robbery, etc. Society gives that to you in EXCHANGE for your taxes.

Wait, so government grants you the right to not be murdered/raped/robbed?

You do realize that means the government can take it away for any arbitrary reason, right? Which means you have no right to life - you are merely a government serf, who continues to live at the whim of government.

Re:Great

[cornjones]

You are having two different discussions. One is that you want to minimize what the gov't offers to curb that bill. THere is a vast area to explore there but it is not the point of this discussion.

The people, as a block, have determined that this is the set of services the gov't is going to offer. they need to pay for it through tax policy. Running a deficit, while sometimes necessary, makes as much economic sense as credit card spending.

Besides, over the last few years, there has been a significant amount of 'austerity' cuts to gov't spending in the UK. For the most part, the economic markers seem to show that it is working better for the UK than the rest of the EU. That said, there is still a shortfall. You need to adjust both dials, cutting spending and raising revenue.

All this is about is attempting to address the shady loopholes where corporate accountants have figured out how to avoid national taxes, by the letter but against the spirit of the law.

Re:Great

[Triklyn]

sounds like a payday loan though. this kind of loan seems too small for a bank loan.

Re:Great

[SillyHamster]

where do these rights you speak of come from? by what right do you speak freely? and what is the guarantor?

A right is the moral right to fight for it.

If someone wants to kill you, you are in the right to protect your life. A right to life. (Assuming of course you aren't threatening him in a way that forces him to kill you to protect his life)

Why is it right? That speaks to a sense of right or wrong and morality. Where does that come from? "Natural Rights" comes from a Christian framework, which claims there's a God given order man lives under.

Coming from an atheistic, purely secular framework, there is no basis for "Natural Rights". Everything just boils down to might and power, and any concept of fairness or justice is a mere cover for survival of the fittest.

Re:Great

[Dr_Barnowl]

Yes, you need robot makers.

But the whole point of automation is to reduce costs or increase productivity or quality.

If you robotize McDonalds, you're not going to increase the number of people who eat there ; that's pretty much determined by the size of the restaurant and the capacity of the kitchen. Quality is pretty much set by the quality of the ingredients, and is not the reason people eat in McDonalds.

The kitchen labour is flexible - McDonalds go to great pains to have people on contracts that mean they can have them work as little or as much as they need. So the thing they are making flex is labour, not production. Add robots, and you have less human labour. If you don't, there is no economic reason to do so - you don't need more production (or they would be having problems recruiting, not trying to keep their workforce lean).

If robots cost more to make and maintain than your human labour, you don't use them. Therefore robots mean fewer dollars in the pockets of human labour. It creates SOME jobs higher up the supply chain, sure, but not the kind of jobs that McDonalds kitchen labour can do - these guys are by and large, on the lower half of the bell curve for ability, as you point out. But if you need to spend more dollars on robots and engineers to handle them, you're doing it wrong. Therefore more money departs from the labour end of the economy (the customers of McDonalds) and into the pockets of the owners (the customers of 5 star restaurants).

Extend this to every low-skill employer and you have a vast underclass of unemployed people who i) need supporting ii) can no longer afford to buy goods and services that they previously would have afforded.

Lower demand means less economic activity which means more push to increase productivity and decrease labour.

Before long, robots are making the robots. The only guy with a job in robotics is the guy who maintains the robot maintaining robot. Sooner or later they realise that if they make another robot maintaining robot, they can make him redundant too.

At this point you can go one of two ways :

i) The 0.1% own all the robots and don't see why they should share their wealth. The remaining human population compete for an increasingly small pool of non-automatable jobs, the unemployed are herded into basic subsistence camps (by robot "peacekeepers").
ii) Everyone realises that the robots are made of materials from the Earth, and powered by energy from the Sun, that the Earth should be owned by all of us equally and that we should be striving for universal human happiness, and that if we cooperate we can all have a living standard that exceeds the definition of "comfortable" by some large margin, since all these robots made everything so gosh-darned productive

Re:Great

[__aaclcg7560]

A $10,000+ loan for paying taxes is too small for a bank? I recently got a $2,500 @ 8.99% loan from my credit union to pay the rent as my new job paid semi-monthly (every 15 days) and it took two months to resync my finances.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Define "jobs are redistributed accordingly in the most efficient manner." I think you'll need to start with defining who it is efficient for.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Go kill yourself, you worthless sack of shit.

Re:Great

[JesseMcDonald]

We then expect everyone to pay their fair share into said pot given that they are sharing said resources.

The problem with that line is that you're not giving anyone a choice—you choose to make the service available to everyone, and then turn around and use said availability as circular justification for taking the money. It's not reasonable to charge someone for a service when there was never any mutual agreement on the terms, even if they clearly benefited from it. If you want to recover your costs, negotiate first, then provide the service.

Re:Great

[davydagger]

Ok, let's use a fictitious country since Somalia might have a negative connotation

you don't say, its also bad because its not directly comparable. You can compare it to its neighboring states that do have a government, or somolia when it used to have a western style government it wasn't any better.

What remains is that you need to hire security (and I mean 24/7 security, since nobody would give a shit about anyone breaking into your place)

no, not really. Most of the damn security police, and military(but not all), is for complete show, and most people don't randomly break into other people's houses. The need for security is soley invented by the state to soley to support the security industries they've created soley to keep the populace in check, not from eachother, but from ever-re-thinking capitalism. Speaking of which, On the rest, I tend to agree with you, I don't like capitalism either. That said, the state is a function of capitalist, hence the need to protect 'private property'. While I do agree with public spaces, and public services, the state is a capitalist machination and exists for no other reason than to further it.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I find this comment particularly insulting. As someone that has created something new that caused jobs that didn't exist before it is unsettling to think that there are people like you that think it "just happens." There is demand for certain things that won't go away. Things like food, basic housing, etc. Beyond that the vast majority of goods didn't have market demand before they existed. You can say the jobs are not created by a company and that's fine. They are NEW jobs and wouldn't have existed without the vision and hard work behind them.

I know nothing I say will help you understand because you already understand everything. Apparently many other people agree with you. Try starting a new company or even just working for a really small company (10 people or so) and see if you still feel the same way.

Re:Great

[JesseMcDonald]

People don't give up their natural rights when they form a corporation, but that does not mean that the corporation has all those same rights.

The corporation per se is an artificial construct and as such has no natural rights (or for that matter, ability to exercise them). But people acting in the name of the corporation retain all the same rights which they have when acting for themselves. What they can each do individually, they can also do collectively. They don't lose rights just because they happen to be coordinated.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

oh bullshit.
1) almost every country has an income tax exemption.

2) Corporations are a collection of people. The profit is taxed twice--first as corporate profit and then when the remains are distributed, as personal profit.

3) Taxes are paying for all sorts of bullshit that remain when police, fire and teachers get cut, but the leftists never mention that.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the more fundamental issue with the GP's post, which can be summed up as:

WTF is an "inherent natural right", and who are you to say whether governments have one or not?

Governments have "a right" (in so far as the word has any meaning at all, which isn't very far) to do whatever the people, collectively, allow them to do. It really is as simple as that.

Re: Great

[DrLang21]

With delicious oligarchy.

Re: Great

[DrLang21]

How exactly is tribalism any different than the ultimate outcome of libertarianism?

Re: Great

[DrLang21]

So you would prefer to be robbed at gun point by a corporation instead of by a government? If that's true it is OK, I am just verifying your preferences.

Re: Great

[DrLang21]

So if I can't afford to buy ammo, do I lack these rights?

Re: Great

[davydagger]

tribalism is a long standing network of families which has existed for a very long time, which is highly based on tradition, and bloodlines.

while I agree that after a while ancapitsan might devolve into such, it will initially differ as that property arrangements will be based on the invidual's actions instead of bloodlines.

Also capitalists make the distinction of libertarians supporting a government to enforce property laws, and ancaps do not. Socialists do not make the distinction between libertarian socialist and Anarchist, the former being invented as a synonym for when the latter became too hot to handle, and needed to convey the message without getting lost in terminology wars.

As far as libertarian capitalism, with a strong government to enforce property rights, you'll see a continuation of capitalism as it exists, without devolving into tribalism.(albiet with a fairly large police and military to serve the ever growing need to protect property rights)

As for proggresivism and the rest of the third position, its putting a bullet on a gunshot wound. Trying to make an ever expanding system of buerocracy to fix the mistakes caused by capitalism will only serve the to expand buerocracy, and with it. You'll be asking capitalists to solve problems created by capitalism.

Hence the phrase, "the expanding buerocracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding buerocracy".

Re: Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Its in your pocket. Your cellphone of today was a super computer in the 60s and is most likely on a zero down contract.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a natural right to take what I can get. You have a natural right to keep what you can keep. If you don't want the gov taking your stuff, shoot the guy who comes to take it. As long as you can defend it, it's yours, and when I show up and shoot you, it's mine for as long as I can keep it. This is what your "nautral rights" means in reality and so I hope you can comprehend how dumb someone sounds when they take your stance. You're promoting anarchy without even typing the word!

Re:Great

[Obfuscant]

Companies do not create jobs, demand for goods creates jobs,

Demand creates opportunities for companies to profit, who then create the jobs while making the product in demand. It is trivial to have demand without jobs. Ten million people could line up for a product tomorrow, and if the company that makes that product decides that the increased prices and profits from high demand were better than increased sales of lower priced products then there will be no new jobs. E.g., the demand for Apple Dev tickets is outrageous, yet this doesn't create more jobs. Or more Jobs.

And you really should recognize that companies often create both the demand and the jobs. Who really needs a Flip Jack or Shamwow or Ronco Pocket Fisherman? Those companies created the demand through advertising, and the jobs for the people that made those products.

If that company was not there the job would still be there.

So you're saying that if all the companies magically went away tomorrow that all the jobs would still be there? Funny, we've seen lots of companies go bankrupt and the jobs went away with them. Who pays the salaries for the people who hold the jobs when there is no company? A job with no pay and noplace to perform it is hardly a job worth having, is it?

That is a myth created by the right.

That the left wants to call the truth a "myth" speaks volumes about the quality of the argument from the left. Perhaps more economic "truth" from the left, such as counting the people who have simply given up looking for work as no longer unemployed, would help the economy even more, huh? Oh, wait, that's right. The demand for jobs has, all by itself, created those jobs, since it is demand by itself that creates jobs. That's the left's version of the job market. Works great, huh? Try telling an unemployed guy that he's got a job because he demands one ...

Re:Great

[Obfuscant]

As soon as a company actually creates a job, we can talk.

Apparently not, since all you want to do is insult.

The cynic in me would just say that if corporations are treated like people, why not tax them like people.

The people who make up those corporations, which is the basis for allowing the people who make up corporations to continue to have rights, already pay taxes.

Yes, I pay taxes too. I pay my share of the sewage pipes, the electrical lines, the roads. Why shouldn't a company pay their share, too?

The people who make up the corporation already pay the same taxes you do for sewage pipes, etc. Why should there be a second charge for the same thing? If you work, then both you and your employer are paying for the sewage pipes, etc.

It seems odd that in the same venue where Comcast is routinely thrashed for trying to charge both the Comcast customer and the streaming data provider for data packets, that you'd try to argue that it's ok for the government to charge both the users of sewage pipes and corporations who employ the users for the same sewage pipes.

If I'm a taxpayer and I've paid for my part of the infrastructure through those taxes, why should it matter if I put a load into the pipes at my house or where I work? Why should my employer be charged for something I've already paid for? Or in the other view, why should the government charge me for something the government is also charging my employer for?

Re: Great

[Anonymous Coward]

You would have been better served in your life if you would have taken that "free" education that you were offered as a child and used it. No one cares about retards nor those who type like one.

Re:Great

[Obfuscant]

But first of all you need demand.

Yes, I think I said that the demand is often why companies are created -- to take advantage of the profit from demand. But I also pointed out that simply having demand does not create jobs, it takes a company to create those jobs before they can actually exist.

I'm an investor/entrepreneur. Today, I see a demand for a certain product. Tomorrow I create a company to fill that demand. Today, there are no jobs created by that demand. Tomorrow I have a company that hires people. Those jobs did not exist today. They do tomorrow. Same demand, different job count.

Then the day after tomorrow my money runs out and I file for bankruptcy. The company goes away. The jobs go away. The demand hasn't changed. Same demand, different job count.

A different investor has a bucket of money. He predicts a demand for some neat new thing. He creates a company, and the jobs that go with it, to develop that neat thing. There is no actual demand, only an idea. Who do you imagine was lining up for a Flip Jack before Orgreenic developed and marketed it? Nobody. But the jobs that were created in devel and marketing still existed. No demand and yet there were jobs. All it took was someone with money thinking he'd be able to create demand after the jobs were created to make the product.

I'm still waiting to hear just who pays the people to do a job if the company that hires them doesn't exist. If you look at everything already said, you might notice that "demand" was not the common element in differentiating between "jobs" and "no jobs", it was the company that hired the folks and created the jobs.

No need to supply, no job creation.

And no desire to meet the demand, no job creation. It is the desire to meet the demand that the corporations provide, and in doing so the corporations create the jobs. Unless your definition of "jobs" is actually "a reason or desire to work" and not "a place to work and a paycheck for doing so". If that's the problem, then you need a better dictionary. "A reason or desire to work" is a pretty poor definition of "job", and a pretty poor indicator of the health of an economy. That kind of definition actually means an economy with a 50% unemployment rate isn't really in bad shape at all just as long as those 50% want to work.

The idea that demand creates jobs would mean that there should be zero unemployment. Every job seeker is a demand; the jobs are created by the demand, so every seeker should thus have a job. No, "putting in resumes" isn't a job.

Re:Great

[Obfuscant]

The job is still there, they are just using robots to perform that job.

Yes, the issue really is the useless definition of "job" that is being used here.

No, the job does not exist, but the task does. A "job" means that someone is being employed, paid for his labor. A "task" is something that an employee or someone else has to do as part of his "job".

The economy is not measured by "tasks", it is measured by the number of people who have and do not have employment and are or are not getting paychecks. Putting someone in your kind of "job" but not paying them anything does not help the economy, yet the "job" exists. Well, yes, it does help the economy -- it helps the plantation owners who get the benefit of having the slaves, but the slaves don't make out too well.

A company that eliminates half its labor force truly has halved the number of jobs it provides even if all the same tasks are now being done by half the number of people. Try offering someone who has no job one of your "jobs" that pays nothing and see if he thinks you're really offering him a job. (Your robot that you say has a job isn't getting paid, so "pay" is irrelevant to "job".)

Of course, this also demonstrates that it is no demand that creates those "jobs", because those "jobs" do not exist (there are no tasks to be performed) for a company that doesn't exist. If the auto manufacturer closes its doors, the tasks of building the cars they used to build no longer exist. The robots don't have anything to do anymore. Even using the useless "jobs" definition it is still companies that create the jobs.

Re: Great

[davydagger]

the irony is biting. have fun calling the kettle black, pot.

Re:Great

[diamondmagic]

Said worker didn't have any guarantee of employment, did they? No?

No one is stopping them from getting another job, right?

But they are seeing the benefits of increased marginal productivity of the workforce, in the form of lower prices. For the working class, you think that would be a good thing.

Your alternatives are (1) require people to hire employees (um, that's called slavery); or (2) prohibit companies from buying capital goods. Which is, like, 100% of the reason we have modern technology. But hey, enjoy your horse and buggy!

Re:Great

[diamondmagic]

Very carefully, taking as little as possible.

If necessary at all: Also note that the US had no income tax until 1913.

Re:Great

[cheesybagel]

You need to read more about the end of the Roman Empire. And Vikings. Namely Great Britain during Canute.

Re: Great

[SillyHamster]

Not $1. Not the sort of supercomputer I was asking for.

Things don't come into existence just because someone wants them, or there wouldn't even be a concept of world hunger or poverty.

Re:Great

[Obfuscant]

That still requires someone with the ability to pay for whatever you plan to offer to create that job.

The employee is paid by the employer. I.e., the "company".

No customer, no job creation.

So there were people buying Flip Jacks before they existed? There were no customers for Flip Jacks before the company that designed them paid people to design and produce some that they could then market (another job, marketing them) and then eventually sell.

And had there been people waiting to buy Flip Jacks but Orgreenic decided not to design and market and sell them, there would be no jobs designing, marketing, making, or selling them.

Jobs without demand. Demand without jobs. Neither could be true if you were right. If you were right, then all it would take to have jobs is a demand for jobs. That is so obviously not the way the world works that it is hard to imagine why you keep saying it.

The fact is, most companies start up with zero customers. It really is hard to buy something from a company that doesn't exist. The next time you manage to do it, let us know. I suppose that once in a blue moon someone finds a guy on the street and says "I am giving you $10,000 to create a company to build me a widget", but it is uncommon enough to be statistically and economically irrelevant. I know I'd never buy widgets that way -- I'd buy them from an established company that has already created the jobs necessary to make and sell widgets. My demand comes long after the jobs exist, which makes it very very hard to claim that my demand created those jobs.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like Walmart in the USA.

The company that gets really low tax rates only to have their stores on average cost over 1 million dollars per year per store in government aid to their employees to make up for the lack of wages.

Also, good luck on that double dip thing, it is full of holes as it wasn't taxed twice to the store up once to the store and once to the employee. If you wanted to go that route, the cash was taxed at least 3 times between when the company earned it, when it was paid to you, and when you spent it on other stuff and they made money off it. Then you could expand that further when they spent it and so on.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that not what we're really arguing here? He is paying for it. He is paying the price set by the government. If that price is too low, as you are alluding to, then that's the gov's problem, not his. I do not go to Walmart and demand they correct the mislabeled $99.99 60" flatscreen. I give them the $100 they're asking and I go the fuck home. It's Walmart's problem that it was supposed to be $999.99, not mine!

I don't believe society doesn't provide me with anything. I'm (mostly) liberal so I'm down for some taxes but I look at it like him. Take food stamps, welfare, unemployment, and all the other social services available. I know plenty proud rednecks who will refuse to take those benefits as needed because they don't want help from the gov or don't wanna look like one of them dirty "niggers". They're looking at it wrong though. Those items are insurance against the unfortunate. When I have something unfortunate happen I make a claim same as if I wrecked my car. You pay into the system whether you want to or not for years and years, so when I get laid off, you bet your ass I'm gonna go get my unemployment check! You better believe I'll sign up for food stamps and whatever-Care. I've only needed to recoup my insurance payments twice since I turned 18 and at those times I was ecstatic they were available.

Another case I worked in real life: I believe we had no reason whatsoever to be in Iraq. It was oil/gas/minerals just like everyone was screaming at the time. I did, however, spend 1.5 years there as a contractor. Why? It's because I'm a hypocrite right? NOPE! How else was I gonna recoup all of that billion a month everyone said we were spending? I did my time there, even though I hated that we had to be there and came home with 250k cash in hand (well, account lol). I'm not sure if that has exceeded the total tax burden I've been saddled with but it's better than how much you made back!

All you two are arguing is whether he paid for a service from the gov or the gov took his money for a service. It's an argument that has no resolution because it's the same damned argument. Money exchanged hands so services did as well. The technicalities of whether that was voluntary or not is a different discussion. In our current system, you wanna reap the benefits or society, you have to pay the cover charge to get in the door. Sorry you hate that.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, dude. You have had to post "I'm not arguing, L2REED" so many times, I expect you need to L2RITE. Obviously you're saying something retarded you apparently don't realize is retarded. I'm not going to look it up though. The way /. auto hides comments and the way the threading structure is setup just confuses the hell out of everyone here and it is easy to get turned around.

I will however point out the pseudo-hypocrisy in your sig. You type like an asshole (that IS an ad hom). You stand right there with your toes right at the edge of ad hom alluding and insinuating generalities which are totally douchey but not technically an ad hom because you don't specifically call that one person a name. I find, generally speaking, those that have to communicate little adages, like in your sig, are the ones most guilty of abusing them. Everyone here is telling you that you're wrong but no, it is US who are the illiterate morons. Yeah, fuck off.

Re:Great

[FirephoxRising]

Except that the 40 week is becoming the 60-70 hour week for both mum and dad if you want to keep your jobs, with poor job security and higher costs. We're still riding the tail of the baby-boom economic benefits, but it's shrinking rapidly. I earn much more in dollar terms than my dad did, but all things considered I'm worse off than he was. My wife and I both have to work to pay off an average house and all other costs are high and rising rapidly. Wages are stagnant, or growing more slowly than inflation. Oh and we have our 80K of combined student debt that we're paying off too. The middle class is being systematically dismantled for the benefit of the 1%.

Re:Great

[Roodvlees]

1. Yes that's the problem, they should not. In my opinion. Currently most governments seem to follow your opinion rather than mine.

2. No, companies are only taxed after they pay their wages and pay for their other costs. Also the remainder is most definitely not 'distributed', instead it's grabbed by the companies top, proportional to how much power they have in the company. Only a very small number of people benefit from high company profits.

3. The 'bullshit' is what we as a community want because we want our community to be well-organized. There are always things you personally don't like, that's life. Most 'leftists' would spend no or much less money on military. If anyone could block the government from spending any money on the things they don't like there would be no military spending either, is that what you want? Or do you just want to be a dictator so you always get your way?

Re:Great

[Des Herriott]

Yeah, fair comment. It occurred to me after I wrote that that I could have better stated it that individuals have a duty to pay their taxes.

Re:Great

[Xest]

Exactly right. Most people in the UK voted for whoever they voted for in acceptance that government would tax corporations in the 20% - 25% range. Thus the government has every right to take this money from corporations in tax. The GP was off his rocker to suggest governments have no right, yes they do, that's the whole fucking point of a democracy - to create legitimate representatives of the people.

Re:Great

[xelah]

It doesn't have to be done that way, an alternative is to tax corporate profits entirely as personal income when they become dividends, and not tax them at the corporate level at all. Then it's much less ambiguous which country and rate applies.

Suppose a UK company has £30k it wants to pay to you and you're already in the standard tax bracket. The total tax paid can be:

• As an employee: 13.8%, then 12% + 20% = £12415
• As a lender or pensioner: 20% = £6000
• As a shareholder (very small company, from profits, no avoidance): 20% then 10% = £8400
• As a shareholder (big company, from profits, no avoidance): 21% then 10% = £8670
• As a shareholder (big company, corporation tax completely avoided): 10% = £3000

See how it's employees who get screwed the most? And how much variation there can be between companies?

