My local elementary school had only women working at it (except a janitor). My doctor's office is dominated by female doctors in the family health department. The office where I work doesn't exactly match the demographics of my street either. For that matter, my management chain is dominated by British ex-pats.
I had a very different experience. I went shopping for used cars for my daughter and to replace my old car. I found used cars hold their value much, much better than they used to. 2-4 years in, they were only selling for a 20% discount under prices for new cars. It seems the days of a car losing half its value when it rolls over the dealer curb are over.
I just quickly googled for some stats. MADD reports 10,000 people killed in accidents where the driver was over the legal limit for blood alcohol content. Even if that's exaggerated by a factor of 10, installing breathalyzers in all cars would likely save many, many more lives than anything you'd do about guns.
To answer the actual question, mass killing are tragic but very rare. I don't want to sound callous but if you really want to save the most lives, there are other preventable causes of death where you'll do more good.
This has a rotten smell to it. Seems to me HP is being slowly dismantled for money. A great company slowly being flushed down the toilet by short termist used car salesman types.
The rotten smell could be coming from the services division. Sounds like Meg noticed the EDS acquisition wasn't panning out so toss the mess to someone else and cut your losses.
I'm really not sure what HPE has left. x86 servers, storage systems, some network stuff. The servers and blades are pretty well respected. I work at a storage competitor and we kind of laugh at HPE storage. The network gear they had when I worked at HP was pretty good but not nearly well respected as Cisco and other giants. There's nothing which is a real standout that I know of. You've got to be the best at something and I'm not sure what that something is for HPE.
This also seems eerily like Agilent. HP's test and measurement got spun out and kept shrinking and shrinking. It's still around but a shadow of its former self.
While I am not a proponent of ethanol fuels, the US didn't take food stocks to produce it. They did use feed stock corn, but that corn would never have been for human consumption in the first place. Since then, many have changed their crops to switch grass which has similar yields but requires much less water to grow.
The feed stock corn would be fed to livestock or used to product other products. Whether humans would directly eat it doesn't really matter, that corn had other uses. I believe you're incorrect about switchgrass. People are working on ethanol from switchgrass but it is still mostly experimental. I don't believe any substantial amount of ethanol comes from cellulose today.
I'm with you, none of this has anything to do with fuel cells. I remember reading a paper something like 15 years ago from the Rocky Mountain Institute which actually ran the numbers. They walked through all sorts of ways to power cars using fuel cells and batteries, computing the energy losses and costs all along the way. It probably needs updating but it was quite interesting. I don't remember the conclusion. My takeaway was it's not like fuel cells or ethanol are good or evil, it's all about the end-to-end efficiency and cost, and that's not easy to compute.
Basically -- you want people to be available to deal with stuff at other hours? PAY them to do so. Nothing hard about this.
Unless it's made illegal to do so. That's my beef, or would be if I lived in France, that my employer and I can't come to an arrangement we're both happy with.
Back to the original post, "they eventually break down". Really? Any evidence for that, Benoit? I've worked with hundreds of people who check email after hours and I don't recall hearing of one single breakdown. How about you document it's a problem before legislating against it?
Wow, two huge companies with long-term net profit margins of around 26%? That's pretty incredible. Most companies I know of are thrilled with net profit of 10%.
There should be a law, the amount owed should be definite, failure to pay would be a crime. That law should apply to everyone, equally.
Agreed. Isn't that the US tax code (modulo exemptions which sound generic but are tailored to apply to only one entity)? I'm not aware of any special provisions just for Apple.
I would be in support of Apple paying its rightful share of all the taxes needed to support the city infrastructure and government that it burdens. Not much more. Sounds like these councilmembers want the "more".
Question is, what's the "rightful" share. I thought we generally used property taxes for that, not corporate sales taxes. So, Apple's rightful share would be the property tax on all its extensive real estate in Cupertino.
It also sounds like Cupertino gave Apple a property tax break to keep them in town. OK, fine, admit that's what you did, take responsibility for the consequences, and talk about whether you want to re-negotiate. But don't whine about how you want a slice of Apple's accumulated profits, that was never in the cards. And use this as an object lesson about why you might not want to do that in the future.
But why couldn't each state just create a single interstate commerce tax rate for this situation?
They could. In fact, I seem to recall a movement a few years ago to do just that, harmonize the sales tax rules among many of the states. The thinking was this would reduce the burden of computing sales tax and undercut the same ruling. I don't remember what happened to that effort.
The practical issue is the sales tax rules are horrendously complicated. Things like what's the tax rate on a Snickers(tm) bar. In some juristictions, it's a snack with one rate, in others it's a food with a different rate. And it varies not just state by state but sometimes county by county or city by city. Legislators just can't resist inventing their own their own classification rules which are better in some way or other. The result for a seller is mass chaos.
Obligatory funny example: in Kansas, candy is taxed at 6% while food is taxed at 1%. If a candy bar contains flour, it's a food, not a candy. So my Snickers bar is taxed at 6%, a Kit Kat at 1%. Starting to see the problem?
In my opinion, capitalism is the only market form that works reasonably effective and ensures progress and freedom,...
It's not just your opinion, virtually all the evidence points that way.