Instead of trying to make an impossible system work, I think it'd be better to charge about 30% on all (middle level) incomes (except maybe pensions) and scrap all the other taxes, including the corporate ones.

It's where we'll end up anyway if countries continue to compete on corporate tax rate.

Re:Great

[xelah]

Damn, I'm slightly out with the first number. It should be £12074. To spend 30k on an employee you make the official salary be £26362, you pay as the employer 13.8% (£3638) on employers' national insurance contributions, then the employee pays 12% employee's national insurance and 20% income tax (£8436) on that.

What's ridiculous is that the amount in your contract (26,362) isn't equal to any of the amounts of money involved. It's not what it costs the employer to pay you (30k), it's not what you receive.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The government is applying the 25% tax only to revenues from UK operations, not to total corporate revenues.

Re:Great

[Neil Boekend]

Please grow up and look into the stuff governments do.
You want to have a fire department don't you? You want road maintenance don't you?
Guess what, these sort of things ain't free. The government pays for them. For that they need money, in the form of taxes.

Re:Great

[Neil Boekend]

In many states of the US that is true: after due process you can be sentenced to death.
In the parts of the world where death sentences are not possible they are only prevented by laws. Laws can be rewritten.
Now that doesn't mean that you really risk losing that safety. Due process means that, bar mistakes, you have done something that causes society to feel you shouldn't enjoy that right.
In the other case: laws aren't easily changed. Especially not such high profile laws as death sentences. No one will seriously propose an amendment to the law that prevents murder "Except for when the victim is SillyHamster" and if they do they'll be laughed at. And even if that would, for some weird reason, not happen the law would be against the constitution, as all constitutions have lines against such laws. Thus the law would not be legal.
Now constitutions can be changed as well, but that means that a lot of people have to agree with that change. All in all there are systems in place to prevent such a law.

Re: Great

[fferreres]

Fair is determined by the benefit to the Citizens. Why should any corporation be allowed or favored to keep one penny more than needed to benefit a parent company that has no loyalty, alliance or duty in making that country wealthy, safe and happy except to the extent needed by marketing? Additionally, workers generally consume most if not all their wages, and still have to pay income tax for the full "gross income". If corporations are people, why not treat work as a corporation, and we can all deduct food, entertainment, education and just anything not spent? Today, corporations have citizen rights but behave as foreign enemies, and pay a negligible amount only once. To be called an american corporation, they should ship ALL income here, and pay in full income tax. After all, USA created Google through favoring laws, education, infra, initial mass scale. Otherwise, it should be considered an alien to be replaced by a more american company. After all, the UK or USA largest bargaining power is Purchasing Power. A monopsony of sort worth 20% of the world demand if not more. And instead of leveraging that we highly tax health, housing, education and everything that makes work more expensive, and makes corporation decide the US is for dumping stuff, not making it.

Re:Great

[Triklyn]

yeah, no. if these rights exist, they exist only in so much as we've agreed that they should.

morality is a human construct unless you believe in divinity. ultimately, the universe doesn't care what one bag of molecules does to another bag of molecules.

Re:Great

[Triklyn]

:), yeah, there it is.

Re: Great

[Anonymous Coward]

in reality it's at least in United States corporate taxes went from been around 50 percent of all taxes collected by the IRS to about 5% of the whole taxes which means that the burden has transferred from the corporate to the personal tax..so the corporations are so profitable nowadays they have more money than God I the meantime the meat and potatoes of Society in Americathe middle class is burdened with more and more taxes to pay for all the government.
I believe they should only be a profit tax and all the corporations that want to sell in the state have to pay it...if they don't want to sell in the state they dont, if they do they should pay their fair share like the rest of us poor people are.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

"Companies do not create jobs, demand for goods creates jobs"

You are quite wrong: Computers, phones, music, movies--no technology is a "need." We need air, food, water, shelter, and clothing. Everything else is a want.

Creating the product introduced the demand. Before these products existed, there was no demand for them.

Companies create wants by creating products. Almost anything that saves time sells and becomes a demand. Almost anything that entertains sells. Ironically enough, entertainment takes time, it doesn't save time.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

A human being doesn't have an inherent natural right to live free of murder/rape/robbery? I don't think that a police force can be necessarily lumped into the same category as the three utility services you list first.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

And the candlemakers will be out of a job.

Innovation has never resulted in few jobs.

Robots must not only be created, they must be maintained. So not only do you have new jobs to create the robots and build improved models each year, you also now have Robot maintenance repair men. Soon the robots die. Now there will be companies refurbishing them and whole gray market of used robots will form. Robot junk dealers, just like computers are cars have junk dealers, will be a new field.

Also, the robots need better branding and images. Artists and marketing teams are needed to brand these robots. Soon there are modularized parts that allow for robots to have branding replaced by quickly switching a piece of their exterior.

The robots also need wifi to be controlled remotely. The number of network engineers just increased. There number of wireless network cards just increased, so the manufacturing of wireless network cards are ramped up.

Software to enhance the robots capabilities will result in many software companies. Whole companies will be created and all the positions that exist in a company.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, google will have to cut off the UK, because they imagine they're entitled to someone else's production.

Re:Great

[PoliteTia]

Wonder how much the 'Royal Family' cost to maintain?

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also hilarious that you still think corporations pay taxes, and magically don't pass the cost onto the customers. That's "Hilarious," R-E-T-A-R-D-E-D

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds to me as if those nations should be paying taxes to the corporations who employ their citizens and generate GDP and personal wealth. I would support this 100%.

Re: Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Assembly, not assembler code. See, it's been so long that everyone has forgotten already :-)

Re:Great

[AK Marc]

So taxes should be "fair". I don't think that's ever really been a goal of them.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a Godwin rule for mention of Somalia.

Since it indicates a complete ignorance of political science, libertarianism or economics.

As a statist argues, the odds of him invoking Somalia approach unity.

And then we can tell said socialist to go to his paradise of North Korea.

No actual debate will take place, but it's not as if you wanted one.

Re:Great

[StevenOfford]

Our "left" is currently in opposition, but perhapse even our "right" is to far left for you.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Because countries refuse to stop giving the ridiculous tax benefits.

Well there you have it. Exactly what is wrong with the left. A lower tax rate is considered a "benefit" as if the government is tossing a cookie out and patting the corporate (or individual) dog on the head and saying "good boy!"

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

The far better way to view it is "companies are shifting assets and income out of our country because of the ridiculous tax penalties here."

Absolute nonsense. Companies are morally obliged to pay tax for the privilege of using the system (provided for and protected by the State) to make money. Buying a license, renewable annually, to make money. A very simple concept.

Re:Great

[AK Marc]

We also didn't force anonymous vote on the people for the first 100 years or so.

The income tax was related to the birth of the standing military. The military caused most of the problems that exist in the US today. If we didn't have a military, we wouldn't have a debt now. The great depression was caused by war. The boom from the build-up during WWI (and the profit-hungry financial industry) grew the bubble until it popped. It took a second war to pull us out with even more deficit spending. Keynesian economics wasn't a call to deficit-spend in bad times, but a call to pay off the debt in good times. The borrow-and-spend Conservatives in the US use it wrong and blame the other side.

Social Security should have taken a Constitutional Amendment. But the effect is required. The democratic process proved people would rather pay taxes and not watch the old slowly starve to death.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice shilling for your corporate masters! Sort of like how the majority of voting Americans vote against their own self-interest.

Not sure how "natural right" is relevant in a modern society, which after all exists because we are better off together. That of course entails obligations as well as privileges, both for individuals and corporate "bodies."

Re:Great

[AK Marc]

A company claims to be a person when it comes to rights and privileges, but not when it comes to responsibilities. The taxes aren't double-dipping if corporations are people. But if your argument is that corporations aren't people, you need to argue with the Supreme Court, not me.

Re:Great

[SillyHamster]

In many states of the US that is true: after due process you can be sentenced to death.

You do not remotely comprehend the point, then. If the right to not be murdered/raped/robbed (right to life) is granted by government, the government doesn't need due process - the government can do no wrong.

A distinction needs to be drawn between protection of a right (using police/legal system/military) and the granting of a right.

We pay taxes to sustain a government that protects our natural rights. We do not pay government to grant us natural rights. Otherwise, what government grants, it can take, and anything it does, is right by definition, since it is the source of rights.

Re: Great

[AK Marc]

What irony? You had multiple grammatical errors. He pointed it out. I didn't see any grammatical errors in his post. Thus I don't see the irony. Can you point it out to me? The irony is when the person pointing out errors makes multiple themselves.

Re:Great

[AK Marc]

After the board of directors and CxO, of course.

Re:Great

[AK Marc]

Oh, I grew up in communist Texas (where the Bushes learned their communism). The power company was owned by the state. The water company was owned by the city (and sewer as well). The Gas was also state, I think (I don't remember the company for the gas, but I think it was the same as the electric). And the phone was owned by a federal government established monopoly.

So if you count the monopoly as government controlled, then 100% of my utilities growing up in Texas were government owned.

Paid by taxes of fees is a separate issue than whether the providers were private or public companies.

Re:Great

[david_thornley]

You know what? My harm is limited. I own stock in the company I work for. The company can go bankrupt with immense debts, and what happens is that my stock is worthless. Except in case of extreme financial malfeasance (which is way above my pay grade, so I can't be touched this way), the bankruptcy doesn't affect my savings, my other stock, my bonds, my house, etc. Heck, if I do things that are legally dubious here (which current management doesn't want me to do anyway), I have a good deal of protection as an employee.

One of the big advantages of most corporations is that they're limited liability: I can't lose more money than I invest in them. Suppose 3M is found guilty of the most heinous offenses against law and humanity; the harm that is done to 3M may therefore be complete. I lose a few tens of thousands of dollars in stock value, unless I sell earlier.

Re:Great

[AK Marc]

When did pro-taxers ever say there was a limit?

What is a "pro-taxer" and why not just call them Nazi Communists or something? You obviously mean it as a derogatory statement, but have a personal definition so that any arguement against it you can trot out a scotsman or similar dismissal of any argument you find inconvenient.

The anarchy-Nazi bastards think that the poor should rot. The only matter of debate is where to put them, since in the loonitarian utopia there is no "public" land, and none of the landowners will let them on it. Dump them all in the ocean? Who pays for cleanup of my beach if your dead bum washes up on it?

Re:Great

[AK Marc]

A large government does the corporation's dirty work for them, extraditing Kim Dotcom, seizing property in NZ, holding criminal charges for copyright infringement. Copyright should be a civil, not criminal matter, and was only recently elevated to move the enforcement costs to the government to help reduce costs for the poor content owners. The small government lets the corporations hire Pinkerton Men to commit murder.

Which do you prefer?

Re:Great

[AK Marc]

So a corporation has all the rights of a person and none of the responsibilities? Because that's the only logical conclusion of what you assert.

Re:Great

[AK Marc]

You can harm a corporation without harming the people that comprise it.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Think how silly that is! So people in the old Soviet empire had no demand for goods? Do you think they liked Russian toilet paper and there was no demand for consumer goods? Hardly! Then assume that the wish for toilet paper without splinters creates a job, as you say. Now ask how much would this job pay without a company to create the goods? We have the problem of politicians claiming that they create jobs where I live. All of this magic without capital goods, skills that are in demand, etc. Wow.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

so at age 18, each person has to decide whether to remain a citizen and pay taxes or emigrate immediately. Until then, they're on their parents' dime. (yeah, "take it or leave it" isn't very nuanced negotiation, but how're you going to do better with 250 million people?)

Re:Great

[suutar]

How does revoking a corporate charter for cause violate the rights of the shareholders or employees?

Re:Great

[Kohath]

Did you use due process? What standard of evidence? What's "cause"? Is there a law that has charter revocation as a punishment for violating it, or are you just making up ways you'd like to hurt people? Are you justly compensating the innocent people when you take their property -- their ownership in the corporation?

Re:Great

[suutar]

By "for cause" I intended to imply that there was a valid reason for revocation, and the process was followed correctly, so yeah, due process, sufficient evidence, meets legal criteria. Loss of share value as a consequence of corporate action is a known and accepted risk of share ownership, so compensation is not an issue.

Re:Great

[mjwx]

Last I checked all my utilities other than water are private companies. My taxes won't pay my electric, gas or phone bill. If I don't pay any of them then they get shut off.

Also I pay my water bill to my local city and it's not even part of my taxes.

Cool,

When did you get the last bill for the Police, Fire services, residential streets you drive on, sanitation, storm drains and so on? Are these provided by private companies?

Awaken from your dreamy state Libertarian. Utilities are more than just power and gas.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The tax breaks are not given to corporations for the purposes of making the "1%" richer. The tax breaks are given to corporations so that they will operate out of a particular jurisdiction (country/state/municipality). Those that are employed by the corporation will then consume within that jurisdiction thus stimulating that jurisdiction's economy. This is commonly known as the "trickle-down effect".

As an example: in an area with an automobile manufacturing plant there are numerous side businesses that bloom as a result (suppliers, contractors, service providers) who all get paid as part of the cost of the plant's doing business, along with the employees of the plant. All of these other entities pay taxes in some way, and in the case of the suppliers, contractors etc they may also have employees as well who earn income and pay taxes and also consume goods and services provided by other businesses

This is all factored into a jurisdiction's decision to offer tax incentives. Usually they feel that the spin-off revenue is better than the loss of the direct tax revenue when courting the corporations.

Better to have 10/100/1000 people earning an income (taxed) in an area than 5/50/500 not earning an income.

That the "1%" continue to amass wealth is a side-effect of the intent. However, the 1% also spends money and consumes too. They just seem to amass wealth at a greater rate than they spend it, unlike the rest of us mere mortals. Bottom line though is that the jurisdictions gain tax revenues as a RESULT of the corporations operations, not DIRECTLY FROM said operations (profits).

There is the bigger side issue (yet related) in how the rest of us mere mortals get all butt-hurt looking at how the 1% lives and seems to receive preferential treatments that we don't in the eyes of governments and others, but that is a separate rant.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies do not create jobs, demand for goods creates jobs

"If I'd asked what my customers wanted they'd have said a faster horse"

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

You can bleat about libertarianism all you like, but elected governments get to make the laws, and you can either abide by them, or piss off somewhere else without any pesky laws. I understand Somalia is nice at this time of year.

Whether you intended it to or not, your argument amounts of a claim that societies without pesky laws, where "pesky" has something to do with excessive taxes, are equivalent to Somalia.

History shows this claim to be false. Many societies throughout history have had good standards of living, relative to their technology, and relative stability, without also having high taxes (in some cases, without having any taxes, and in some cases without having elected governments, or governments at all).

It seems you managed to sleep through the history classes the government provided you, but you still have the option of paying for a set of refresher courses in history education (or even reading a few good books). A little exposure to anthropology would probably help as well. Or would you prefer to pay some more taxes so the government can also provide this?

I realize that all the cool liberal kids are claiming that arguments against socialism, excessive taxes, or excessive government will inevitably result in every nation becoming like Somalia, but you might actually want to put some thought into your words next time. It's much nicer to be both cool and right, than to have the illusion of being cool, while being wrong.

Similarly, if your advice to others is to simply abide by the laws government passes, you might want to actually learn something about the relevant tax codes (in order to more properly abide by it, of course, it wouldn't do to be ignorant). The British tax code is over 11,500 pages. If you happen to be a US citizen, your tax code is over 70,000 pages. Have fun with your reading. If this doesn't sound appealing, you might wish to reconsider your stance on the subject of "pesky laws".

Re:Great

[NewYork]

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

Re:Great

[Neil Boekend]

I do comprehend you point, I just feel that it is irelevant and try to explain why.

If you get down to it there is no such thing as natural right. You may have that right but unless you are physically stronger then the one who tries to violate that right you are going to need someone to protect that right. The government provides that someone, mostly by punishing those who violate that right.
Without the government that right is useless. If someone stronger then you tries to murder you there is no use shouting "you shouldn't because it is my right not to be murdered". That won't stop them.
The fear of repercussions from the government usually does that, combined with the culture that was created by it and that created it (that is a two way street).

So for each of the so called natural rights the government grants you protection from violation. I see no difference from the government granting that right in the first place.

As for the government taking that protection away: they won't. Not without due process. If they would they wouldn't get re-elected or probably even sued by the next government.
However it does happen. There have been many cases in history where groups of humans have no protection for their natural rights. Slavery is an example for it. The way the Uyghur were (or are, I don't know exactly) treated in China is another example. Somalia is a third.
What good does their right do? Your government protects you against such behavior, which sadly seems to be in most humans.

Re:Great

[duck_rifted]

Surely the only ones with any right to tax us to death are banks. When governments levy taxes, it benefits (gag) *people*. Eww.

Fees and penalties should only benefit people at the top of the foodchain. If those stinkin leftist commies would just stop ruining it...

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The government has no inherent natural right to take money from anyone.

It has (Weber) monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force. It can thus give you jail time or other physical inconvenience until it's satisfied with how much you paid.

Re:Great

[Roodvlees]

So you think Google will give up 75% of the profit they get in the UK because they don't want to give up 25%?
And the UK does not think they are entitled to anyone's production.
The UK contributes to Googles production and wants Google to contribute to the UK in return. But I'm sure you can phrase that in such a way it looks like I'm a communist.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK contributes to Googles production and wants Google to contribute to the UK in return

I am pretty sure Google already pays everyone in the UK who provides them goods or services.

But I'm sure you can phrase that in such a way it looks like I'm a communist

You seem to be doing that just fine yourself already.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

I can't help but I am in favor of taxation. I earn a lot, and in my country that's akin to a crime. Looking at my paycheck, I get about 45% of what I "officially" earn before taxes as money on my bank account. Sounds hard, huh? It might make you wonder, but that's ok by me. I see what I get in return and I like the deal. Yes, it's anything but cheap. But I live in one of the towns that have been considered for years now the most "livable" cities, with a near-zero crime rate (seriously, a murder in our capital makes the headlines for at least a day and I can't think of ANY place where I wouldn't dare going at any time of the day), exceptional cleanliness (aside of the occasional dog turd), an incredibly well built, reliable and CHEAP public transportation system (frankly, I've been to New York, I've been to London, your subway is overpriced and SUCKS) and affordable flats (I own my little apartment near the city center and pay like 150 bucks a month for sewage, waste and other tidbits, if you don't own but rent it's about 1.5 bucks per square foot of your flat, and we're talking walking distance to the capital's town center). Power and water are cheap, and you can actually drink the tap water (less than a cent per gallon of spring water, right from the tap).

And I didn't even talk about the free nursery, schooling and other things I don't really use (and hence cannot comment on quality). Yes, all that costs money. And I certainly pay more than my "fair" share of it all. But still it's well worth it.

So tax me. If I get something in return, it's money well spent.

Re:Great

[diamondmagic]

If you think the government is the most efficient spender of your money, I have sad news for you. I scarcely have time to discuss the wars, failed projects, spying, or hell, the fact New York prosecutors couldn't even get a an indictment for police officers who killed a guy they said wasn't paying taxes. Killed a guy for not paying taxes, as a result of a direct order to NYPD to crack down on tax evasion. If he were smoking a joint it would have merely been a summons! But I digress.

No, the fact of the matter is without cost and revenue, there is no profit or loss, and we can't know if we're efficiently allocating resources or just wasting them. All other industry except government would collapse if they squandered resources as much as the government does. Yet they do it. Over and over again.

All other industry has to buy inputs - raw materials, labor, capital - and combine it and sell the result for a higher price than they bought it for, hence producing value. The government just shoves a gun in your face.

Anyways, if you're happy with giving away your money like that, then cut the damn check yourself. You most certainly don't speak for all of us, though.

Re:Great

[diamondmagic]

Also, your anecdote is nice, but in reality there's very little evidence to suggest higher taxes means more prosperity. Prosperity is very strongly correlated with rule of law, however, which requires a minimum of taxes, if any.

Re:Great

[SillyHamster]

If you get down to it there is no such thing as natural right. You may have that right but unless you are physically stronger then the one who tries to violate that right you are going to need someone to protect that right. The government provides that someone, mostly by punishing those who violate that right.

Natural rights do not exist only in a world without objective morality.

The jury is out on that question, considering the inability to prove God does not exist, and the natural tendency of mankind to seek justice and the "right" of things.

So for each of the so called natural rights the government grants you protection from violation. I see no difference from the government granting that right in the first place.

So you have no problems if a government rescinds those rights and decides a portion of its population needs to be plundered and converted into fertilizer? As in mass killing/genocide, in case that's too subtle.

Because in a world without "natural rights" - that's not wrong. If you were principled about there being no such thing as "natural rights", you'd respect the Hitlers and Stalins and Maos of the world for doing whatever they wanted to do. Cause their might makes it right.

As for the government taking that protection away: they won't. Not without due process.

Let's perform a thought experiment. Let's say they do, without due process. Is that a good/right thing?

Because it has happened in the past, and it might happen in the future. You can't say it will not happen or did not happen - only that it should not - but why should it not happen if it's not wrong?

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

Odd. Half of Europe would disagree. The other half is currently busy trying to keep its economy from collapsing and its population from revolting, so of course it might be biased.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

It's certainly not the most efficient way to spend money. Sadly, though, the more efficient spenders usually have their own and not the public interest in mind. I do for good reason not trust the private sector to run any meaningful infrastructure for one single reason: A conflict of interest. Infrastructure is critical for the functioning of a society. And while I can at least see a government having this as some sort of goal on its agenda, for a private operator it's at best a necessary evil.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

You really think companies just create stuff and hope and pray that they'll find someone to buy it? C'mon. That's what market research is for.

Bottom line is, if you can't sell, you're not going to be in business for long. Only if you can sell you can have a business. Nobody ever get rich producing. Selling is where the money is. And for that, you need someone to buy.

Re:Great

[Opportunist]

You really believe that you wouldn't find sufficient people to trade working to earn money for simply taking what they want if there is no law enforcement in place? You have never seen what's going down in places like New York when there's a city wide blackout?

People DO break "randomly" into houses even WITH law enforcement in place. How much worse do you think it would be without? Especially, how much worse do you think it would be towards companies where people don't feel like they're taking it from someone who might be missing it, after all, Sony has thousands of TVs, what's one single TV that I want compared to that?

Re:Great

[OhPlz]

That's my point. There is no such thing as voluntary when it comes to taxes.

Re:Great

[davydagger]

You really believe that you wouldn't find sufficient people to trade working to earn money for simply taking what they want if there is no law enforcement in place?

not what I said but OK. I said that people wouldn't respect absentee property laws in absence of police.

You have never seen what's going down in places like New York when there's a city wide blackout?

looting and riots?

People DO break "randomly" into houses even WITH law enforcement in place. How much worse do you think it would be without?

your making a fairly bad assumptions. My argument is the police are mostly for show, and to protect the property of those wealthy enough to affect political intrest. They can't and won't protect yours. There will be just as much theft without the police as with it, not more.

Re:Great

[kloro2006]

nods

Re:Great

[Neil Boekend]

Don't put words in my mouth. I never said that might makes things right.
Fact is that people have been doing things that are wrong for as long as people exist.

You can't say it will not happen or did not happen - only that it should not - but why should it not happen if it's not wrong?

I can't say it will not happen because it has happened. Hitler, Stalin and slavery are prime examples of the fact that it has happened. That is a clear indicator that there is no magical protection on natural rights and that those rights need protecting. The best way we have now is protection from the government.

Please understand that natural rights are pointless if nobody protects them. Then we can talk.

Re:Great

[Roodvlees]

I am pretty sure Google already pays everyone in the UK who provides them goods or services.

Sure the people who work for them, because those people contribute to Google. But they should also contribute something to the UK as a country, because the country also contributes to Google apart from the work people do.

You seem to be doing that just fine yourself already.

No I'm not a communist.
Do you define a lack of absolute trust in the concept that companies seeking profit will somehow magically fix all our problems?
Then I am a communist.
It's so strange that some people in the US have defined communism as wanting things to be more fair.

Re:Great

[SillyHamster]

Don't put words in my mouth. I never said that might makes things right.

I am not putting words in your mouth. I am pointing out where the logic of your position leads to.

If that makes you uncomfortable (it should!), you ought to re-examine your logical position.

Please understand that natural rights are pointless if nobody protects them. Then we can talk.

That's nonsense. A right is not some object you have, it's something you are justified to do. At the very bare minimum, you are protecting your right - and if you aren't willing to protect it, you can't complain that someone else isn't protecting it.

The government can help you protect your rights, but it cannot be the source of the justification without it also having complete authority to do whatever it wants.

So let's clear this up if you wish to continue talking: Is the government the source of rights? Yes/No.

Re:Great

[Neil Boekend]

I am not putting words in your mouth. I am pointing out where the logic of your position leads to.

No. You claim that I feel it should be so and everything is good and, by extension, that slavery was good.
I don't feel that way.
It does lead to "might makes it possible to do what the hell you want" but that doesn't mean that that is right. 10 minutes of medieval history tells you that that is exactly what happened in the past.
For example Elizabeth Bathory: she liked to bathe in human blood.
From the article: "her family's influence kept her from facing trial."

Please understand that natural rights are pointless if nobody protects them. Then we can talk.

That's nonsense. A right is not some object you have, it's something you are justified to do. At the very bare minimum, you are protecting your right - and if you aren't willing to protect it, you can't complain that someone else isn't protecting it.

If you protect it then someone is protecting it. You just can't practically protect your rights from everyone.
We pay the government through taxes to protect our rights. We can complain they don't do an adequate job of it because we pay them to do, among other things, that.
If someone is stabbing you in the heart what protection is shouting "it's my right not to be murdered"?

So let's clear this up if you wish to continue talking: Is the government the source of rights? Yes/No

No.

However that is academic.
What is the practical difference between protecting a right for someone and being the source of that right? If you protect someones right you can simply remove that protection. If the other isn't capable of protecting that right, what use is that right? If someone is raping you what protection is "It's my right not to be raped"?

An uncomfortable truth is that we only recently have moved to a system of laws that prevents "might makes it possible to do what the hell you want". And it isn't doing a good job yet. The rich and famous get away with awful things.
Another uncomfortable truth is that there isn't some magical protection on rights. Most likely there is no god, and if there is He isn't doing much on this front. We have to protect the weak ourselves. For that we use governments.

Re:Great

[SillyHamster]

It does lead to "might makes it possible to do what the hell you want" but that doesn't mean that that is right. 10 minutes of medieval history tells you that that is exactly what happened in the past.

As your example illustrates, we know it is not right, and we have a common and instinctive urge to call it wrong. Thus, there is a human right that transcends government. It's wrong not just because a particular government says it's wrong, but because of something that is innate to humanity. (and I believe, the universe we exist in)

However that is academic. What is the practical difference between protecting a right for someone and being the source of that right? If you protect someones right you can simply remove that protection. If the other isn't capable of protecting that right, what use is that right? If someone is raping you what protection is "It's my right not to be raped"?

No, it is not academic.

If you don't have the right to resist, why resist? If you don't have the right to free speech, why should you risk anything to speak against the majority/popular view?

Paying a heavy cost to assert a right is possible only when there is a concept of right and wrong that is more valuable than even one's own life.

Take away that ideal, and we are just bags of meat, and we are ultimately just slaves to the strongest bully in the neighborhood.

Another uncomfortable truth is that there isn't some magical protection on rights.

You speak of truth as if it were desirable, while attacking the concept of rights. ("it's not a right if someone isn't strong enough to protect it")

"It's not true if it's uncomfortable" - how much would you disagree with that?

Because that is wrong in the same way as "it's not a right if it's not protected by a government".

Most likely there is no god, and if there is He isn't doing much on this front. We have to protect the weak ourselves. For that we use governments.

Wrong. There is a God, and our instinctive desire for Justice, Right, and Protection of the Weak are strong evidence of His fingerprints.

We do need to protect the weak, and we are a part of governments - but governments are not the highest human authority - so we have the right to judge governments and force them to do what is right.

Re:Great

[Neil Boekend]

We will not convince each other so I will drop it.

Re:Great

[jwhitener]

Tax the company who creates the jobs

Companies don't hire unless there is first a demand for a product or service (or the potential to create a new market). In that sense, companies never create jobs. Customers create jobs.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The far better way to view it is "companies are shifting assets and income out of our country because of the ridiculous tax penalties here."

How the hell is that crap insightful?

Every government has the right to tax companies, and taxed they should be just like individuals!

Governments need money to operate! Or are you suggesting that governments are no needed, or that they should work for free?

As much as you might dislike government officials, they are also human beings and require an incoming to live.

New notice on Google agreements

[Anonymous Coward]

"All transactions will be processed in US dollars and will be liable to conversion fees.

Your transaction is explicitly between Google US and not any subsidiary in your home country."

Then they'll be able to write down massive losses when they pay their own consultants for projects in the UK and force UK companies to pay via the US office which negates any profit received.

Good times, Google.

Re:New notice on Google agreements

[91degrees]

Not sure if it will be as easy as that, but it's certainly true that it's a lot easier for entirely online firms to avoid this sort of thing than companies that have physical products. Ultimately, Google can operate in a country with zero physical presence.

Still, it's not just Google. Starbucks and Amazon also came in for a lot of criticism, and it's a lot harder to charge a customer in US dollars for a cup of coffee along Kensington High Street.

Re: New notice on Google agreements

[Anonymous Coward]

Then Google will find themselves experiencing a new law, or the businesses they deal with will.

Google does make their money from selling ads and services to others after all.

Re: New notice on Google agreements

[BarbaraHudson]

Google does make their money from selling ads and services to others after all.

Sales tax at the point (country) of purchase. Problem solved.

Re:New notice on Google agreements

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Ultimately, Google can operate in a country with zero physical presence.

But ISPs and telcos can't.

Cutting certain businesses or even entire countries out of the Internet is not nearly as difficult from a technical point of view as cloud-dreaming geeks like to think, and taking billions out of a national economy by blatantly playing the system is a very strong motivator.

If they aren't careful, the same big companies that have made the modern Internet so useful in many ways will also bring about its fragmentation and at great cost to themselves. In the end, you cannot win a war over tax or legal matters against a government that has the power to levy taxes and legislate.

So, the real question is how far you can push before it becomes more politically beneficial for the government to overtly throw you to the wolves regardless of the consequences. It turns out that the answer is pretty far if you're a business that in reality does already pay quite a bit of tax to that government, but it's not forever. Big businesses that do this kind of thing are extremely unpopular right now here in Europe, and at least in the UK, next year is an election year.

Re:New notice on Google agreements

[91degrees]

Cutting certain businesses or even entire countries out of the Internet is not nearly as difficult from a technical point of view as cloud-dreaming geeks like to think, and taking billions out of a national economy by blatantly playing the system is a very strong motivator.

Didn't mean to imply that it was trivial. Google obviously sees a business need for a presence in the UK. More the observation that it is genuinely a lot harder to claim conclusively that a transaction with Google happens in any specific place. Sure a British company advertising to British customers paying Google UK is a British transaction, but what about a Canadian company that does 17% of its business in Europe paying Google US for international advertising? And with multinationals selling to other multinationals things get even more complicated.

Re:New notice on Google agreements

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Oh, I completely agree. International tax rules are certainly not easy things to set up in way that is transparently fair to all parties. That's how these big businesses can play these games right now, but going too far the other way would be harmful to commerce as well.

The current thinking from the tax authorities in the UK seems to be that they should have generic rules available to them, so they can unilaterally and possibly retrospectively declare a tax scheme against the rules. The General Anti-Abuse Rules that came into effect last year were already one significant step in that direction. I'm not sure how I feel about those, because on the one hand abuse has obviously been taking place, but on the other the new rules fundamentally rely on the tax collection authorities (HMRC, in this case) to make fair decisions about who owes them money but they have a track record of interpreting other rules to claim more than they were entitled to.

If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Greyfox]

You could just tax every transaction made with that currency at a fairly low percentage of the total transaction and do away with all the other taxes. Credit card companies figured this out decades ago.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK isn't this already done at 15%? That, along with income tax, and corporate tax, and capitol gains tax I guess just isn't enough. Might be easier to balance the budget looking at the other side of the equation, spending, but I guess that's hard.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Coward]

VAT is 20%, but Google offers its services for free to its users (actually, the users are the product for they sell to the advertisers). So that's not going to raise a lot.
Income tax isn't a corporate tax.
Corporation tax is being avoided by the offshoring of revenues.
Capital Gains Tax is likewise probably being offshored/reduced.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Coward]

The 15% is VAT which is only for transactions between VAT registered sellers and consumers. It is not for every transaction and it is not required for subsequent re-selling of second hand goods that are not sold through trade so it is not compound in the way that an unconditional transaction tax would be.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[beelsebob]

Actually, it is for every transaction, but it is paid only on the value added, and usually passed along to the next person in the buying chain.

If I as company A buy bolts for a widget from company B, and pay £1 for them, and then sell my widget to person C for £5, I pay £1 VAT (and likely actually sell the widget for £6), and recoup £0.20 in VAT refunds. company B meanwhile pays £0.20 in VAT, and gets some smaller amounts in refunds because he bought the metal and tools from another company, etc.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Their fundamental problem is that they can't do enough on spending alone to balance the books.

Politicians like to talk about efficiency savings, particularly when they're not the ones actually in government so they don't have to find actual savings to back up their rhetoric. But the reality is that we have an ageing population in the UK, and the younger generations who are still working and paying taxes have to pay for more social security and medical care for more people than ever before if services are to be maintained. You can't just wish that away by hand-waving, and the results of "austerity measures" are much more visible to the average voter than any theoretical long-term economic benefits.

So, one way or another, the government has to raise more tax revenues, and part of their strategy is to chase the big multinationals in major growth industries like technology, which are playing funny money accounting games to shift their profits to avoid tax obligations they would otherwise incur. Given how much business is now done on-line, in some industries at the expense of traditional physical versions, the government quite simply can't afford not to alter the tax regime to keep up with new technologies and the businesses built with them.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Coward]

But the reality is that we have an ageing population in the UK, and the younger generations who are still working and paying taxes have to pay for more social security and medical care for more people than ever before if services are to be maintained.

And that was actually my "hidden" point, thanks for making it obvious. Socialism does not work, eventually you run out of other people's money to spend. Sure, you can raise VAT, implement this Google tax, raise income tax again, but all you really are doing is putting off the collapse and making it bigger once it happens.

You will one day reach a point where the taxes are so burdensome that the young are not willing to work for the little they have left after taxes. Its pretty much at that point in the US where the workforce participation rate is spiraled out of control. Easier to collect food stamps, and the difference between that and your paycheck is so small its not worth working 40 hours a week. Add free healthcare, like the UK, and its really not worth it at all.

Glad to see you realize the problem, now you just need to realize the solution.

Re: If You Had An Electronic Currency

[cyber-vandal]

Whereas what we had before with people living in slums and dying of cholera unable to afford food or basic medical care was a much better way of life.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[blue9steel]

I'm not necessarily opposed to that but it does create some interesting incentives with regards to vertical integration that we'd need to consider beforehand. Additionally we would need to carefully specify that yes, indeed this applies to ALL transactions, including things like buying stocks.

Re: If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Coward]

The lazy died, the non-lazy lived - yes, much better for society.

Any "entitlement" based society is doomed to fail. If you want to get ahead, if you want o survive, you have to put effort into it.

No effort, no nothing, problems solved.

Yes it's harsh, but it's the only way people as a race will survive.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Wrath0fb0b]

The problem with taxing at a fixed percentage of volume is that it penalizes high-volume low-margin businesses relative to the high-margin ones. That introduces serious inefficiency by artificially lowering the relative cost of expensive good relative to cheaper ones (which is also regressive*).

In practice, States try to soften the regressive nature of fixed-percentage taxes by devising a classification scheme wherein essential goods like food are taxed at a different rate (sometimes zero). That leads to a separate inefficiency where now people start to game and dispute the classification, leading to high-stakes court battles about wether Jaffa cakes are a cake or biscuit.

* Most commodities like gas* and groceries fall into the "high volume low margin" category, so this will harder hit the lower class that spends a large percentage on its income on commodities. In the US, gas stations average 3c on each dollar spent on gas, less than half the average margin for a private business in the US. YMMV in other countries.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Your argument implicitly assumes that the cost of providing the services stays similar while the demand goes up relative to the available funding. That isn't necessarily the case, because the younger generations could potentially do the same work more cost-effectively, for example if new technologies make providing the expected services more efficient.

The problem is that new technology is a double-edged sword in this case, and right now any modest increases in efficiency from some new technologies are being outweighed by significant shortfalls in available funding because other new technologies are allowing the tactics in the business taxation game to change faster.

Re: If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Coward]

Whereas what we had before with people living in slums and dying of cholera unable to afford food or basic medical care was a much better way of life.

Right. Because government spending run amok has done such a good job eliminating slums and bringing unlimited free healthcare to everyone...

Re: If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm glad life is fair in your world. In mine, sometimes the people with no money are valuable, and sometimes the people with lots of money did little of real value to society to earn it. Looking out for our peers when life goes against them through no fault of their own is part of what we call "civilisation".

Incidentally, since you seem to have read a couple of capitalist handbooks too many, you might also consider that supporting the less well off in society to a basic level is much more cost-effective than the alternative of leaving them to fend for themselves, which inevitably results in high crime rates that you then have to deal with instead. Unless you are literally proposing to execute anyone who got fired, I suppose, which is about what I expect you to come back with next...

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Coward]

You stumbled upon a second problem. As revenue increases in government, so does spending. The US just added a $1 Trillion per 10 year healthcare system to the budget. Bush added Medicare part D to the budget (prescription drugs for elderly). If revenues increase again, they will add additional benefits as well to eat the surplus.

If spending didn't always continue to increase, you would have a point. It doesn't because someone says "we have additional revenue and should do X for everyone". So in reality if we could just freeze spending and get the benefits you claim, I am betting everything would be fine in the long run, but if you freeze spending the story is that funding for department X is cut because they use baseline budgeting (If a department's budget increases by 2% it is a "cut" because they expected a 5% increase).

So like I said before, I'm glad you see the problems. You are well on your way to seeing the solutions and becoming an "extremist" like the rest of us with common sense.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just tax every transaction made with that currency at a fairly low percentage of the total transaction and do away with all the other taxes. Credit card companies figured this out decades ago.

This is called sales tax, or VAT.

And your have thought about it for a few seconds, you would have realized that VAT is not something that matters to the rich, but very much affects the poor. There was a reason why progressive income tax systems were devised. It has to do with fairness.

Fairness has nothing to do with "pinky commie kumbaya" type of thing. It is about disposable income - income that can be spent on discretionary expenses, not requirements of staying alive. Someone making $100k per year tends to have a lot more disposable income than someone making $10k per year. Therefore if you tax someone's disposable income more, it has much less effect on their standard of living than if you are taxing the non-discretionary income.

And VAT, or what you propose, are complete unfair type of taxes.

In finance, these is called regressive taxation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

And despite what wikipedia says, flat taxes are inherently regressive.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Anonymous Coward]

> Its pretty much at that point in the US where the workforce participation rate is spiraled out of control.

In large part because of retiring Baby Boomers, but also because of black markets and a certain kind of underclass and yes, to some extent because of the economy.

> Easier to collect food stamps, and the difference between that and your paycheck is so small its not worth working 40 hours a week.

An individual working for minimum wage would earn the maximum monthly individual food stamp benefit ($189) in about 30 hours. Virtually all other welfare in the US is predicated on having a job or having had a job in the immediate past. Taxes are nowhere near historical highs. Keynesian economics is not socialism and is proven to work. Keep trolling, liebertarian.

Re: If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Keeping people from starving was 80% of the budget ago.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[TubeSteak]

The GP doesn't understand what the "Google Tax" is about.
This previous /. thread has an article about Amazon that lays it out

It worked like this: Amazon Europe paid 105 million EU to Amazon Technologies Inc in Nevada to license the rights to Amazon's intellectual property -- the patents and software for the websites, including that button that buys a book with one click.

Amazon Europe onsold the rights to use this intellectual property to Amazon EU for 519 million EU -- five times what it had paid the US company. Amazon Europe made an instant profit of 414 million EU, which would have been taxable, except that Amazon Europe is a limited partnership. It doesn't pay tax in Luxembourg.

This is what the UK is trying to stop.
A small transaction tax would do nothing to prevent naked abuses of transfer pricing.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[Cederic]

VAT is 20%, but Google offers its services for free to its users (actually, the users are the product for they sell to the advertisers). So that's not going to raise a lot.

Erm. Advertisers pay money to Google. That involves a transaction. Which could be taxed.

(it's still a flawed idea, but not for the reason you stated)

Re: If You Had An Electronic Currency

[cyber-vandal]

It has in the UK pretty much although Margaret Thatcher tried her best to bring back slums by selling off all the social housing. Our NHS may not be perfect but when I get sick my first thought is to go to the doctor not to check if I've got enough saved to pay the insurance excess.

Re:If You Had An Electronic Currency

[jwhitener]

You could just tax every transaction made with that currency at a fairly low percentage of the total transaction and do away with all the other taxes. Credit card companies figured this out decades ago.

Yeah, we could. However a sales tax alone is a very regressive form of taxation. Our society (USA) explicitly does not want regressive taxation.

Why tax profits, why not income?

[trout007]

Individuals aren't taxes based on their profit but income. Corporations should minimally be held to the same standard. After all there is a huge benefit to incorporating which is limiting liability of the owners. Tax the income at a much lower rate of 5% or so. Think of all of the productivity lost moving money around to optimize tax payments. If your profit margin isn't high enough to cover this tax then you shouldn't incorporate.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Chris Mattern]

Individuals aren't taxes based on their profit but income.

Untrue, at least for US income tax. You are allowed to deduct your business expenses--you are taxed on on your income net of those expenses.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[TheRaven64]

Individuals aren't taxes based on their profit but income

Yes they are. You can (as an individual in the UK) offset most business expenses against tax. It's a tax on net income, not gross.

Re: Why tax profits, why not income?

[TheCastro1689]

If I was only taxes on profit I'd owe like $100 in taxes.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Individuals aren't taxes based on their profit but income. Corporations should minimally be held to the same standard. After all there is a huge benefit to incorporating which is limiting liability of the owners. Tax the income at a much lower rate of 5% or so. Think of all of the productivity lost moving money around to optimize tax payments. If your profit margin isn't high enough to cover this tax then you shouldn't incorporate.

There is more to incorporating than just tax implications. There is also the protection of the personal assets of the stakeholders involved which is as much, if not more, or a consideration for SBO's.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[petes_PoV]

Individuals aren't taxes based on their profit but income

Not strictly true. Individuals pay some taxes (here, at least - other countries: different rules) on their taxable income. That allows for certain deductions such as some expenses paid by people for items necessary for their work. It also allows them quite generous allowances and reductions.

It would be simple to think of all the income that a person received from their job as "profit". But governments don't apply rules like that, to protect low-paid workers and be progressive (tax those who can afford to pay more, at higher rates). Taxing companies on their profit is the only way that a sensible and proportionate system could work - while still incentivising companies to invest in their (and, by association, our futures). It is a reasonable parallel to the way that income is taxed. Sadly, companies employ cleverer accountants than governments do.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[trout007]

Did you read what I wrote?
"After all there is a huge benefit to incorporating which is limiting liability of the owners"

This is what I mean. This HUGE benefit should come at a price.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[trout007]

Not if you are an employee. I can't deduct my car that I need to get to work, house to live, utilities, food, medicine, etc. Only if you are self employed.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[wisnoskij]

Because if they taxed individuals on their profits, that would be 0 tax for 99.9% of all individuals. People do not accumulate wealth, so you need to tax their wealth production instead. Also Individuals do not spend money to make money, so their profit margins are all the same, 100%.

If you wanted to tax wealth production, similarly, for corporation you would need to do it on an individual basis, as every single business has a different profit margin. It is not bad for anyone for a business to be making $.01 on ever 1000 orders, equating to making $101 on every $100 spent on materials and manpower, in fact that is sort of what you want. So you do not want to make that business unviable with taxation. So you would have to adjust the taxation based on the profit margin, and that is call taxing profits.

So in closing, taxing businesses profits is directly synonymous with taxing individuals income.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[thaylin]

He is talking about employees as individuals, not sole proprietorship that for some reason dont seperate their taxes from their person.

I am not allowed to deduct my full housing cost, utility payments, food, clothing and such from my taxes, event though they are necessary for me to live and work.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[shrewdsheep]

Profit margins are often lower than that. For example, retail operations might operate on 3% profit margins. Also sales can be moved around thereby gaming such a system. Partnering companies can internalize sales by forming holdings etc.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[putaro]

The difference is that for a corporation almost everything is a business expense whereas for an individual you can't deduct things like food, clothing and other things not directly related to the business.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[thaylin]

What about food you need to consume, housing (full bill paid), utilities just to live. Offsetting business expenses is not in an individual expense, it is an extension of the business.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[thaylin]

There was a price, but the SCOTUS took it away. Now business are people, but better.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Trepidity]

Generally that's not the case if you earn income as an employee. If you're self-employed you can deduct business expenses from your self-employment income, but if you have a job, you generally pay tax on the gross income from the job, not the income net of expenses. See e.g. these instructions:

Daily transportation expenses you incur while traveling from home to one or more regular places of business are generally nondeductible commuting expenses.

Most other things aren't deductible either: cost of your work clothes is only deductible if it's a specific uniform required by the employer, and distinct from "normal wear". So if you have to wear a McDonald's uniform at work, you can deduct that cost; but if you have to wear a suit to work, you cannot deduct that cost. You also cannot deduct the cost of a car, even if you only need and use it for commuting. In most cases you cannot deduct the cost of training either: if you pay to get a certification, you can't deduct that from the income you earn using the certification. In all those cases, a business can deduct them as costs.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you buy something solely for the purpose of employment you most certainly can write it off. I've done it myself with no issue. If your job requires that you have a vehicle to do your actual job (not just commuting) you can write it off including the fuel, insurance and maintenance. You can't write off the things that you may use for employment but also use for personal reasons. That's where things like most cars and your house come in.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Carewolf]

Individuals aren't taxes based on their profit but income

Yes they are. You can (as an individual in the UK) offset most business expenses against tax. It's a tax on net income, not gross.

No you can't. In the UK like any other country you pay tax on income you spend. Often you in fact have the reverse structure from what corporation have, where you pay a lower tax on money you invest or pay onto others.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[thaylin]

There is no reasonable parallel there. Businesses get to deduct the things they need to operate, including their properties, their payroll, all their expenses. Individuals dont. The personal dedication is not "generous" when you consider the different things. Shoot the dedication would not would not allow you to pay for a single bedroom apartment in any city in the US.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[putaro]

I think there may be some merit to this.

First, it makes the tax structure for companies a lot simpler. The amount of paperwork for tracking all of your expenses is silly (I _hate_ saving and tracking receipts) and you don't know how much your tax will be until you know how much your profit is. If it's a percentage of revenues you can just figure it in to your costs and be done.

Second, the tax on income penalized businesses saving. So, if you need to make a big investment that you can't finance out of revenues in a single tax year it makes more sense to borrow for it than it does to save profits for a few years. When times are good, borrowing is fairly easy. However, as soon as a recession hits, banks start to trim credit lines and refuse to make new loans. This decreases investment and makes the recession worse. If more businesses were financing themselves out saved profits the business cycle would probably not be as much of a boom/bust as it.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[thaylin]

Wait, if people dont accumulate wealth what is that money sitting in my bank? how about Gate's Billions of dollars of wealth?

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, companies employ cleverer accountants than governments do.

Worse than that, somethimes they employ the same accountants that the governments do.

Much easier to know where the loopholes are that way, and to ensure that the necesary loopholes are there in the first place.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[visualight]

Not even close to the right perspective.

My labor is valued at $50.00 per hour. If I exchange one hour of labor for $50.00 then my profit is 0, and I should be taxed a percentage of 0.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Income is what is left over after you pay your costs. You, sir, have been lied to by the I.R.S. and other people for too long.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[AmiMoJo]

The theory is that a company provides employment so it's better to offer it a little more protection during the bad times in order to preserve jobs. I'd say it would be better to just defer any non-profit tax till later, although in the UK we generally prefer to just write off massive tax bills.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[parkinglot777]

Yes they are. You can (as an individual in the UK) offset most business expenses against tax. It's a tax on net income, not gross.

And that is still based on "income" not "profit" as the GP said, isn't it? Unlike a company/corporation, for an individual (not a business person), you can't bring all personal expenses to deduct your gross income. How many (percentages of) "business" individual people compared to those who are simple employees???

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

since everything the corporation is charged gets passed on to the customers, all we're doing is paying the government more in income tax due to increased consumer costs.

stupid people

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[thaylin]

What you value something at does not equal what said thing costs to produce.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Charliemopps]

Individuals aren't taxes based on their profit but income. Corporations should minimally be held to the same standard. After all there is a huge benefit to incorporating which is limiting liability of the owners. Tax the income at a much lower rate of 5% or so. Think of all of the productivity lost moving money around to optimize tax payments. If your profit margin isn't high enough to cover this tax then you shouldn't incorporate.

No no no and no.
Taxes make people not do the thing you are taxing. Tax income, and they have reason to make less. Why go get the new job that pays a tad more when 25% of your raise goes to the feds?
Tax the thing you want people to do less of. Sales tax. The last few financial bubbles have been because people spent beyond their means and didn't save. But the fact of the matter is due to capital gains, putting your money into a mutual fund means it'll get taxed! You pay less in taxes spending it at the movies or buying a house. Instead, tax sales... people will save and invest more. Tax stock sales, as regular old sales. You pay your taxes when you buy them, but sit on them for 30yrs? No taxes. The person that buys them from you pays sales tax. People are more likely to hold onto money, slow down their spending and day trading dies in fire like it should.

Oh and, before everyone poo poos this because of deductions... no deductions, at all... for anything. No tax breaks for anything.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[bws111]

That is already built into the tax tables. You pay no tax at all on the first $x of income, of low rate on the next $x, etc. That untaxed (and lower taxed) money covers your basic expenses. If you have additional expenses (such as required for a job) you can also deduct those. If your additional expenses are because of your lifestyle choices, too bad, you are in effect just spending your 'profits'.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Kohath]

Limiting liability isn't a "benefit". It's a basic necessity to doing business. Without limited liability to business owners, every business owner would always have to bet his family's life savings on every business transaction. One failure would mean permanent destitution. No one with any money would ever take a risk like that. You couldn't build something like a factory -- why bother when it can disappear at any time because someone made a mistake?

A similar problem keeps countries like Haiti and some African nations poor. No one can get ahead -- if you start doing better than the people around you and accumulate a little wealth, it gets stolen or confiscated by government and you become a target. So no one bothers, there are no success stories to teach new people how get ahead, and the people are extremely poor.

You need to be able to retain earnings and use past success to build infrastructure for future success. Without this, you'll be in hand-to-mouth mode forever. Limited liabilty is required.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

If by income you mean wages then your talking about taxing profits of the individual essentially. In a business you might have high costs, low margins, and quick turnaround to compensate. That is one business model. If you start basing taxes on income those businesses would go bankrupt or you would see prices increase drastically. On other sorts of items where there is a high margin low cost the seller would greatly benefit. We would have nobody wanting to sell anything for which has a high cost as they would then have to pay more in taxes. No more cars, no more houses, no more computers... more junk made in China, etc.

Simple math:

$1000 in costs per widget
$1050 sells for
$50 profit
$1050 income
$52.50 in taxes if based on income @ 5%
$12.50 in taxes if based on 25% profit

$2 in costs per widget
$10 sells for
$8 profit
$12 income
$0.60 in tax if based on income @ 5%
$2.00 in tax if based on profit @ 25%

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Umm, no.

Your "profit" is the difference between the price you sell your labor for and the cost to produce your labor. Since it doesn't cost you $50, then your "profit" isn't zero.

Theoretically, the "standard deduction" (if you don't itemize) is supposed to approximate the cost of your labor. It hasn't for a very long time, but theoretically it did.

Do note that when the Income Tax was proposed and passed, the intention was to tax people who made tens of thousands of dollars per year (at the time, that kind of income was in one-percenter territory), and that virtually no normal worker would pay any of it.

Inflation, of course, put paid to that idea three generations back.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[tomhath]

If I exchange one hour of labor for $50.00

Nope. You produced an hour of labor and sold it for $50. That's a $50 profit (ignoring expenses related to producing that hour of labor such as the cost of an office).

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's hugely unfair to companies with low profit margins. There are extremely successful businesses that run on single digit profit percentages. Your local supermarket is a pretty good example.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[CrimsonAvenger]

The last few financial bubbles have been because people spent beyond their means and didn't save.

On the other hand, you occasionally have "respected" economists saying that the economy right now is as shaky as it is because people aren't spending enough of what they make.

Apparently, their take is that a strong economy is built on everyone spending every dime that comes to hand....

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Chris Mattern]

Not if you are an employee. I can't deduct my car that I need to get to work, house to live, utilities, food, medicine, etc. Only if you are self employed.

Yes if you are an employee. You can't deduct things that are not directly related to work and not required by it. You don't *need* your car to get to work, that's a consequence of where you decided to live. If you drive your car in the performance of your job, that's dedcutible. Your commute, your house, your living expenses...those aren't deductible whether you are an employee or self-employed. The same things are deductible either way, for the most part. The only difference is when you're an employee, the things that would be deductible if you paid for them are generally paid for by your employer in the first place.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do this in Canada as well, since my brother-in-law and his partner ran afoul of this at one point with Revenue Canada in that they did NOT use their vehicle ENOUGH for business. The same is true in the US I believe.

It pretty much comes down to the business vehicle had better pretty much be used for 99.9999% business use to be written off.

I also think that doing stuff like that increases the likelihood of being audited, so I suppose it comes down to additional accountant/possible legal fees versus whatever you're saving in writeoffs. For me as an employee those writeoffs would have to be pretty significant and ironclad, which is NOT likely the case IF I'm employed by someone else, i.e. not owning/running my own company.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[__aaclcg7560]

Wealth production comes from owning assets with postive cash flow (i.e., dividend paying stocks and/or rental real estate) or appreciate in value (i.e., stocks and/or real estate). Cash sitting in a bank account that earns less interest than the rate of inflation doesn't generate more wealth by itself.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[trout007]

I limit my liability for driving by buying insurance. The more risky a driver the higher the rates. The same should apply to businesses. Except since the risk is externalized so companies are better off taking larger risks because they keep the benefits but socialize the risk.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[trout007]

We already pay sales tax on cars and houses. It's factored into the price.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Taxes make people not do the thing you are taxing. Tax income, and they have reason to make less. Why go get the new job that pays a tad more when 25% of your raise goes to the feds?

Yeah, when approaching the next tax bracket I always decline all future raises. Because (using your numbers) its totally beneficial to me to give up 75% (thats SEVENTY FIVE PERCENT) of that extra money just to spite the gov out of 25% (which I would benefit from by some non zero amount). Thus my pure capitalist heart beats stronger, making less than I deserve, cause....of spite? What the fuck is wrong with you?

The bullshit argument you're supposed to make is "ZOMG moar tax mean less invest!!1!". Ask Kansas how accurate that argument is...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/be...

AC to not blow away all those mod points...

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[hendrips]

The smallest possible deduction for a U.S. taxpayer in 2014 is $3,950 for the personal exemption + $6,200 for the standard deduction. That works out to $845.83 per month, which is certainly enough money for reasonable if sparse two bedroom apartment in my city. And, as I say, that's the theoretical minimum - if you are married, have children, are over 65, are blind, have a high amount of deductible expenses (including but not limited to certain business expenses that you pay for yourself), or earn more than $400 in employment income but less than $37,870, your deduction will be larger - often much larger.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[bws111]

I don't know about the UK, but in the US that is taken care of in the tax tables. No, you don't claim a deduction for food, housing, etc. However, the tax tables are set up so that you pay no tax on the first $x of income, a relatively low rate on the next $x of income, etc. Additionally, you get a deduction for yourself and each dependant. That untaxed (or low taxed) money covers your basic expenses.

Such an approach works for individuals because a person is a person, and the goverment can set (correctly or not) what they consider to be reasonable living expenses. That approach does not work at all for business, because they are all different. Therefore, businesses must go through the pain of actually accounting for all their expenses.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[jabuzz]

Show me anyone outside the 1% and even 99% of the 1%'ers that would choose to make less money because they where being taxed too heavily on it. That is a complete fallacy.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Kohath]

A car crash isn't a business mistake. There's no "my new candy didn't sell" insurance. No one would ever sell you that insurance.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[rabtech]

Tax income, and they have reason to make less. Why go get the new job that pays a tad more when 25% of your raise goes to the feds?

This has to be one of the dumbest arguments of all time and I can't imagine anyone who actually has money ever actually operates this way or they're headed for ruin rather quickly.

Of course you take the job; 75% of the extra income goes into your pocket. A business that decides not to sell more widgets at a 75% profit margin because they'd have to spend 25% to sell the widgets (taxes, overhead, etc) is a business headed for bankruptcy.

The only programs in the USA that lead to less overall income when you get a raise are ones for poor people like Medicaid where making one extra dollar can cut off your benefits.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[trout007]

Of course they would for a price. But it's hard to compete with free which is what businesses pay today.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[trout007]

Not quite. The price of your labor is $50. That hour is worth less to you than $50 otherwise you wouldn't trade. That hour is worth more to your employer otherwise they wouldn't trade.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[bws111]

First of all, for a business, 'profit' and 'income' are the exact same thing. So that only leaves the possibility that you are talking about revenue. And taxing revenue is a really, really, dumb idea. You must be a complete idiot if you don't think those taxes will be passed directly to the purchaser, so I will assume that you do have a brain and realize that will be the case. Now, think about what you are proposing. Take for example, a car.

Iron is mined. Company gets paid. Price goes up 5% because of revenue tax.
Mill makes steel. Company gets paid. Price goes up another 5% (on top of the already inflated cost of the iron)
Supplier makes part from steel. Compound another 5% increase on that.
Manufacturer uses part. Compound another 5%.
Dealer purchases car. Compound another 5%.

How does that make any sense? You are not taxing those evil corporations, you are taxing the purchaser of the car. If you want to do that, just put a 50% sales tax on everything and be done with it.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a UK article about the UK chancellor of the exchequer talking about upcoming changes to the UK taxation laws. The UK tax system does not allow for the masses of deductions IRS filings let you get away with.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Kohath]

No they wouldn't. You don't understand what insurance is.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tax income, and they have reason to make less.

...or a reason to earn more. Also you earn dollars, you don't make them, unless you're the treasury.

Why go get the new job that pays a tad more when 25% of your raise goes to the feds?

So that you can earn 75% of that tad.This argument makes no sense. It's like saying why would you go to a better job if the cost of driving there increases by 25% of the new wage? Taxing corn might make people not what to buy corn, but work has no alternative. Economists even model work as something we all want to avoid. There is no viable competitor product to working (with obvious odd exceptions).

It's false to think that not paying tax will increase your income. It doesn't matter how much tax you pay. It doesn't matter what the tax percentage is. You could be paying $1 billion in tax a week... it doesn't matter. Comparison to other economies is pointless. What matters is what you take home. Google is using public infrastructure here and expecting to be able to retain claims on resources that should go back into those systems. Since we live in a real world with the unfortunate property that there is no way to differentiate who is using which public systems and by how much, taxation is the only viable mechanism to provision the public good.

If Libertarians think otherwise I'm waiting for them all to stop funding the evil US government and move to a more moral stateless part of the world.

If we all stopped paying tax we would not save that 25% The value of dollars or pounds would drop to zero. Dollars or pounds are nothing but tax/fine vouchers.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[bws111]

A business can deduct the expenses it must spend to earn money. It needs a facility, it can deduct that. It needs employees, it can deduct that. It needs to puchase goods, it can deduct that.

What must an individual employee do to make money? Basically, be alive. And you can be alive for a few dollars a day, and those few dollars a day are what is covered by things like tax tables, standard deductions, and personal exceptions.

Being alive comfortably is not required for you to earn your income, so it is not deductible.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually income tax is banded first 10,000 is tax free and then banded
so if all individuals have the same basic 'life existence costs' then greater salary (and associated greater tax) is a 'tax on individual profit'

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[blue9steel]

The current tax code does a very poor job of accounting for the "expenses related to producing that hour of labor". In effect individuals are taxed on their gross revenue while corporations are taxed on their net income.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[blue9steel]

Because if they taxed individuals on their profits, that would be 0 tax for 99.9% of all individuals.

I think that's overstating the case. A reasonable assumption would be that the median income is the break even line.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[HeckRuler]

That's.... huh. I wanted to call bullshit on that because the system is ludicrously rigged for business taxes... but that makes a good deal of sense.

So while that might be true, putaro's point still stands. Practically everything is a business expense for a corporation: Planes, ludicrous CEO's wages, the rent on the building they pay to the owner to bypass taxes. There is no upper limit to the extravagance that a corporation can claim as a business expense. Their "lifestyle choices" are not scrutinized. Only when they try to invest in the company and see capital gains. Or hoard money. Meanwhile individuals are expected to just get by on the minimum amount, and taxed on anything past that.

Wait a minute, I can still call bullshit on this: if you think that the cost of doing business for individuals (ie, living) is built into the tiered tax-rate.... then why doesn't that argument apply to the tiered corporate tax rate? Why do they get to write off business expenses if people can't write off living expenses? If your comeback is "well that's what the lowest brackets are for", then YEAH, that's what the lowest corporate tax brackets are for!

Your argument sounds a good and rational way of dealing with individual taxes. We're just saying it'd be nice if corporations played by the same rules.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[swillden]

That's hugely unfair to companies with low profit margins. There are extremely successful businesses that run on single digit profit percentages. Your local supermarket is a pretty good example.

It's also extremely harmful to highly disaggregated supply chains and strongly rewards deep vertical integration. That's bad because it means supplies of materials that have multiple uses either get locked to a single use or else the companies that control those supplies become ideally-positioned to own huge swaths of the market. This is because if you tax revenue, the tax gets applied at every step in the supply chain. If it's a 5% tax and there are 10 steps in the chain (10 companies adding a bit of value and selling on to the next company in the chain, up until the last which sells to consumers), then the tax that must be build into the final price could be as high as 63%. In contrast, a company that buys up the entire supply chain only has to build a 5% tax into their prices. This translates into a huge competitive advantage for vertical integration.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[blue9steel]

Taxes make people not do the thing you are taxing. Tax income, and they have reason to make less.

Completely agree. Which is why I propose high pollution taxes, corporate merger taxes, a lobbyist tax and a tax on sugar added to foods that aren't desserts.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[blue9steel]

Limiting liability isn't a "benefit". It's a basic necessity to doing business. Without limited liability to business owners, every business owner would always have to bet his family's life savings on every business transaction. One failure would mean permanent destitution. No one with any money would ever take a risk like that.

You realize the economy worked just fine prior to corporations being the dominant form of business right? You're right that the risk is higher and that does make the economy somewhat less productive which is why our current system is better, but it's not like limited liability is a pre-condition for a free market.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[blue9steel]

Sure they would, you just wouldn't like the price they'd probably charge.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[thaylin]

How is it taken care of in tax tables? you only dont pay taxes on your standard dedication and the other dedications you are allowed. Tax tables just give you a % you owe, and it has more to do with being progressive then anything else.

All people are different, so if it works for people it should work for corps.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Caveat about the self-employed and living expenses. My office is in my home. I can deduct some of the costs of running my office out of my home - including a small percentage of the cost of heating, repairs to the part of my home my office is in, and the interest on my mortgage.

I'm in Canada, your mileage may vary.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Chris Mattern]

Caveat about the self-employed and living expenses. My office is in my home. I can deduct some of the costs of running my office out of my home

You can do this in the US as well, as long as you can prove to the satisfaction of the IRS that the area of your home you are claiming a deduction on is used for *nothing* except work. Again, this has nothing to do with being self-employed...all that determines the deductibility of the home office is how it's used.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[thaylin]

The statement was accumulate wealth, not that it does not generate more wealth.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct - my time, which is finite, and I never get it again is priceless.

ie - millions of dollars per second, so @ 50 bucks an hour, I'm operating at one hell of a net loss. The government owes me trillions of dollars.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[arkhan_jg]

The problem with sales taxes - which we do have in the UK, VAT @20% - is that they're highly regressive. i.e. the people earning the least (pensioners, low wage workers) end up paying a much bigger share of their income than those at the top of the pile - the richest pay very little sales tax as a proportion of their income. As a result, the poor stay poor, and the rich get ever richer. And assuming we don't want the poorest to literally starve, we end up subsidising their costs with welfare benefits, social housing, etc etc - which have to be paid for somehow, and the middle classes don't have fancy tax accountants to move their money out of the reach of the taxman, as the wealthy and corporations do.

So you keep the poor poor, hollow out the middle classes, and the wealthy get ever more wealthy at a faster rate than anyone else. They then buy media companies, news companies et al to promote their views and systems, such as those that channel ever more amounts of money via companies into their own pockets via government subsidy (check out much money Walmart, and by extension the Walton family make from social assistance costs for their workers for just one example, or similarly amazon). They even end up becoming politicians and sponsoring politicians to sponsor laws that benefit them directly.

The correct answers are:
a) make companies pay a living wage, instead of making up the difference with subsidies
b) make companies and the wealthy pay their share of taxes instead of letting them continuously decrease it, because they benefit from a functional and well ordered society (educated and healthy workers, good transport, reliable infrastructure etc etc) more than anyone, they just don't want to pay for it
c) stop the vast amount of 'soft' money going into politics and media ownership as in any other circumstance it would be called bribery and corruption.

'Flat' sales taxes benefit the wealthiest the most. They are not the answer.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't *need* your car to get to work, that's a consequence of where you decided to live.

More likely that's a consequence of wealth/income inequality.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with several people who have chosen to not take pay raises because they would have been subjected to additional taxes.
In particular entering the "highly compensated employee" bracket for a 401k can really screw you. Basically, if your company has "unfair" 401k participation, then making more then ~115k/year can limit what you can contribute to your 401k. Since that isn't too far from the median income of a lot of job titles here people discovered that they might be making an extra 2-3k/year in income, but now have to pay taxes on 10k/year of their retirement savings.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Cash sitting in a bank account that earns less interest than the rate of inflation doesn't generate more wealth by itself.

Unfortunately it is taxed as if it does.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[__aaclcg7560]

You're not going to accumulate wealth with cash sitting in the bank.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in the USA, and not only is my housing deductible from my income, but the government pays me money for owning a house or residing at the same apartment for 2+ years. I can understand the utility payments, since those come out of my post-tax income compared to a company being allowed to deduct the costs, but where I do get compensated a little bit is being a residential user, I do not have to pay a sales tax on any of my utilities, while businesses do, and that's one tax you can't deduct your way out of.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Kohath]

You mean back when the majority of the population worked on farms?

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

heil Karl Marx

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[0123456]

Show me anyone outside the 1% and even 99% of the 1%'ers that would choose to make less money because they where being taxed too heavily on it. That is a complete fallacy.

I'm not sure why this is tagged as 'insightful', because it's utter nonsense. I've refused to work longer hours myself, when most of the overtime I'd make would end up going to the government in one tax or another. I've seen many people online in the last year or so saying they're fed up with government in general and are cutting their spending so they can cut the hours they work, or stop working entirely.

Whenever the left want to stop people doing something, and can't ban it, they put a tax on it, because taxing it will make people do it less. Yet they continually claim that increasing taxes on working won't make people work less.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

When is the last time you turned down a raise because part of it would go to taxes?

That's right, never.....

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[0123456]

This has to be one of the dumbest arguments of all time and I can't imagine anyone who actually has money ever actually operates this way or they're headed for ruin rather quickly.

Presumably because you're one of the people who collect more from taxes than they pay into them?

'From each according to their ability, to each according to their need' only works until the people of ability wise up, then you discover there's a distinct lack of ability and an infinite excess of need.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me, right here. My wife and I do our taxes as 'married, filing jointly' in the US. Our top marginal income tax rate is the 25% bracket, meaning our combined taxable income is betwen $72,501 – $146,400. In other words, hardly 1%ers.

My wife and I have looked several times at starting a small side business in the evenings making and selling craft jewelry that she already makes for herself and friends. Were we to do so, and we made a profit, that profit would then be treated by the IRS as taxable income and we'd pay our top marginal tax rate on it (25%). But then we also have to pay the employee portion of the FICA tax (another 7.65%). But then because it would be a home business where we're essentially self-employed, we'd also have to pay the employer portion of the FICA tax (another 7.65%).

In total, every dollar of profit would be taxed at a rate of 40.3% by the Federal government. And that's before the state government comes in and potentially levies more taxes on the profit depending on our total revenue. Needless to say that's put enough of a damper on the benefit of making more money that even after examining the numbers several times we've always decided to continue making less money.

Your argument that people like me don't exist is just an emotional opinion. If people like me, in the 25% tax bracket are foregoing additional income because the taxes on it are too high, you can bet that people in higher tax brackets, who almost uniformly work longer hours already in order to be there, are going to be even more discouraged from working harder and earning extra income when they look at what portion of it the government wants to take.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Theoretically, the "standard deduction" (if you don't itemize) is supposed to approximate the cost of your labor. It hasn't for a very long time, but theoretically it did." The "standard deduction" should be about $40,000 to $60,000 now.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[blue9steel]

Well, agriculture employed more than 50% of the population till about the mid 1880s. The main court decisions that lead to the explosion of the corporate form were:

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad – 118 U.S. 394 (1886)

Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania – 125 U.S. 181 (1888)

Carnegie Steel was a company, but when it was sold to J.P. Morgan in 1901 to form US Steel that was a corporation. As a rough estimate I'd have to say I'm talking about the pre-20th century economy for the most part.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I short myself a dollar on payroll, I gain 4 back in taxes ...

Of course that only works for $1 per year, so my get rich quick plan is a little slower than I had hoped for ;)

It does however meet the request above, lol

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[visualight]

If the job market says my labor is worth $50.00/hr then why isn't it valued at that rate when I exchange it? I "own" something with an objectively verifiable market price of $50.00 , and, it did not become worth that much for "free". It cost decades of growing and learning, devoting my attention to things I do not enjoy and cannot be considered leisure.

The premise is that if the job market values my labor at X , then it is true that the expense of creating that value is also X --regardless of my ability to itemize that expense.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[JesseMcDonald]

Of course you take the job; 75% of the extra income goes into your pocket.

You're assuming that all else is equal. Of course you'd take the raise if it meant more money for the same work, even if 99% of the increase was wasted on taxes. But that isn't realistic; a better-paying job generally means more work, more stress, perhaps relocating to a new area. It may also require extra capital investment in the form of training or certification. If you only get 75% of the marginal income, while still paying 100% of the marginal cost, then changing jobs seems rather less worthwhile. The fact that individuals effectively pay income tax on (economic) revenues rather than profits amplifies the problem immensely. Their main expenses, the time and effort they put in to their jobs, are highly limited resources and yet are not deductible for tax purposes.

This has somewhat less of an effect on corporate income taxes, since a business's economic profit more closely parallels its accounting profit. Which is not to say that there is no effect; even for a business not all costs are deductible, or even readily measurable, and there is a point of diminishing returns; the taxes make the returns diminish that much faster relative to the costs.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Kohath]

I don't think the majority of the population wants to go back to working on farms. Saying "the economy worked just fine" back then -- even if true -- isn't really an argument for getting rid of the corporate structure in the context of a modern economy.

If you wanted to get rid of corporations and limited liability, you'd probably want to argue how an alternative arrangement would enable people to have better lives. Otherwise it's just destructive: "Corporations bad. Smash."

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Tax income, and they have reason to make less. Why go get the new job that pays a tad more when 25% of your raise goes to the feds?

In the US, the tax rates are tiered so this never happens. I don't remember the actual tiers, you can look them up if you like, but the work like this:

Your first $10K is on the house
Your second $10K is taxed at say 10% (so $1 for the first 20K since the first 10K is free)
Your next $50K is taxed at say 15%
Your next $100K is taxed at say 20%

And so on. You will never make less money by getting a raise because of US federal income tax.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did. European Welfare state, though. That means I had the right to work 32 hours, healthcare coverage was unaffected when I did, and my net income only dropped by approx 8% or so as I was in the top 10% earners before.

I think the right to work part-time was a mistake in hindsight, even to politicians. It's not the poor who work shorter, it's the rich who can afford to. But it's that same group who paid the majority of income taxes, and the progressive rates meant that a 20% drop in working hours translates to a much larger drop in tax income. (With a flat tax, a 20% drop in wages is also only a 20% drop in taxes). And yet the left can't drop it because it's "social policy" and the right not because it's "family policy".

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is that logical? Presumably there's a reason the other job pays more. Longer hours, dirtier work, or other downsides. That's a downside for which the other employer will pay, but you only pocket 75% of the extra pay.

Now the theory here is the Laffer curve. It's obvious that at 0% tax and no extra hours, everybody would take the other job. At 100% tax and double the hours, nobody would. Somewhere in between people must hesitate and consider both offers equivalent, and different people may have different trade-offs.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[SlaveToTheGrind]

Individuals aren't taxes based on their profit but income. Corporations should minimally be held to the same standard.

Taxing businesses' income rather than their profits would severely disadvantage businesses with ultra-thin profit margins (e.g., supermarkets, whose net profit before taxes currently averages under 2%).

If your profit margin isn't high enough to cover this tax then you shouldn't incorporate.

See above, and be careful what you wish for -- bye bye supermarkets. Or, I suppose their other option in your world would be to raise their prices by ~4.5% across the board so their net profit would remain the same. Hard to imagine a more regressive tax than that.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[blue9steel]

Apparently you missed the part where I said the current system is better. From an economic perspective limited liability encourages investment by lowering the risk of investments. Lower risk means more projects get done which generally results in greater wealth generation.

There are some downsides to our current system that make it more like zero liability than limited liability and those should probably be addressed. The simplest fix I've seen is called "double liability", essentially shareholders are on the hook for an additional amount equal to their original investment. Given that sort of increased but still quantifiable and limited risk I believe shareholders would take a much more active role in ensuring their directors keep a tight rein over sources of potential liability. This solution has the advantage of actually having been used before in the US and it seemed to work tolerably well, though of course nothing is perfect.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[SillyHamster]

Show me anyone outside the 1% and even 99% of the 1%'ers that would choose to make less money because they where being taxed too heavily on it. That is a complete fallacy.

People don't simply "make money". They trade goods or services to get paid.

There's a difference between working 1 hour to earn $100, and working a week to earn $100. The first sounds like a good deal, the latter sounds like a waste of time.

Everyone has a threshold, and taxes make it so that you earn less for the same effort. If there was a 99% tax so you could spend an hour to make $1, would you still do it?

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you deduct the costs of your shoes and clothing?

Your food?

Your washing machine, and power used for showers?

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no "my new candy didn't sell" insurance.

Yes there is. It's called bankruptcy.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to talk people who work 3 jobs just to make enough to pay for food. The majority of people do not save or only a tiny bit (because they can't).

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Opportunist]

I said I live to work, so whatever I need to live should be deductable as work related expenses.

My tax agency didn't agree.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Opportunist]

You can actually cover your basic expenses (food, clothing, housing, medical bills...) from the untaxed portion of your income?

Write a book and tell the people how to do this!

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, "the left" and their evil taxation.

I'm reminded firmly of the neoliberals who, in New Zealand of the 1980s, put a Goods and Services Tax (GST) of 10% on all spending, to both increase tax revenue and reduce spending so people would save more. It was later increased to 12.5%.

For those who are about to leap up and say "but but but that was Labour, and they're a left wing party," it's probably worth pointing out that Roger Douglas retired in 2011 from the ACT party, a firmly right wing political party.

He was never left wing.

Anyway, 23 years later, when another lot of neoliberals got in after promising not to increase the GST rate, they immediately cut taxes on the wealthy (the "job creators" they called them, who promptly cut jobs across the nation and increased the unpaid overtime of their lowest paid workers) and increased GST to 15%.

The poorest section of society, making up roughly 40% of the population, complained that they were going to struggle even harder so the government explained to the poorest that, if we didn't like it we were free to not spend all of our incomes on just surviving. Unfortunately, being the poorest, most of us do spend all of our incomes just to get by.

Median wage in my city is $20,400. The wage you need to actually live (not survive) on is closer to $35,000, which naturally varies in the cities around the country.

As far as your idiotic overtime argument goes, around 50% (and almost certainly more) of the population in my town work overtime for free, as a gift to their employers who just can't afford to pay for the overtime out of their $10 million profit made this year. I know I've worked about 50 hours this year, and I've graciously chosen to not take my statutory holiday pay so the business can be more successful.

Well, you know, not chosen but I have been told that they won't pay it because they've found a loophole.

I mean, we are free to not work the overtime and demand we get paid for our public holidays, but we're also perfectly free to be unemployed. That's the gift the neoliberals in power gave us, especially when they reduced the power of the unions.

Oh, good one Slashdot:

Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 16 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[bws111]

According to the US goverment, if you (as a single person with no children) make more than $11,670/year, then you are not in poverty (ie your basic needs can be met). If you make $11,670/year your tax would be $150, but since you are that close to the poverty line you would be eligible for earned income credit and would pay no taxes (in fact, you may have money coming to you). So, according to the government, yes, you can cover your basic expenses out of the tax-free portion of your income.

Would you be comfortable? Probably not. Would I want to live that way? No. Can you live that way? Yes.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

That must explain why the CEO of the local university turned down her bonus pay offer of up to $50k/year, because she'd be paying extra tax on i... wait a minute! SHE DIDN'T!

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Ash-Fox]

Similar situation in the UK:

Your first 10,000 is 0%.
Up to 31,865 is 20%.
Up to 150,000 is 40%.
Above that, it's 45%.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Ash-Fox]

VAT is mandated by the European Union and is forcefully applied across all European Union countries.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Ash-Fox]

Show me anyone outside the 1% and even 99% of the 1%'ers that would choose to make less money because they where being taxed too heavily on it.

I don't wish to show you actual people. However, I know that people who earn some good coin in my company have the majority of their sallary put into their pension to prevent it from getting taxed.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[JesseMcDonald]

That's a $50 profit (ignoring expenses related to producing that hour of labor such as the cost of an office).

You're ignoring far more than just the cost of an office. Useful labor isn't produced ex nihilo. What about the cost of having you available at that time and place, properly educated and prepared to perform the task? That's a huge cost, even amortized across all 100,000 or so of your lifetime working hours, and you can't deduct any of it. At a minimum there should be a depreciation schedule for the cost of raising a child to an employable age, including the cost of the college education required for most jobs, on top of the $10-30k or so of basic annual living expenses.

Or we could just set the standard deduction at the median income, somewhere around $50k. That's probably a reasonable approximation for what an average employee's time is worth.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

We should scrap the standard deduction/personal deduction and just offer a deduction equal to poverty level.
$11.5 for an individual
$30k for a family of six
And if 100% of the poverty level isn't good enough, just multiply it by a factor.

But to be fair, the government does more today than it does years ago. The biggest problem we have is money spent on military.

I think $40k-$60k would be a lot.

I would favor a negative income tax to help the poor.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[trout007]

Not quite. I am talking about in place of the existing tax code.

So take this mine.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?...
Right now they pay $87M in taxes on $2789M in revenue or about 3%. So prices wouldn't go up that much. If anything their costs of tax complience would also go down quite a bit.

Re: Why tax profits, why not income?

[bws111]

You picked a company with a nice fat profit margin. Now look at the other end. In 2009 (picked because it came up first in a search) Walmart had $405B in revenue, made a profit of $22B on that, and paid $7.1B in taxes. Under your scheme they would owe $20B in taxes, leaving them with no real profit at all. And of course companies with a loss still have revenue, so your tax scheme is just sinking them farther into a hole, which is not good for anyone.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[david_thornley]

Back when I was a sole proprietorship, I deducted all of my job expenses, but the IRS wasn't going to let me deduct my home expenses (since I didn't have a part to devote soley for my business). I was subject to the same restrictions on deductions that employees are.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[david_thornley]

No, the principles are the same.

The difference is that I personally spend a lot of money not on making more money, pure consumption. My employer spends its money on making money. I don't get deductions for food to eat and a place to sleep, and neither does the corporation that employs me.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[david_thornley]

Income tax brackets are not there to account for expenses, they're there on the principle that somebody like me can spare more money than somebody making minimum wage. (Personal tax dodges and the capital gains tax are there on the principle that the rich shouldn't pay as much tax, proportionately, as everybody else.)

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[AK Marc]

One failure would mean permanent destitution

So if you abolished the limited-liability construct of corporations, you'd have to eliminate the concept of bankruptcy as well? I don't see that as a logical conclusion.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[AK Marc]

No, there are insurers that will insure anything. The finger of an actor, or anything. Yes, they'll even insure you against business loss. And not just the very common business interruption insurance.

That you are ignorant isn't proof of the opposite.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[blue9steel]

Food and sleep are necessary overhead, if you don't believe me try cutting them and see how well your labor power holds up.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only programs in the USA that lead to less overall income when you get a raise are ones for poor people like Medicaid where making one extra dollar can cut off your benefits.

Or in a tiered ("progressive") taxation system when you earn just enough to kick you into the next tax bracket, such that your net income becomes less. Been there, done that, several souvenir articles of clothing were purchased (then tax and duty paid).

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[HeckRuler]

Income tax brackets are not there to account for expenses,

That was the entire crux of bws111's argument that I was calling bullshit upon.

they're there on the principle that somebody like me can spare more money than somebody making minimum wage.

Also that people like us have more control over the economic system and can pull in more money then what's really fair. It's a progressive system because a capitalistic system is regressive, winners take all and the more you win the more you can take.

(Personal tax dodges

Are illegal, per the definition. A tax dodge means you're not paying money you owe. ...ah ah ah, I see the term has evolved a bit. Apparently tax "avoidance" is all the legal ways people avoid paying taxes while tax "evasion" is a crime.... fuckers.

and the capital gains tax are there on the principle that the rich shouldn't pay as much tax, proportionately, as everybody else.)

No. No no, don't drink the cool-aid. That's just a cynical view from the opposition. Capital gains taxes have a special status because, and this is the rational they use not the one I believe, because it's "already been taxed". They think that when you invest in a business, any gains the business has has been taxed, so when they sell that investment, they don't want to be taxed again. But that's bullshit and why the cynical view has developed.

If I buy a calf for $200, feed it till it's a cow, and then sell it for $1000, I pay taxes on $1000 of income. But if I buy a stock for $200, wait a few years, and sell it for $1000, then I pay a special lower rate because investing is some magical thing and it's not really property and all the other bullshit arguments.

But no, don't take the cynical view. That'll lead to an ulcer and make you a bitter man. Take the realist view that capital gains taxes are there because wealthy investors have control over the taxation system.

Re:Why tax profits, why not income?

[Opportunist]

I'll believe that the moment I get to see anyone who had anything to do with fixing this amount getting by on this amount. It's easy to say "X is enough for you to live on" if you don't have to do it yourself.

Seriously. If there is ONE politician, no matter the party, that lives for a year on that amount of money, he will have my vote for the rest of his political career!

Why call it a 'Google' tax?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure why this is being pegged as a google tax, it should hit every major multinational, all of of whom are doing what they can to not pay taxes in any country.

Re:Why call it a 'Google' tax?

[thaylin]

Because some people have a hard on to hurt Google.

great name

[slashmydots]

So they're calling it the Google tax when Google is actually based in the United States and the law doesn't affect Google in any way. Great choice of names.
I am happy a country finally had the balls to pass a law like this and end the complete nonsense of pretending to be based overseas. Hopefully the US passes it next.

Re:great name

[thaylin]

The law would affect google if they sold any goods or services in the UK, say advertisement spaces.

Re:great name

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely correct!

Google doesn't sell anything or make any money in the UK.

Doesn't sell apps through the play store, doesn't sell any Nexus devices, doesn't sell any advertising, not a sausage.... Well, not profitably anyway, it's a strangely expensive business to be in, as there are all these funny fees and license payments they have to pay, all to other google subsidiaries in Ireland/Luxembourg/Netherlands/etc.

All seems above board to me!!

Re:great name

[tomxor]

Google is actually based in the United States and the law doesn't affect Google in any way

Perhaps you should check out google's own map. Not to mention this CCTLD. Still sure a particular countries law could not possibly apply to an international company operating in that country?

Re:great name

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite the sarcasm, that's probably truer that you would think. The apps are sold from a data center which is in fact located in Ireland. The Nexus devices aren't made in England but in China, and the point of entry into the EU might very well be in the Netherlands. It's not like the Port of Rotterdam became Europe's biggest by just handling Dutch trade.

The fact is that manufacturing activity is one of the few things which you can decently assign to a particular country, and the UK is doing particularly bad in that sector. If they complain about shifty businesses, the rest of Europe has a few words to say about the City.

Algorithm

[countach]

I'm not sure what Britain has in mind, but I've long argued for a system like this. Say Apple does business in my country. Say they do 6% of their global business and revenue in my country. OK, then whatever profits Apple makes world wide throughout their empire throughout all associated companies, you've got to pay tax in my country on 6% of it.

If you want to argue that for whatever reason the product mix of sales in my country is lower margin than your global business because the product mix is different, ok fine, but the onus would be on you to demonstrate that, and the level of proof required would be high.

Re:Algorithm

[gnupun]

OK, then whatever profits Apple makes world wide throughout their empire throughout all associated companies, you've got to pay tax in my country on 6% of it.

That's just wrong. Say Apple's total annual sales is $100B, and $6B of that is from your country. But profit margin varies from product to product. Say another country also has $6B sales, but the average profit margin of Apple products is 30% in that country and 15% in yours. Say, also that the profit margin difference is not due to different pricing in each country, but because some products have a higher profit margin than others. Should Apple pay the same tax to both countries? That makes no sense at all.

Re:Algorithm

[admiral snackbar]

For me the real problem isn't that some corporations don't pay taxes in some countries, its that some corporations hardly pay taxes anywhere. That is the real problem. I don't mind Starbucks not paying taxes in the UK, as long as they pay a fair share of taxes somewhere. What I would do is this: I would demand from all corporations operating in the country an overview of the corporate income taxes they pay anywhere in the world. If this is the same or more than the national corporate income tax rate, I would not add any tax. If it is lower, I would take cut of the lower amount equal to the percentage of total business they do in the country. Example: Apple makes 10 billion profit a year and pays 500 million in corporate income tax (anywhere in the world), while the corporate income tax is 25%. So they should have paid 2.5 billion in taxes, a shortfall of 2 billion. If they have 50% of their revenue in the US, the US should take 50% of the shortfall, i.e. 1 billion. This way, you avoid double taxation and you still force corporations to pay a reasonable tax to some country at least. In your example, theoretically Apple could have shifted all their profits to the UK and paid a regular 30% (or whatever the corporate tax rate is there) corporate income tax, and then also be forced to pay in the US over their revenue share (if the US implemented your system)

Re:Algorithm

[admiral snackbar]

If that is the case, Apple would soon learn to slice their business into different units, and have the unit incorporated in country X to pay taxes there over their 15% profit margin, and have the more profitable business unit incorporated in country Y pay corporate income tax there over just the more profitable business.

Re:Algorithm

[AmiMoJo]

The EU is trying to introduce something similar at that level, so actually Osborne is just getting in early and trying to claim the credit for something that would have to happen soon anyway.

Re:Algorithm

[rockabilly]

I think you are confused with what he is saying. Every country has their own unique taxing system. It just so happens that the UK is applying a fixed percentage on the profits companies take in. It is up to the company to decide what their margins are to be, not the government.

Re:Algorithm

[mnooning]

I mostly agree, but let me add an additional idea.

Eaton Corp (large and small electrical controls devices) moved their HQ to Ireland a few years. They can claim the higher US expenditures and the lower Irish tax rates. Smart for the investors. Terrible for America as a whole. I tend to be right of center, but I see what the British are doing as a step in the right direction.

The real, permanent solution would be to eliminate corporate taxes altogether. Buildings and piles of corporate paperwork do not have feelings, for example "enjoyment of less taxation", so jealousy should not be aroused at this idea. Instead, just tax the profits of the people who own the corporation at a slightly higher rate. If those people want to move to another country to avoid the personal income taxes, so be it, but the majority would stay right here, and there would be no more Eaton style HQ transfers.

Re:Algorithm

[Kohath]

If you're in favor of this in the US, you're in favor of a huge tax cut for multinational companies.

Re:Algorithm

[Maxwell]

That's already illegal in most countries (any IFRS country). See Transfer Pricing and 'non arms length transactions' for the details....

Re:Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

So, then, companies will do the same thing on an international level as they do with states in the U.S. Game one state against another for preferable tax treatment.

Shift you profits to whatever country has the lowest tax rate, use the extra profits to lobby other countries for something even lower. Switch to moving your profits to that country, rinse, repeat.

Who loses in this scenario? All the citizens, everywhere.

Re:Algorithm

[HeckRuler]

If you're a Briton travelling abroad on vacation, and you buy a doughnut in Berlin, does the baker owe Britain a tax?

Because the Internet makes it REAL easy to go make a deal with entities in other countries. The crux of the question is where is the business being done? You're sitting in London, the server you're talking to is in the USA, the effects of an ad happen "on the Internet", the corporation is an ethereal beast that transcends borders. Does it matter?

Also.... couldn't Germany and Briton both claim that Google does 90% of their business in their country? How would Google settle that?

Taxation based on market share is interesting. But it's going to have just as many issues as the current system.

Re:Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazingly, the fix is to allow all corporations to pay no tax.

And the reason is simple (and not something I came up myself, it's been known for well over a century): Corporations don't pay tax, period. You can point at their tax receipts and I'll ask you where that money came from. It all comes from the customer having to pay more for the product, or maybe the shareholder seeing less return on investment, or maybe the employee getting paid less. To a corporation, tax is cost of doing business, and to keep doing business it has to rake in more than it spends. So tax engineering is nothing but advanced cost-cutting.

So to avoid corporations try and engineer their taxes, make them tax free. This is fair as long as you give all of them the same tax-free regime, as opposed to the current situation where the big ones get to leverage their size and negotiate tax breaks or shunt profits around the world and whatnot. What I want is for taxes to be paid on what happens in the current country, and you best do that by taxing the workers (income tax) and taxing the customer.

Of course, this'll be unpopular because now it becomes clear that those who end up with the tax buck, eventually, get to see just how much they're being gouged for taxes. But that is not so bad really. Let them complain, and maybe governments will be forced to lower their taxes and spill less of that lovely tax revenue. Because in the end taxes are levied for a reason, and we've forgotten that a bit.

We just get taxed and invertebrate pathological liars elsewhere spend it on their "friends". That is arguably a worse abuse than corporations juggling their accounting numbers according to the governments' own and rather byzantine rules. But of course it's the liars running the show so it'll never happen, and instead we get... this.

Re:Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mind Starbucks not paying taxes in the UK, as long as they pay a fair share of taxes somewhere.

The UK starbucks would be benefitting from all the public services of the town they are in yet not paying anything back. That's just siphoning of money from one country to another. Terribly unfair to the town they are siphoning resources from.

Re:Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It levels the playing field. Why should multinational companies be penalized for being based in the US? Why should some companies pay zero taxes by using accounting trickery to shift their profits to other countries? Why should we penalize companies for repatriating money made over seas to invest in the US or pay their owners as dividends (owners pay income tax on dividend). Actually, while we are leveling the playing field, dividends should be pre-tax dollars like an expense so that the owners paid for owning the company pay their own taxes instead of double taxing that money.

Re:Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

They absolutely do pay taxes somewhere - thus the shuffling. The overwhelming problem is that the amount of taxes they pay somewhere else are based on rules that result in them paying a much lower percentage in taxes than if they were paying taxes in your country on that amount. So instead of paying 15% on profits in your country, they are paying 0.5% somewhere else, with probably a ton more applicable exclusions.

Making the money outright disappear only happens in Hollywood accounting.

Re:Algorithm

[godrik]

You are exposing yourself to Hollywood accounting by doing this.
Say you want to pay taxes in country FOO because the taxes are better there. You choose to subcontract your wallpainting to a company in FOO that charge you an insane amount. Your big company no longer makes any profit, and the wallpainting company is making tons of profit at FOO's rate.

Of course, this one is obvious and will certainly be considered fraud. But there are more subtle ways of doing the same thing that will look legitimate.

Re:Algorithm

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mind Starbucks not paying taxes in the UK, as long as they pay a fair share of taxes somewhere.

I couldn't disagree more. If Starbucks makes money and does so by taking advantage of infrastructure, labor or whatever in my country then my country had damn well better tax them.

Re:Algorithm

[TheSync]

Say they do 6% of their global business and revenue in my country. OK, then whatever profits Apple makes world wide throughout their empire throughout all associated companies, you've got to pay tax in my country on 6% of it.

So if a company can't make a high profit in your country, they simply would never invest in business operations in your country if you are going to tax them on revenues instead of profits. Sure, that is one scheme.

Re:Algorithm

[TheSync]

I don't mind Starbucks not paying taxes in the UK, as long as they pay a fair share of taxes somewhere.

In 2012, Starbucks had operating income of about $2 billion and paid $674 million in income taxes.

In the last 12 months ending Sept. 27, 2014, Apple paid $14 billion in income taxes on $52 billion operating income.

Of course both of these companies paid significant amounts of sales taxes as well as income taxes.

"Highly Tax Efficient"?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an interesting euphemism for "being dirty rotten cheats".

(Yes, I know it's "legal", but that doesn't make it "right".)

Re:"Highly Tax Efficient"?

[Anonymous Coward]

legality has less to do with right or wrong than ever before

Re:"Highly Tax Efficient"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Liberal much?

Re:"Highly Tax Efficient"?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is what GP wrote liberal? I would say it is quite the opposite. Liberals tend to view taxes as a necessary evil, whereas left-wing people seem to be very fond of taxation.

25% of 0 is still 0

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Google claims all its income is used to pay for their server farms, their profit is 0. So, how much is 25% of 0 again?

More companies will apply this 'trick' to evade the new tax law.

Re:25% of 0 is still 0

[91degrees]

That's roughly what they're doing already. This law addresses that. Charging for server farms would be considered "economic activity" and therefore these payments would be taxed at 25%.

Re:25% of 0 is still 0

[ledow]

Hence why this is a tax on sales, not a tax on profits.

Whatever you do with the money, it gets taxed. Even if you "pay yourself" via a roundabout method.

Re:25% of 0 is still 0

[Anonymous Coward]

A public company can't do that because the stockholders will go apeshit if Google didn't make any profit at all. Any reported profit, which is what stockholders demand, is taxable.

Easy: just kill IP

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course killinng "Intellectual Property" wouldn't be realistical not thoroughly fair. But strongly curtailing it would go a long way towards a better wold:

  * strongly limit the duration of afforded protection
  * don't let IP "owners" to set an arbitrary phantasy price
  * acutally force an "owner" to use the IP or relinquish control within some reasonable time limit

IP isn't some property and speculation on IP is already doing a huge damage (speculation on food is doing a huge damage too, but I disgress).

Re:Blame America.

[thaylin]

Mainly the multinational wall street. When people were more concerned with long term investments, and not make a buck in 1 second investment we have now , it was not a problem

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

this would only make sense if private people wouldnt pay any taxes at all.

Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[Chirs]

I know it sounds crazy at first blush, but I think it would make sense to totally get rid of corporate taxes. (Replaced by other forms of taxation.)

The basic idea is that a corporation is nothing but a bunch of people owning it, so instead of taxing the corporation you tax the individual owners (owners, shareholders, etc.) instead. Since corporations wouldn't be paying taxes, you could then get rid of all of the tax breaks/writeoffs for corporations, which would significantly simplify corporate accounting and reduce the incentive for large corporations to shift money around to avoid tax.

Some references:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/8/59...

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[Anonymous Coward]

government bases it's model on lots of little bits of taxation to fool you. If you just had one single tax - say sales tax - it would feel gigantic - even though you would prob be paying the same % of your income.

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[swillden]

government bases it's model on lots of little bits of taxation to fool you. If you just had one single tax - say sales tax - it would feel gigantic - even though you would prob be paying the same % of your income.

You've put your finger on the key point... corporate taxes are a way to hide taxes from taxpayers, so they don't realize just how much they're paying.

Personally, I think that's a bad thing, not a good one. People should know what they're paying so they can decide if they're getting good value for their money.

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it sounds crazy at first blush, but I think it would make sense to totally get rid of corporate taxes. (Replaced by other forms of taxation.)

The basic idea is that a corporation is nothing but a bunch of people owning it, so instead of taxing the corporation you tax the individual owners (owners, shareholders, etc.) instead. Since corporations wouldn't be paying taxes, you could then get rid of all of the tax breaks/writeoffs for corporations, which would significantly simplify corporate accounting and reduce the incentive for large corporations to shift money around to avoid tax.

What is stopping someone from making their own corporation which owns their home, their car, and buys their food, thus that person no longer has to pay any taxes. Now think about everyone doing this clearly optimal plan.

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that when corporations make massive profits thanks in part to all the services the host country provides, and the company passes nothing but minimum wage on to their employees, what you end up with is a system that burdens ordinary employees with an ever larger proportion of taxes. It's like the employees are paying the company's "government overhead" costs for them. That doesn't seem fair, because you're basically socializing all the costs of government and not guaranteeing that any of the profits get back to employees beyond what is legislated as a bare minimum. At least under the current scheme if companies make a lot of money, they start paying more back into the system that enabled them to do so.

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you also have to introduce rules for the amount of money a corporation is allowed to own before it *has* to be given to the owners? You can't expect a company the size of Microsoft (for example) to run all it's money from Bill Gates (or whoever is running the show these days) own personal bank account. That would be massively inefficient. So they would have to have some operating capital to run the day to day from - paying staff, rental on property etc.

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[godrik]

How does this change anything? the shareholders of Google are not in the UK and so would not be paying taxes there.

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians put corporate taxes in place so that they don't have to tax the general populace. They still get peoples money, but (some of) those people will think the money is coming magically from the corporation ("The Man") rather than their own pockets. It is a tenant of the left that taxes should be as obtuse as possible so that they can be better maximized.

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[LDAPMAN]

Uhhhh...The law. There are thousands of pages of tax code that define what expenses can be charged as valid business expenses. Expenseing some of the cost of your home, car, and even some food is possible. However, you have to meet pretty strict guidelines and have to keep extensive records. Even then, the IRS can decide you can't.

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[sabbede]

People everywhere in the world own shares of Google. And Google has employees in the UK whose income is taxed. Past that, maybe the UK doesn't have a right to tax them.

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that as a rich corporate owning asshole I get to cherry pick:

* do things which are highly-taxed in the UK somewhere else.
* do things in UK which are either not taxed or require government-sponsored highly developed society.

This is a situation where more of my actual operations depends on UK than I pay taxes there. By what logic UK wouldn't have a right to rectify the inbalance considering that I'm really just a guest there?

Re:Get rid of corporate taxes totally

[Anonymous Coward]

So how are you going to prevent corporate owners pretending to be butt broke and abusing corporate assets or living someplace with no income or capital tax?

Corporations don't really pay taxes

[TwoEyedJack]

Every dollar of corporate tax is built in to the cost of the good or service they offer to us, so *we* actually pay corporate taxes. Politicians love indirect taxes like this because you don't see the line item for taxes. If it was up to me, you would get one tax bill per year. No sales taxes, income taxes, property taxes, corporate taxes, personal property taxes, or any of the rest. On 4/15 you would get a bill payable immediately for your share of the bloated leviathan into which our government has morphed. Then we would see some serious discussions on spending. The first trillion dollars of debt the US government ran up took over 205 years. The latest trillion only took 403 days. We are in deep kim chi.

Shouldn't that be Apple Tax?

[Anonymous Coward]

After all they pioneered this shit...

Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[Chirs]

The basic idea is that a corporation is nothing but a bunch of people owning it, so instead of taxing the corporation you shift the tax to the individual owners (owners, shareholders, etc.) instead. Since corporations wouldn't be paying taxes, you could then get rid of all of the tax breaks/writeoffs for corporations, which would significantly simplify corporate accounting and reduce the incentive for large corporations to shift money around to avoid tax.

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[thaylin]

However then you also need to get rid of special tax breaks that only those owners can take advantage of.

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[blue9steel]

I'd be ok with that as long as the burden is shifted to the shareholders not the general public.

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish +6 was possible.

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[Anonymous Coward]

The basic idea is that a corporation is nothing but a bunch of people owning it, so instead of taxing the corporation you shift the tax to the individual owners (owners, shareholders, etc.) instead.

As long as that means we're taking away everything that comes with being considered a separate entity, I'm for it. But that means the owners are jointly liable for the finances of the corporation. You own 10% of Enron, your house and cars are on the line when they go bankrupt. That means the corporation has no right to free speech, which means we can regulate the shit out of product advertisements and campaign contributions by corporations.

What's the sound? Do I hear Libertarians jumping ship? What happened to the "basic idea that a corporation is nothing but a bunch of people owning it"?

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[Rich0]

++

Corporations love to socialize the risks and privatize the benefits. If some Pharma company releases a drug that kills a bunch of people, I don't hear the libertarians calling for liability for anybody who had money in a 401k that was partially invested in a mutual fund that had .5% of its shares in the company 5 years ago when the decisions were made that led to the problem.

And this is why corporations make short-term decisions. The person making the decision gets his bonus today. The shareholders get their dividends today. The consequences (if any) come for the shareholders 5 years from today.

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[Streetlight]

I keep hearing this suggestion but have not heard how those taxes on the shareholders would be taxed. If you own the stock of a company that pays no dividend you won't pay any tax even if the stock price increases. Under today's tax law taxes aren't levied on the increase in stock equity unless the stock is sold. And then the tax depends on how long one owns the stock and the total income of the seller so it's either 15% or 20% for long term holds. I also haven't heard anyone propose taxing the change in equity value of companys' shares held by individuals. If stock prices decrease then would shareholders should get credit for that decrease? Furthermore, the taxes produced could be very volatile as the willingness of stockholders to sell or buy stock varies. One thing government at all levels need is certainty in the size of annual tax revenue to pay for required services. One way taxes might be levied on owners of companies is to distribute all after expenses revenues to shareholders and then tax the shareholders. Companies are able to manipulate their books so there are no after expenses profits including moving profits overseas so there may never be any taxes paid directly or indirectly by companies.

I want to hear how shareholders in companies would pay taxes corporate taxes.

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[blue9steel]

There are a variety of different ways you could do it, probably the simplest would be to divide earnings by the number of shares outstanding and require that each shareholder report that money on their own tax form (adjusted for the number of shares they own of course). I'm not a tax accountant but I believe that's fairly similar to how an S Corp works. Obviously the devil is in the details but in principle that sounds reasonable.

Re: Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK, the government can't abolish corporation tax because they would have to abolish income tax at the same time. Corporations compete against self employed people in the same market. That is why corporation tax and income tax are both set at more or less equivalent rates, so that there is no significant tax advantage to be gained from switching legal status between operating as a corporation or self employed. Abolishing corporation tax adobe would effectively give corporations a huge tax cut, making self employment uncompetitive and forcing self employed people to either cease trading or increase prices or form corporations (which they do not want to do, as corporations have more complex administrative requirements).

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[JesseMcDonald]

And this is why corporations make short-term decisions. The person making the decision gets his bonus today. The shareholders get their dividends today. The consequences (if any) come for the shareholders 5 years from today.

And this is why those whose decisions have a significant, long-term effect on the value of the company get their bonuses in the form of stock options dated 5-10 years from now rather than cash. If they make short-sighted decisions that come back to haunt the company later, their bonuses (often a significant part of their overall compensation) become worthless.

This is also why investors should carefully consider a company's history and policies and whether there might be any skeletons lurking in the its closets before purchasing shares.

Re: Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[jcr]

they would have to abolish income tax at the same time.

and what's the downside?

-jcr

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[Anonymous Coward]

No you don't. You want to hear every tell you that you're so smart you've seen through the veil and have acquired knowledge the rest of us do not possess. IOW, you wanna feel speshial.

Re: Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[Anonymous Coward]

If taxes on economic activity were abolished, then either taxes on savings and property ownership would have to be massively increased to balance out the lost income, or the state as we know it would become unaffordable and collapse. Since most people like having the existing state system, they will never vote for the latter.

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[RuffMasterD]

shift the tax to the individual owners (owners, shareholders, etc.) instead

Simply won't happen, because politicians own shares. They need to put their money somewhere. And they also want to be re-elected, so they won't shift it all to the voting public either.

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[CrimsonAvenger]

I don't hear the libertarians calling for liability for anybody who had money in a 401k that was partially invested in a mutual fund that had .5% of its shares in the company 5 years ago when the decisions were made that led to the problem.

Note that this is exactly the reason that corporations are Limited Liability Corporations. If a stockholder was liable for the decisions of the management of a company, noone would buy stock.

Which would leave us with a world even more divided between the haves and have-nots....

Re:Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[NewYork]

http://wh.gov/iCfVS
Buffett's secretary Bosanek pays a tax rate of 35.8 percent of income, while Buffett pays a rate at 17.4 percent on profit. http://news.yahoo.com/warren-b...

Re: Why not abolish corporate taxes entirely?

[jcr]

the state as we know it would become unaffordable and collapse.

Great! How soon could we make that happen?

-jcr

There is no single "fair" value.

[Chirs]

How much is "fair" depends on the culture the company and government are operating in.

You could have a libertarian society with minimal government involvement and minimal taxation, but where every individual has to pay for everything they do. (Roads, fire protection, ambulance, medical, police, education, utilities, garbage collection, etc.)

On the other hand, you could have a more socialist society with high taxation and high government involvement, but where most of the services are paid for by the government.

Both are viable solutions, with different tradeoffs.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[MagickalMyst]

Or you could have a society that is not dependent upon central banks and the fractional reserve system - one which prints its own currency debt-free and backed by a commodity such as gold or silver - without a national debt (interest owed to central banks for borrowing our nation's currency) and more economic prosperity for all.

As it stands, most - if not all - income tax dollars collected go to pay back the central banks.

The taxman, in many ways, is little more than a glorified collection agency for the banksters.

See also:

Money As Debt

The Creature From Jekyll Island

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[tnk1]

Services paid for by the government *are* services paid for by individuals. I pay a significant portion of my paycheck in taxes. Please don't tell me that I'm not individually paying for government programs.

What you mean is that the government ensures that everyone has individual services irrespective of their ability to pay for them. They make that happen by charging individuals with those means to pay for people who do not have those means. If I am poor and want fire services, under a libertarian system, I pay let's say $100, but under the government, I pay $10, $1 or even zero. If I am not poor, under a libertarian system I will still pay $100 for fire services, but under the government, I pay $150 (or more).

Unless the government is an entity that generates its own operating expenses from the sale of a service or product, it is not anything other than individuals being forced to pay for services. It's just not all individuals at the same rate.

Don't get me wrong, I am not necessarily arguing for the existence of the a la carte ultra-Libertarian state. The government exists for a reason and I happily pay taxes for those services that government is well designed to manage. What I don't like is when the government becomes an engine for wealth redistribution, forced charity, or social engineering experiments.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[dryeo]

It's more complex then that. Under a Libertarian system, if not enough people pay their $100 then everyone is likely to suffer when the big fire destroys the town. Both due to the fire feeding on the property of people who didn't pay up and the insurance company going bankrupt due to the large amount of damage.
This is why the insurance industry lobbied so hard for socialized fire protection.
This of course brings up the other advantage of taxes, stability for the companies in different forms. The extreme example being the banking industry who really benefited from the taxpayers when they totally overextended themselves in 2008. Other benefits include the workers being able to fall back on government help when times are tough including medical in most countries. And of course supplementing income so companies can pay less for labour and make bigger profits. Would Walmart be as successful if they had to pay a living wage to keep employees?

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[sabri]

What I don't like is when the government becomes an engine for wealth redistribution, forced charity, or social engineering experiments.

My kingdom for modpoints.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, just those two options? Nothing in-between? You'd think we'd have evolved a bit more than that by now...

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

" but where most of the services are paid for by the government."

you do realize that the government does not have any of its own money. it's all taken at gun point from the people.

a system that does not involve extorting your fellow man, for your upkeep, is preferable.

learn to take care of yourself.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

Both are viable solutions, with different tradeoffs.

This is like claiming that a communist country is a great solution. In theory communism is great since everybody gets what they need and so on. In practice nobody has every managed to construct a communist country even though many have tried.

Whilst Somalia and Iraq are kind of clear attempts to create libertarian societies, and I have to admit that they do still continue more than communist countries (Cuba being the possible exception there), you really can't claim that they are viable since both are being taken over by distinctly non libertarian islamic groups.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

Both are viable solutions, with different tradeoffs.

Citation please. You can *try* to have a society where everyone pays for themselves, but it's inherently unstable. Lose your job? Well, now you can't pay the road tolls to drive around looking for a new job. Which leaves you to die in the ditch.

Why didn't this person save enough money during their employment to cover the costs of road-tolls (etc...) while they look for their next job? That's a great solution for those of us that earn enough to save, or have the will power to delay gratification of spending money. But what about the guy who gets paid minimum wage? He can barely scrape by on what he earns with no ability to save.

Libertarian societies don't have the safety net that people rely on. You can never quit your job, no matter how bad it is, because you can't afford to find a new job. This inevitably leads to companies taking advantage of this situation and working conditions getting worse.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Aryden]

There is not a single item on this earth, nor are there combinations of items that the United states could collect physically to back the currency.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[MagickalMyst]

No, you are wrong.

Gold worked just fine until currency became backed by debt instead of a real commodity.

Read Griffin's book...

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[countach74]

Physical currencies generally have more disadvantages to advantages when compared to virtual ones. There really is no reason, economically, for a currency to be backed by a commodity. There are, however, very real problems that are introduced by inflationary policies and the use of fiat currency. The biggest hurdle for virtual currencies to overcome is to get off the ground in the first place and to be assigned a value by society. (Remember, there is no such thing as "intrinsic" value: a thing only has a value if people assign value to it. Commodities like gold have other uses besides currency, which make them easier and more likely to bootstrap as into a state of money, but that does not mean a virtual currency can never come about as money. Bitcoin has proven that notion wrong.)

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[countach74]

You are right in that Arden is wrong. Obviously there are commodities that can be collected to back a currency. My other comment was just to point out that gold is not a hill worth dying on and it's unfortunate that sound money people get so hung up on it.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Would Walmart be as successful if they had to pay a living wage to keep employees?

Bingo.

Wages that are so low that the government is forced to step in and subsidise them? That's basically slavery. It is in fact, worse than slavery. If I kept slaves, I would have to feed, clothe, and accomodate them. Wal-Mart doesn't even bother to pay them enough for that, because it knows that their cost of living will be kept up by the government, aka, the people.

When all those right-wingers are screaming about minimum wage being too high, they're really advocating more socialism, because you can't have wages that low without social welfare programs. Without welfare, no-one would take a job for so little because they would be unable to survive.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[JasonGoatcher]

Or you could have a society that is not dependent upon central banks and the fractional reserve system - one which prints its own currency debt-free and backed by a commodity such as gold or silver.

Maybe I'm wrong, but if it's backed by gold or silver, it's based on gold or silver, which means it isn't currency. If you use paper to track metal so that you don't have to carry it around, than it's no more money than a check is money. Paper money is the problem, since it's simply backed by the bankers reputation.

People like to complain about taxes, but inflation is also a tax of sorts. Inflation is how most modern governments control the citizens, by devaluing their money. But this can only be done with paper money.

Better mining methods aside, an ounce of gold can buy about the same amount of blood, sweat and tears that it could 100 years ago. I believe gold reflects the true value of a currency.

And, not to sound like a Bible thumper, I believe gold is the money God intended. No direct taxation of a citizen and gold as money, that's the way it's supposed to be. The Bible equates a country directly taxing it's own citizens to a form of servitude. Perhaps the people that run the IRS haven't heard that peonage is a version of slavery.

"Sixteen tons and whattaya get? Another day older and deeper in debt."

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

Historically income inequality doesn't go so well for either the haves or the have-nots. Safety nets and wealth redistribution are an attempt at pressure relief valves from the social strain of people not being able to feed or shelter their children.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the people who run the IRS think that there should be a divide between Church and State?

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[dryeo]

When all those right-wingers are screaming about minimum wage being too high, they're really advocating more socialism, because you can't have wages that low without social welfare programs. Without welfare, no-one would take a job for so little because they would be unable to survive.

That's not really true. They figure that the Walmart workers can live in a cardboard box along with 10 friends to split the rent, live on a pot of rice (cooked on their dried feces) a day and if they get sick, wander into the forest and die. Hey it's still better then the worse place in Africa and they should be happy to have a job in the richest country on Earth and they have no one to blame but themselves for not being born in better circumstances.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

*My* kingdom for mod points.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[tnk1]

And that is why I said that the government is good at certain things and I am happy to pay for them.

What I most objected to, I think, is this idea where someone says, it is either the individual or the government who pays for something. There is no such distinction.

The "government" is a corporate fiction just like any corporation. It is just run under different rules. The government may print money, but it doesn't create the value of the money out of thin air. It doesn't produce things. That value is generated by individuals, either by themselves or as part of a corporate body devoted to production or for-pay services. And since the corporations don't usually eat the cost of taxes, but pass them to consumers, *all* taxes are actually paid by individuals.

There is no division between government money and individual money. It is all individual money, the government merely extracts it and redistributes it to ensure order and collective security from things like fire, invasion, etc.

This is why people are wary of government being used for every problem under the sun. There are people out there who believe that there is this magical vault where the government has money that was not generated somehow by charging people. What people are saying when they want "the government" to pay for it is that they really want other people to pay for it. Just not them. Maybe those rich people over there.

And again... there are times that a government makes a lot of sense, and I probably do generate a lot of benefit for paying to make sure that poor person's house doesn't light my McMansion on fire, but it starts becoming dangerous when people believe that taking from the government isn't actually equivalent to taking from actual humans... they lose sight of where that money actually comes from and they start believing that it is magically produced and can't run out.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[DrLang21]

learn to take care of yourself

Damn straight. Anyone who isn't ready for when TSHTF deserves the screwing they get!

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[Dynedain]

The Bible also pushed for mandatory taxation, sorry, I meant tithing, to the prevaling religious power.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is wrong. Currency is a medium for exchange of value between people. When the currency itself lacks any value in itself you get tons of problems that require a very strong and expensive enforcement mechanism. You must force people to use it. Those that choose not to, you must punish. Modern money is not more then government or central bank IOU note. Governments are usually at a loss and have no money to back it up. Govrernments also fail on their debt often enough.
Currency backed by commodities has the feature of "proof of productive work" and has intrinsic value as the commodity it represents. Gold may be consumed in usefull ways, so can other metals and minerals with total disregard to its exchange value with other products.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[countach74]

I am very aware of this argument, but it is wrong. Gold's viability and value as a currency comes earlier in the market process. There is a sort of paradox when transitioning to a non-commodity money; Ludwig von Mises thought it impossible. Like you said, one way to overcome the paradox is by force of government, and it's been assumed for quite a while that without the force of government, such a money would never come to be... well... money. The argument for this is compelling, but we know it to be wrong simply by looking at Bitcoin. Bitcoin had absolutely no worth, and as such, was completely arbitrary in exchange, yet someone thought it cool enough to try and eventually it stated to hold its own exchange value.

Lastly, *nothing* has intrinsic value: if you simply mean to say that a good has other use cases besides money, that is fine. But the use cases it has are precisely because we have assigned it such. Gold isn't "naturally" worth anything. It is only worth something because we have found uses for it.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[david_thornley]

Without fractional reserve banking, how do you have banks in the current sense? Banks need money to operate. The traditional way to get that money is to lend out some of their deposits, and collect more interest on the loans than they pay on the deposits, which is fractional reserve banking.

As far as income taxes going to banks, you could say, equally truthfully, that most of my take-home pay goes to credit card companies. Of course the money is going through banks on its way to doing other things.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[david_thornley]

Jesus was quite emphatic about whether people should pay their taxes, and he came out in favor of it. In fact, he was unconcerned about money, and considered the accumulation to be a potential trap, hence his advice that the rich man should give all his wealth to the poor. (I've heard arguments about whether this was his advice to people in general, or just people who put too much emphasis on material wealth. He gave different people different advice.)

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[AK Marc]

Would Walmart be as successful if they had to pay a living wage to keep employees?

Yes. But they can be more successful by taxing the middle class to make up for the sub-living wages paid.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[david_thornley]

Governments do produce things. The Defense Department is a government agency that provides military protection and other valuable services, to give one example. Governments are much better suited to providing services than goods, in general (unless you want to consider something like the high-quality water piped to my home a good).

As far as taxing the rich, I'll keep recommending raising their taxes until their tax burden proportional to their income is at least about mine. Due to income tax and FICA, and the fact that I work for almost all my money, I'm in the slice of society with the heaviest Federal taxes.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[AK Marc]

What I most objected to, I think, is this idea where someone says, it is either the individual or the government who pays for something. There is no such distinction.

I pay individually for many of the fees for roads. Fuel taxes are paid individually. DMV fees are paid individually. Road subsidies from the feds are not paid indiviudally. I may pay $100 in taxes that go to the roads, but I didn't pay for them individually. They are aggregated from multiple sources, then re-distreibuted without thought or concern to which dollar came from which source.

There is no division between government money and individual money. It is all individual money,

By your definition, it would be just as valid to claim the opposite. The money isn't individual money when it's separated from the individual and mixed into a general fund. That it all came from individuals is unrelated to the ability to identify which individual it came from.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[MagickalMyst]

> "Without fractional reserve banking, how do you have banks in the current sense? Banks need money to operate."

They don't. Fractional reserve banking IS the problem.

What it means is that the banks can lend out money that they don't have - as long as they have a fraction of it.

For example; a standard 10:1 fractional reserve ratio means that if the bank has $100 in the vault then it can lend out $1000 - and charge interest on it. Absolutely ridiculous, but absolutely true.

Supposing the bank charges 10% or $100 interest and the borrower repays in full.

The bank's vault now has and additional $1100 from the borrower - the principal + interest. The vault itself now contains $1200.

With a 10:1 ratio, the bank can now lend out $12000 and charge interest on it, even though it doesn't have the full reserves to back it....so on and so on..

In short, banks create money out of thin air and charge interest on it!

Of course, the borrower's promise to repay is always backed by real assets as collateral - house, car, etc.. It is 100% ponzi scheme. We are truly slaves to the banksters.

In Canada we have the ability to print our currency debt free (unlike the USA, in which the Federal Reserve - a private corporation - has a monopoly on the government's money supply), but only about 5% of Canadian currency is actually printed debt free. The rest is borrowed from the central banks - at interest.

Mathematically, the cold hard truth is that you can never repay a debt of principal+interest from a pool of money that only contains the principal. Collapse (or loss of assets) is inevitable. A large real-world example of the effect would be Canada losing it's national railway (CN) to the banksters in the 70's.

It is also interesting to note that in Canada, the "Bank of Canada" is a special corporation setup as a liason between the Government of Canada and the central banks. The only member of the Canadian government on the board of directors of the BoC is the deputy minister of finance - and he has no vote!

So in short, the banksters dictate monetary policy to the government - not the other way around.

If you are interested in learning more about this subject, I highly recommend watching Money as Debt. It is a short, easy to understand animated documentary which explains money and banking.

It is the film that you should have been shown in grade 9 math class but weren't.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF !

USSR last quite a bit longer, was a superpower (still mighty, do you see US's troop in ukraine ? wonder why?) and they were first in space btw .. call me when Somalia launch their first satellite (and still are 'libertarian')

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[MagickalMyst]

In Newfoundland - which has a large fishing industry - cod fish were an actual form of currency that could be traded for value.

Newfoundland also has an active Local Exchange Trading System (LETS), which the currency is called the "cod", although "cod" is only a term which describes the currency.

The currency itself is backed by mutual credit.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[memnock]

A "kingdom", you say? Then you should be taxed royally!

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

Boring conspiracy speak.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[david_thornley]

You have failed to show that there's anything bad about fractional reserve banking. It has been shown to work for centuries, and your "mathematically" is wrong. In real life, people do repay loans, including interest. Simply describing fractional reserve banking while adopting an attitude of incredulity and horror is not an argument.

You have failed to show how a bank should operate, except for your claim that fractional reserve banking is bad - in other words, banks should never be able to make loans. After all, if I deposit $1K, and the bank lends out any of it, the bank is creating money and practicing fractional reserve banking, since my $1K still exists as long as the money for any loan made.

You have failed to show how people are supposed to make small investments without the current banking system. Any pool where numerous people contribute money and the pool lends some of it out is effectively a bank and practices fractional reserve banking.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[MagickalMyst]

> "You have failed to show that there's anything bad about fractional reserve banking..."

Then you obviously haven't grasped the concept of fractional reserve banking.

Please study the aforementioned reference material before you making such an ignorant comment.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[MagickalMyst]

*make

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Aryden]

Please name any single "item" that could be stockpiled to have enough value to cover the entire US economic structure.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[kloro2006]

the debate resolves into a debate about property rights.

it seems to me that every right to property must be defined by the society which protects it.

or am i missing something?

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't use a single item - you use a collection of items, choosing those which have both a demand and a value with some element of rarity to preserve the value.

This is why gold is so popular - there is a limited supply, but it is used in both industry and art (jewelery, etc) and so has a high value and demand - and the demand is unlikely to drop.

Silver has a similar use in industry and art, but is more common and so less valuable.

Diamonds are stupid to use as there is an artificial supply available, and the availability is restricted to keep the prices artificially high, which is why de Beers try and make such a big thing about "natural" diamonds.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[stiggle]

Fractional Reserve banking is one of the main drivers of inflation due to the "creation" of debt out of nothing.

You can have a bank making loans without being fractional reserve - they can loan LESS than the about of deposits. eg. $1k deposited, bank lends $500, rather than $10,000. The depositor & bank only risk 1/2 the original deposit rather than 10x the amount. This have the bank creating no money and so no inflation. It also means there is less "money" in circulation, but the risk of debt and a financial crash is removed as all the deposited money doesn't vanish if no loans are repaid.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[dosius]

Paul even more openly supported it, in Romans 13.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[JasonGoatcher]

Jesus was quite emphatic about whether people should pay their taxes, and he came out in favor of it. In fact, he was unconcerned about money, and considered the accumulation to be a potential trap, hence his advice that the rich man should give all his wealth to the poor. (I've heard arguments about whether this was his advice to people in general, or just people who put too much emphasis on material wealth. He gave different people different advice.)

More, generally, he told people to follow the law. But that doesn't mean he thought any particular law was a good idea. Advising someone to follow a given law and endorsing that same law are two very different things.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[JasonGoatcher]

Sorry, for the double post, but I just reread what you were responding to and I think you misunderstand me. I'm not saying people shouldn't pay their taxes, I'm saying directly laying taxes on a person's paycheck is immoral. You can still tax purchases and property in general. You just shouldn't be taxing money that the person hasn't even technically received yet.

Think of it this way. The basic idea is that only profits should be taxed. Even though it might not be literally true, the foregone conclusion is that the employer is going to pay as little as possible and that the employee is going to try to get paid as much as possible. Because of this, whatever pay they agree on is considered the precise value of the work. If you get paid 10 bucks an hour, the assumption is that an hour's worth of your time is worth ten bucks. It's an even trade, therefore no profit is made, therefore there should be no tax.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[JasonGoatcher]

The Bible also pushed for mandatory taxation, sorry, I meant tithing, to the prevaling religious power.

If you went to a church that said tithing was mandatory, you went to the wrong damn church, buddy.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[Dynedain]

The Bible clearly lays out mandatory tithing . Wether a particular denomination or church follows that practice is something altogether different.

But it's completely wrong to claim that the Bible discourages taxation while ignoring what the Bible says about tithing. Not to mention the whole "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's" goes against your servitude argument as well.

Hint: The Bible is inconsistent with itself in many ways. As a result, trying to use the Bible as foundation or any set of rules or behaviors requires making effectively arbitrary decisions as to which conflicting passages should be used or how they should be interpreted.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[JasonGoatcher]

The Bible clearly lays out mandatory tithing . Wether a particular denomination or church follows that practice is something altogether different.

You might be thinking of the Jewish Old Testament Laws, I'm not sure. What I meant was that you can still be considered a Christian without doing any sort of tithing. Whether or not it's a sin to not tithe is not something I have an opinion on.

But it's completely wrong to claim that the Bible discourages taxation while ignoring what the Bible says about tithing. Not to mention the whole "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's" goes against your servitude argument as well.

I never claimed the Bible discouraged taxation, I simply said that I believe that Jesus believed that it's immoral to tax a person's pay directly. There's still plenty of other stuff to tax. In the modern world, there's things like sales tax, gas tax, alcohol tax, etc.. I consider these to be okay, since they don't tax the person directly, just the property they're obtaining.

Hint: The Bible is inconsistent with itself in many ways. As a result, trying to use the Bible as foundation or any set of rules or behaviors requires making effectively arbitrary decisions as to which conflicting passages should be used or how they should be interpreted.

The Bible is intended to apply to all times even though it was written thousands of years ago. If it seems to contradict itself, that just means that we lack full understanding of the Bible's teachings. For instance, people claim that the Bible allows slavery, but ignore the fact that God might simply be accepting that slavery exists and make verses that will make a slave's life easier than it would've been without the verses. It's possible that a slave owner would simply ignore a verse that says slavery is immoral, but be accepting of rules that simply make them treat slaves better.

Re:There is no single "fair" value.

[jwhitener]

"What I don't like is when the government becomes an engine for wealth redistribution"

If a government providing fire service free to poor person B by taxing rich person A is wealth redistribution, then I would argue that wealth distribution is an unavoidable part of any functioning society. The question that left/right always debate, is the level of redistribution. How much is too much? I haven't heard any serious politician say that zero redistribution is a viable option, have you?

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[Dynedain]

As soon as you start hand-waving away and justifying portions you don't agree with (like the slavery example you just mentioned), you have opened the door for *any* portions to be justified away in the same manner. There is nothing in the Bible that instructs "follow this part, but ignore the previous page."

The Bible cannot be used as a basis of logic and directive on human behavior for this very reason. It can be a fantastic tool for study, for allegorical lessons, for cautionary warnings, for a supplementary tool, and especially as the guiding principals of religious belief, but not as a logical basis for extrapolation into how people or cultures should act.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[JasonGoatcher]

You only say that because you're not a Christian. The Bible isn't useful all on it's own, you need a "helper" to help you figure things out, that helper being the Holy Spirit. The Bible isn't 100% of the solution, it's a doorway towards that, but the Holy Spirit is the key that unlocks that door.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[Dynedain]

Wow - making judgmental calls on my beliefs based on what I say about logic.

You realize this all stemmed from you claiming the Bible recommends a gold standard and I merely refuted your claim.

That has absolutely nothing to do with my individual belief system (which you're absolutely wrong about) and is intentionally going off-topic so that you can feel you won some kind of argument.

Re: There is no single "fair" value.

[JasonGoatcher]

Wow - making judgmental calls on my beliefs based on what I say about logic.

You realize this all stemmed from you claiming the Bible recommends a gold standard and I merely refuted your claim.

That has absolutely nothing to do with my individual belief system (which you're absolutely wrong about) and is intentionally going off-topic so that you can feel you won some kind of argument.

I'd like to apologize about that, I didn't mean to be disrespectful. That being said, I'm writing this apology after I've already written the stuff after this, I just scrolled back. Please don't take the following stuff as any sort of judgement against you.

No, actually, you changed the subject(obviously unintentionally) by suggesting the Bible is vague on some details. I responded by saying the Holy Spirit takes away the vagueness, assuming God wants you to know that particular thing.

Of course, sometimes vagueness remains because we either have selfish motives, or maybe God's trying to teach us patience.

It's like with Mrs. Hudson, I believe homosexuality is a sin, but when transexualism(not sure if that's a word) enters the picture, there's a gap in my knowledge. I don't know if she's a homosexual because of her original gender, a heterosexual because of her new gender, or some other thing that I might not have thought of. I treat her decision with respect because I have no idea how God feels about it. This doesn't mean God doesn't have feelings about it, I simply don't know those feelings.

Of course, I'd still treat her with respect even if I believed she were sinning, I'd simply inform her of this and hope she didn't become angry.

And, yes, I've gone waaaaaayyyyyy off-topic.

What they should be doing...

[MillerHighLife21]

Is offset that tax shift by an amount of money equal to how much is spent employing people in that country. Same idea, but provide an incentive to hire more people locally.

I've been wish the US would do something similar to use taxes to incentive employment. Right now there's so many additional rules, fees, and legislative attachments to hiring people that the government is virtually incentivizing companies to favor automation.

Re:What they should be doing...

[Anonymous Coward]

An even more reasonable variant hinges not on wages paid, as that gives Walmart an unreasonable benefit from all their low-paid jobs. Instead, let them deduct just the income taxes over those wages. As low-paid jobs generate little taxed income, this is an incentive to create higher-paid jobs.

Re: What they should be doing...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's PERFECT actually

Re:Ha ha ha ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lower than 0 that the internationals are paying through Ireland? Taxes aren't a marketable product, you can't pick and choose. If they're too expensive, don't do business in that country.

Dave420 = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Where all dave420 had was off topic illogical failed ad hominem attacks http://news.slashdot.org/comme... - funniest part of all is how dave420 used his sockpuppets to try to effetely "hide" the last time I posted this set of facts here http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Irony

[ze_jua]

What's funny is that these kind of "tax optimizations" (read "fraud") appeared in the UK :-)

Re:Dave420 = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Dave420's embarassed: He used his sockpuppets to mod down your post.

Your fair share

[NotQuiteReal]

(Cost of Government) / (Number of Citizens) = the fair tax per citizen.

Anything else is unfair, but necessary simply because not everyone can afford their fair share.

The tax code boils down to extracting unfair amounts of money from whomever can pay, muddied by the politics of helping friends and punishing enemies.

Sadly, politicians have a disincentive to keep a "reasonable" Cost of Government.

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a pretty reasonable foundation for talking about the issue, but I'd add that if you divide it up that way and ignore corporations, it's ignoring the huge number of government services that are provided specifically to companies rather than individual citizens. Granted, companies are made up of citizens as employees and investors, but I think something should be owed back for the services provided at that same level of organization (i.e. corporate).

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

That assumes everyone derives the same benefit from the government. If I have more property which could be stolen, do I not benefit more from police ? Unemployment benefits are also not distributed fairly. It's usually the middle class who are both too poor and too rich to benefit from government.

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

(Cost of Government) / (Number of Citizens) = the fair tax per citizen.

Anything else is unfair, but necessary simply because not everyone can afford their fair share.

The tax code boils down to extracting unfair amounts of money from whomever can pay, muddied by the politics of helping friends and punishing enemies.

Sadly, politicians have a disincentive to keep a "reasonable" Cost of Government.

What if I am homeless and carless? Why should I have to pay for roads and fire protection? Screw clean air and water too. I can move. If you want to own more than you can carry and defend, how about you pay all the taxes foe police military and courts too, I will make a jagged club for myself, you freeloader!

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.

And a fair bit more complicated than you think too.

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

That's assuming everyone gets an equal share back from the government. However, as a corp owner I collect the summed benefit from every fucking customer and employee living in a society that doesn't resemble Somalia. There's a reason why my business isn't there, after all.

Re:Your fair share

[Rich0]

(Cost of Government) / (Number of Citizens) = the fair tax per citizen.

Gross domestic product / Number of citizens = the fair income per citizen.

If you're going to argue "fair" then let's talk fair. The way things work is that the general population of the country you live in lets you keep what you earn instead of mobbing you, and in exchange you help pay for homeless shelters for them to live in.

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

This assumes people benefit equally from government - clearly untrue. People with more property derive more benefit from institutions enforcing property rights, and ought to / will pay more to support them.

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

This. A billion times this. Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists keep trying to redefine the word 'fair' to fit their ideology.

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

Gross domestic product / Number of citizens = the fair income per citizen.

Only if all citizens are equally productive (which they are not). The fair income per citizen is the income that said citizen has earned himself/herself.

If you're going to argue "fair" then let's talk fair. The way things work is that the general population of the country you live in lets you keep what you earn instead of mobbing you, and in exchange you help pay for homeless shelters for them to live in.

Ah, extortion. Excellent system.

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but that is a very small part of government budget. The vast majority of government expenses go towards benefits, subsidies and healthcare, which are strongly disproportionally spent on people with a low income.

Re:Your fair share

[Rich0]

Gross domestic product / Number of citizens = the fair income per citizen.

Only if all citizens are equally productive (which they are not). The fair income per citizen is the income that said citizen has earned himself/herself.

No, I defined fair income as GDP / number of citizens - it has nothing to do with earning anything.

See, we can all play this arguing over definitions game all day long and get exactly nowhere with it.

It is clear that all citizens are not equally productive. IMHO that is all the more reason that income should only be loosely related to what each person "earns." I'd say that you're entitled to 100% of the income you've earned only if you earned the abilities you have that enable you to earn that income. Did you earn the fact that you weren't born a mentally-retarded quadriplegic? Then why should you have a higher income than one?

In the end I think it makes far more sense to have a system where everybody has incentive to accomplish things, but nobody ends up living like a slave simply because they aren't good at math or whatever.

Re:Your fair share

[Anonymous Coward]

Given citizens use unequal amounts of government services, how does that formula produce a fair result?

Google should leave

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Google should leave and take all their products along with them. See how long they last without youtube in Europe or the super great search engine, what about google maps....

Re:Google should leave

[ledow]

Yeah, that kind of attitude goes down really well.

Hence why Microsoft kowtowed to the EU requests and paid millions of dollars in fines, etc.

Pulling out of one of the top two world markets (depends what you look at exactly, but Europe and the US are either 1st or 2nd in almost any product/industry), especially over a sales tax, is corporate insanity and will see stockholder lawsuits within seconds.

And, to be honest, there are countries that survive just fine without Google. Google is only really the top search engine in English-speaking countries. And Google Maps? What about it? I can name ten different companies producing maps accurate enough for almost any purpose. You think ONLY Google get the mapping and aerial photography data of a country? Maybe StreetView (because they're the only ones really doing it seriously), but maps? No.

Re:Google should leave

[Anonymous Coward]

That's unlikely indeed. A much more serious threat would be Google raising its prices. If they do so, loudly, chances are that their competitors will follow suit. Search engine advertising space? Bing needs to make money for Microsoft, they'll also follow the price hike. Perhaps not for 100%, but it's easy money either way.

Oh, and only market leader in English speaking countries? Belgium: 98%. Denmark: 95%. France: 95%. Germany: 93%. Italy: 95%. The Netherlands: 93% Poland: 97%. Spain: 96%. Sweden: 94% (Source: returnonnow.com, 2013 figures) Without a single exception, all are higher than the 89% market share in the UK. In comparison, Bing only exceeds 5% marketshare in the UK (7%). Google can afford to lose quite a bit of marketshare if the remaining part is more lucrative.

Nice language

[argStyopa]

I appreciate the use of the term "fiendish" as artfully coined in this discussion.

It paints the companies trying to avoid taxes as nearly-diabolical agents skulking around in the dark, not to mention adding a delightful soupcon of sinfulness.

Of course, what this seems to conveniently ignore is that national taxation policies are likewise "fiendishly" complicated, sometimes driven by complicated corporate structures, but just as often driven by a quasi-socialist, populist, and (as long as we're painting in Medieval imagery) a quasi-Dulcinian desire to appropriate at least a piece of anything valuable "for the public" meaning actually "for politicians to spend and gain votes without the usual pain of public taxation or debt".

Companies respond to these policies. If the policies are so contrived and convoluted that there remain loopholes that are worth pursuing to evade tax, that's the LAW WRITERS' fault, not the companies' for exploiting it. But it plays so much better in the press to blame companies for being greedy, rather than politicians for being incompetent.

Re:Nice language

[Xest]

No you've got it completely backwards, tax law is extremely simple, and that's it's flaw.

When income tax for corporations simply says something along the lines of "You must pay 21% tax on all profits" there's nothing complex in law. What's complex are the tax avoidance and evasion schemes that go out their way to redefine profit as something else.

It's the evasion and avoidance schemes and all the lawyering that goes around justifying profit as not actually being profit that is complex not the tax law itself. When someone says "tax law is complex" what they mean is that "finding ways to legally justify not paying tax is complicated".

Re:Nice language

[Anonymous Coward]

No you've got it completely backwards, tax law is extremely simple, and that's it's flaw.

Your assumption in untenable. The British tax code is roughly 11,500 pages in size. That's ten times the size of Tolstoy's enormous novel, War and Peace. The US tax code is larger by a factor of 4 or 5.

The reason for the difference largely comes down to the reality that the US has a far more unethical legal profession. The members of this profession make sure to write enormously complex laws so they and their buddies can get paid to "protect" people and businesses from their own government. The legal profession has all kinds of influence in US politics.

Of course, neither country's policies are particularly ethical: a reasonable tax code for individuals would be at most 10 pages, and for businesses at most 100 pages.

Thus, the tax laws (in both countries) don't merely represent a minor case of unethical practice of law (and unethical government), they represent unethical practice on a stunning and amazing scale. Entropy increases in any closed system, so we should expect some inefficiency in government and law (the system is only approximately closed, but that's sufficient to reasonably expect increasing entropy), but this is just ridiculous!

The citizens of both countries should be ashamed of how badly they are letting their legal professionals (and corrupt politicians) screw them over.

Your initial assumption is incorrect, but it is certainly fair to say the excessive complexity of the tax code is responsible for all kinds of problems.

Re:Nice language

[Xest]

You realise that a lot of that text is there as a constant patchwork to close all the loopholes companies have been looking for?

"Pay 21% tax on profits" isn't difficult for anyone or any company to understand, yet apparently Google, Amazon, Apple, Starbucks et. al. have exactly that problem - the rest of tax law doesn't make it difficult unless you're explicitly looking for loopholes NOT to pay it.

So using the excuse that tax law is too complicated to be worth paying tax is a sick joke.

Dave420 = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Where all dave420 had was off topic illogical failed ad hominem attacks http://news.slashdot.org/comme... - funniest part of all is how dave420 used his sockpuppets to try to effetely "hide" the last 2 times I posted this set of facts here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and again later too http://slashdot.org/comments.p... - lmao!

Re:Dave420 = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Dave420's embarassed himself here twice sockpuppet downmodding this http://slashdot.org/comments.p... & this later too http://slashdot.org/comments.p... when apk spanked him as usual making dave420 do a "run, forrest: run" being unable to prove apk wrong on his points on hosts files superiority to adblock (all dave420 could manage is his usual illogical off topic invalid ad hominem attack instead), lol!

Apk spanked you dave420

[Anonymous Coward]

You did a "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" here dave420 http://news.slashdot.org/comme... and your "pot calling a kettle black" b.s. now? Please, lmao. You fail as usual, projecting your issues with schizophrenia as you always use (not very creative, are you?) on apk when you fail against him, or are these not your usual schizo ad hominem attack posts with YOUR NAME on them, dave420 here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... and here http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... and here too http://slashdot.org/comments.p... and today again here too http://slashdot.org/comments.p... so we know it's you, stupid.

Re:Apk spanked you dave420

[Anonymous Coward]

Good job showing dave420's a hypocritical little failure with those links of yours.

Re:Apk spanked you dave420

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so clever apk! You sure showed him!

Re:Apk spanked you dave420

[Anonymous Coward]

True, dave420 is a little whiny bitch who just can't deal with getting his ass handed to him.

Re:Apk spanked you dave420

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on dave420, no response from you or your numerous sockpuppets?

Re:Apk spanked you dave420

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, apk, you are really letting your mental illness hang out for everyone to see. I don't know why you don't try getting mental help or try listening to people like mmell who just want to be your friend.

It is not a google tax.

[Anonymous Coward]

The tax was dubbed “Google tax” by the British press.

Particularly if you define income as revenue

[Sycraft-fu]

Meaning the money a company takes in. The difference between revenues and profits is vast, and varies by company and company type. Some companies take in a lot of revenues to make very little profits. Target would be an example. They took in 73 Billion dollars in revenues the last 12 months. However on that, they only made about 1.5 Billion in actual profit, or 2% when put another way. Retail doesn't make a lot of money, particularly discount retail. So once you add up all their costs (buying the merchandise, payroll, buildings, taxes, power, insurance, etc) there isn't a huge percentage left over.

Compare that to Apple. Not only do they make more money, but they have a much higher profit margin. They took in 182 Billion, and made 39 Billion on it, a 25% margin. Because of the nature of their business, they make more profits per dollar of sales than a place like Target.

This is, of course, only talking about profitable businesses. There are plenty that don't make money. My parents ran a small quilt shop for a number of years. Did about $750,000 in sales per year, yet never made a profit. After they'd paid rent, taxes, insurance, salaries, replenished merchandise, and so on there was not only nothing left over, there was a deficit they had to cover.

Tax intellectual property.

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay taxes on my REAL property, so that the police which are there to stop people breaking into my house or burning it down, and other form of protection of my REAL property are paid for. So Tax Intellectual property.

PS Heard Sandy Shaw on BBC Radio 2 a while back and she was whining about how stage was not what she liked because the audience enjoyed it, but *she* didn't, except in a "Well, I enjoy their enjoyment", proclaiming this was "a bit of a one-way street" thing.

However, she doesn't seem to realise that she was the only one there getting paid to turn up, which is a "bit of a one-way street"thing.

Somehow, not a problem for her...

Secondly she was tired of the tiring responsibility of owning all her own work, and how this meant she was having to concentrate on "business things" rather than "her art". WHAT A WHINY PRETENTIOUS LITTLE ANGEL!!! If you don't like looking after "your own work" (did you continue to pay your teachers for their teaching that helped you earn? No??), THEN GIVE IT AWAY.

Re:Dave420 = "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Project much, Dave420? Too bad you proved yourself a hypocrite too http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

You DO *NEED* your car. AND you DO *NEED* your house. You won't be employed without a house and now that you "can't expect a job for life", you will need to move house or travel to work. If I were to travel to work *ON WORK TIME* and take the three hour walk there (ergo free) off my working hours, then my employer would be MOST upset. Driving is the only option. And not being self-employed, I get NO say on where work is.

Re: I Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

You get no say? I thought you were free to take whatever job you want and leave your job whenever you want.

WRONG!

[Anonymous Coward]

"That hour is worth less to you than $50 otherwise you wouldn't trade."

WRONG!

You have NO CHOICE. You can't make your own food, therefore you need to have *A* job. WHATEVER it pays. Your hour is worth MORE THAN $50 to your employer, but THEY want to keep as much as possible, therefore will only offer $50, and if YOU won't take it, someone else will (on H1B if necessary), and then YOU WILL STARVE.

What you get paid by your employer bears NO RELATION to what YOUR time is worth. The employer, since there is no actual decent welfare state in either the UK or USA, has every advantage and can insist you take what they offer, or your welfare will be stopped and you will starve to death on the street.

THIS IS WHY the UK, despite a drop in unemployment, has a lower receipt of income tax and have a much higher borrowing than they expected. People are forced to take any old shit job, on average paying less than the living wage (hence needing working tax credits and housing benefits, which go to private industry, therefore a GOOD welfare payment, whilst still blaming "benefit cheats" for the massive welfare bill), and therefore less than the average wage of the person who had previously been employed.

Your wage isn't about what YOU consider your time worth, but what you can eke out of your employer with the threat of homelessness, starvation and death hanging over you if you hold out too long.

Re:WRONG!

[mattventura]

Nothing you just said refutes "That hour is worth less to you than $50 otherwise you wouldn't trade." This is stuff people learn in Econ 101. Yes, it's worth more than $50 to the employer, that's where their profit comes from. If they weren't profitable, the employer wouldn't exist in the first place.

EU states don't use taxes the same way

[gelfling]

In the US the lever is adjusting the tax rate whereas in the EU governments simply give generous bags of cash directly to corporations. It's a different kind of protectionism but the effect is the same.

Re:EU states don't use taxes the same way

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US the lever is adjusting the tax rate whereas in the EU governments simply give generous bags of cash directly to corporations.

They don't. In fact, EU members are not even allowed to do that. The US, on the other hand, does it quite often, especially in the aerospace sector.

delusional libertarian

[Anonymous Coward]

Cute libertarian delusion.

Fare is your tax burden is the % of national revenue you make. So if you and your billionaire cronies are making 98% of the GDP, you have 98% of the tax burden. If you want to reduce that burden, you pay your employees more.

Re:delusional libertarian

[JesseMcDonald]

That position wasn't libertarian in the slightest. You can tell because it claimed that there was a (non-zero) "fair share" of taxes. Libertarian means the Non-Aggression Principle, which leaves no room for taxation.

As for your proposal... you do realize that you've described a flat income tax, right? It would significantly reduce taxes on the "1%ers", who currently pay much more more in taxes, proportionally, than they receive in income. That would certainly be a nice first step.

Re:delusional libertarian

[Anonymous Coward]

That does not make sense at all. Why would the contribution to the national revenue be relevant to the distribution of the cost of government?

Still, it would be better than the current situation, where the amount of taxes paid increases much more than linearly with income.

I would go a step further

[RelliK]

Countries should make a treaty creating a global tax on corporations. X% would be withheld and then apportioned to each country according to the percentage of revenue. A corporation would have little incentive to play games with profit shifting because X% of global profits would be withheld no matter what. The tricky part would be to distribute the tax fairly among the different countries and to agree on this treaty in the first place. So I'm not holding my breath.

Sure.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I hear of the taxes UK inmates/citizens pay it's tough not to cringe. Then they do this:

We will make sure multinationals pay their fair share of tax. We will introduce a 25% tax on profits from multinationals here in the UK

So that's going to attract businesses to the UK, is it George Osborne? These people are a bunch of bloody bumbling idiot thieves, wandering in and deciding that 25% is owned by their greedy overtaxing bitch "monarch" at what amounts to a whim.

Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Tax company's total worldwide profits prorated by the percentage of revenue in your tax jurisdiction. Done.

When did YOU ever say there was a limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you haven't said so yet does not mean I can claim that YOU are in favour of 100% taxes, can I? Yet you feel you can do so for these strawmen you attack in your cowardice.

Re:When did YOU ever say there was a limit?

[Kohath]

They always want more and never have any answer for how much is enough. That's the problem with the "we built roads, so pay up" argument. We already pay many times the cost of building roads. There are a limited number of roads, but no limit to the calls to pay.

Re:When did YOU ever say there was a limit?

[Triklyn]

there are bridges on the brink of collapse. roads don't last forever.

also, lets take your argument to its absurd conclusion. One guy in America controls all of america's wealth, everyone else lives in abject poverty.
what do you think happens? oh wait, what happens involves a great deal of guillotines. Enough of us agree that respecting property rights is a good thing, even protecting really terrible people and their rights. Without us all agreeing that laws have value and money has value, the laws are meaningless and money valueless.

Re: When did YOU ever say there was a limit?

[DrLang21]

In that scenario you really only need one guillotine...

Re: When did YOU ever say there was a limit?

[Triklyn]

hell, i'd imagine in that scenario someone would be selling a great deal of replica guillotines for the kiddies too, they'd celebrate guillotine day every year. also, the french revolution.

more like you have no natural right

[publiclurker]

to sponge off of the hard work of everyone else just because you think you are special or manage to bribe a few politicians. If you don't want to pay your fair share, then leave and stop sponging off of everyone else.

You cannot tax a corporation

[SlithyMagister]

It is not possible to tax a corporation.
Corporations exist to provide a return on shareholder investment.
Taxing a corporation requires that the money for the tax comes from the customers.
Thus all so-called corporate taxes are hidden taxes on the consumer of that corporations products and services.

Re:You cannot tax a corporation

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not possible to tax a corporation. Corporations exist to provide a return on shareholder investment. Taxing a corporation requires that the money for the tax comes from the customers. Thus all so-called corporate taxes are hidden taxes on the consumer of that corporations products and services.

This completely ignores the concept of competitive market pricing and price elasticity of demand. The effect of taxing a corporation might very well be lower profit margins for the corporation, not higher prices for the customers.

I smell teabagging...

[TiggertheMad]

The far better way to view it is "companies are shifting assets and income out of our country because of the ridiculous tax penalties here."

Spoken like a selfish right wing ass hat, good on you sir!

Companies are using infrastructure and resources that were paid for or are the property of the people. They have to follow the laws set down by the people, and in exchange they get to set up and do business. If they start to cheat the system and break the spirit of the law by using all sorts of legal tricks to avoid paying their legally mandated share of the taxes, don't be surprised if the government imposes new taxes to remove loopholes and punish dishonest behavior.

Companies are shifting assets out of the country because they are being run by dishonest ass stains that want to maximize profits by letting others pay taxes to support government and maintain infrastructure. Roads, bridges, laws and stability have a cost that someone has to pay. You want to keep 100% of your profits without paying taxes? Move to Somalia or some other anarchy ridden shit hole and do business there.

'Taxes == slavery' is just a selfish person's way of saying they want the benefits of a modern society without paying the costs.

Re:GAY BUTT SEX!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only 1 that got that was dave420 courtesy of apk (+ dave's offtopic stupidity) here http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Ignore Opportunity Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

You're deliberately ignoring the opportunity cost. There are many examples, probably every day, but read "The man who said no to Walmart".

#richbastardproblems

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who benefit the most should pay the most. That's what you're arguing against. And it clearly falls under #richpeopleproblems, which from your stance and tone, I infer you consider yourself one. There is PLENTY of money. So much in fact that those people just can't spend it all. Their heirs get so much from them that they too can't spend it all. What the bigger argument, in reality, is "how much is too much" and clearly the social currents have shifted to the "rich bastards are getting too much" while you're trying to make your group look poor. We don't buy that shit! The math is there. That umpteen billion dollar bailout we gave the banks for that bailout would have been better served to our economy by simply paying off every citizens' mortgage. You know it, I know it, we all know it, but you're trying to make us all ignore it. No way, Jose.

Re:#richbastardproblems

[tnk1]

I don't think anyone is arguing that the rich are, in fact, poor. Seems a little paradoxical, right?

The point I was making was simple. There is no such thing as government money. There are only individuals paying taxes. If you exempt one group from paying more taxes, that still doesn't mean that there is "government money". Now, it is just a smaller pool of individuals paying taxes, but it is still humans paying taxes. It's now just "someone else".

You need to get money from somewhere to spend it. There is really only one place value is generated: from the production of goods and services by individuals. If you try and spend more than you produce, you run out. Governments try and use tactics like borrowing to offset that, but really, they can only do that by making sure that individuals somewhere have money extracted from them. It's a slight of hand game.

The point is, Soylent Green is people. It may look like the government has "plenty of money", but no one gets "plenty of money" without extracting it from the source, which is people, mostly non-rich people. It is dangerous to view the government as a magical money pinata.

Re:#richbastardproblems

[Anonymous Coward]

and when corporation dodge taxes by transferring profits to offshore account, the taxes that their CUSTOMER paid for already, are being diverted outside of the country. Then government must increase taxes on those that cannot dodge it to pay for the actual services that profit everyone (including corp)

hypocrite

[Anonymous Coward]

As a servant of the government, I have modded you down because you're asking for more mod points instead of working hard for them yourself. See, there is only so many mod points around so we can't just keep giving them away. Our calculations have concluded that you do not post under the poverty limit so you cannot have a shortage of mod points. We would be willing to fund you while you went back to college for some debate, politics, and civics classes so that you can come back here and earn your mod points through careful selection of topics, proper usage of all logical fallacies, and rallying around the groupthink banner. That's how I get mine, that's how you should get yours. In otherwords, you're spouting and agreeing with Libertarian policies but still sitting here asking for a handout. You're a goddamned hypocrite like most every Libertarian.

Yes there is

[Anonymous Coward]

Unknown to many, but the US never went off of the precious metal economy. Sure, we went off of gold as the standard, but we reverse Midas'd it and change to the Lead Standard. When our currency is questioned, we go liberate your country by depositing copious amounts of lead into your coffers until you finally decide that you don't have the space for it, and prefer the old system of paper notes.

How they possibly figure it out?

[sabbede]

Multinationals like Google are so complex, how is a national government supposed to figure out what is has a legitimate claim to tax? Without a formal international structure for tax collection, it won't work.

Re:You cannot tax a corporation

[drewlake2000]

Companies in this country, and the one in question (both the UK) do not have a sole obligation to provide a return for shareholders, to quote the FT (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a7319a86-cc5f-11e2-bb22-00144feab7de.html#axzz3KwTHMDBP) "they must have regard to six specific factors: the long-term consequences of their decisions, the interests of employees, relationships with suppliers and customers, the impact of corporate activities on the community and the environment, the company’s reputation for high standards of business conduct and the need for fairness between different members of the company."

Another setup from the big 4 accountancy firms

[amias]

this is actually an announcement of new tax loop holes but spun as a shutting down old ones.

The big 4 accountancy firms in the uk regularly place staff in the treasury as a gift , this allows them to get privileged information about the the new tax rules , by the time the rules are implemented these firms already have tax avoidance schemes setup to exploit them which then they then sell on , typically each scheme will raise them several times the cost of the staff secondment to the treasury.

labour , libdem and conservative all do this , please if you can vote in the uk vote green so this will stop.

Re:You cannot tax a corporation

[amias]

indeed , this also applies to punitive fines which is how a lot of taxes start out

the problem here is the limited liability of the company officers who are making these decisions.

untill we start fining shareholders , directors and investment brokers personally nothing will change

Disband the IRS.

[siliconsmiley]

Florida state stopped taxing income in the 80s because there was so much money off the books in the drug trade. They switched to sales tax and got in on the action because even drug dealers need to buy stuff.

Why can't Govt just print currency?

[NewYork]

Instead of Taxing Individuals/Corporations, why can't Govt just Print currency?

Happening in the US too

[servant]

That is what lots of 'offshoring' of US work has done here too.

.

Ireland and Iceland have been some of the English speaking beneficiary countries. But there are more (not necessarily English speaking as a primary language).

This is why the US is about to do something to 'repatriate capital' in giving some tax breaks to bring some $$/capital back to the US. I think I heard there is about $20T and they hope to repatriate at least $2.5T of it. - but I could have the numbers off by a large factor too