...but it absolutely needs to be combined with moderate egalitarianism and effective laws to prevent monopolies and cartels.
You'd have to be more specific about what sorts of rules you're in favor of. There's evidence that monopolies and cartels tend to fall apart soon enough if there's free access to markets and no use of force (e.g. legislation or regulation) to enforce the monopoly. I'd also say that an egalitarian and compassionate society is a wonderful thing but I'm less convinced government is a good way to ensure that.
Why? Well, regarding the first point, we can always discuss how much wealth should be transferred and in which way, but that there should be universal agreement that some transfer is necessary. You can show that to almost anyone by explaining the Gini index and asking that person at which point society becomes unjust - people will only disagree about where the point lies, but nobody will honestly and sincerely defend a country with index 1.
And here's where we depart ways. A high Gini constant by itself isn't a bad thing if everyone is getting richer (e.g. the United States for the last century). Heck, if most people are content with their lot, even getting richer doesn't matter. Problem is, that's not how we're wired. We innately want to compare ourselves to the Other Guy, to keep up with the Jones'. That leads to envy and class warfare. IMHO, that's the problem, not the actual inequality.
I also believe your hypothetical country with a Gini index of 1 is a strawman. I don't think that can exist in the real world. Or if it did (e.g. Tom Hanks in Cast Away), it would be a very poor country.
Because, you know, without any sort of employment regulation we always get the best of all possible worlds with absolutely the best economy and wages that there is possible to be. Because right wing ideology says so!
Well, no, Microeconomics 101 says so. And Fredrich Hayek. The observation is no one agrees to a deal unless both parties think they benefit and benefit by more than their other available options (would you buy something if it wasn't worth it or you could get it cheaper somewhere else?). Given that, I trust employees and employers to strike the best possible deal between themselves. It's the height of arrogance for me to think I know their situation and can craft a better deal than they do.
Fair enough, it's not unanimous. I hope (but can't prove) virtually all of them will concede that theory and practice show if you have a price floor, you get surplus supply and reduced demand. In a labor market, one calls that "unemployment". They should also generally agree employers can adjust in other ways than cutting jobs (e.g. by cutting benefits). Finally, they should agree the effects might be small and difficult to measure. The current natural experiments suddenly raising the minimum by large amounts (e.g. Seattle) ought to be enlightening.
Personally, I suspect the economists who signed that statement want to believe the minimum wage doesn't cost jobs and are suffering confirmation bias. I may be doing the same thing in the reverse direction. I don't think so. Supply and demand analysis is pretty simple, compelling, and matches my own observations of how the world works. That raising the price of labor would not reduce demand seems such an extraordinary claim it demands really clear, extraordinary, and compelling evidence to believe it.
If they track your hours then you should automatically be hourly. If you don't set your own schedule then you should be hourly. If you can't leave at noon because things are slow then you should be hourly. If you don't have a set amount of tasks that once finished you can leave then you should be hourly.
And that matches, let's see, exactly none off the full time salaried professionals I've ever worked with. The deal is, I more or less work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So long as my boss thinks I'm getting enough done and I think I'm working reasonable hours, we're all good.
Well, it's not free. Someone is paying for it. Funneling it through the government/employers/insurance companies just makes it harder to figure out who.
If the U.S. Government can't manage to give every U.S. citizen free basic healthcare, then it sure as fuck can't afford to give everyone enough cash to live on every month.
Interesting thought. Let me ask you this: which do you think is more complicated, sending everyone a check or managing a $1 trillion healthcare system? And do you think the provision of health care and health care financing to everyone is hard because of a lack of cash or the inherent complexity of the system?
I think it's hard to provide because it's mindbogglingly complicated. Writing checks to everyone seems way, way simpler, something the usual gang of idiots could probably pull off (although I wouldn't put it past them to screw it up).
Then there is the question of how much a UBI would cost. Let's see, there are something like 245 million adults and 50 million children. That's $7.4 trillion basic income for adults and $400 billion for children. So we're talking roughly $8 trillion per year. Gulp. That's a lotta cash, something like double the entire federal budget (including Social Security and Medicare). SS and Medicare are around $2 trillion a year. Let's assume you cancel those because you don't need them any more, we're still talking raising taxes by around $5 trillion dollars. Wow. That's a total non-starter.
It always seemed to me that the more successful you were, the more well-off you were, the less actual work you appeared to do each day. I know there's research involved in say running a major investment fund like Warren Buffet does, but he doesn't do the majority of it. 95% is delegated out to subordinates who do the legwork and write up the analyst reports, Buffet himself just goes over those reports and makes the final decisions. It's something only he can do, but he's not spending 40 hours a week nailed down to a desk...
I'm guessing you don't know many C-level executives. Or executives of any kind. Every successful business leader I've ever met works their a$$ off every day. Meetings from sunrise to after sunset, tons of decisions to be made, activity to review, guidance to dispense, email to slog through, shareholders to placate, customers to schmooze, and on and on and on. I don't know anyone running a company who routinely kicks back smoking a stogie and barking "Get me New York" into an intercom.
Seriously? A 50% tax rate? That's highway robbery. It's an insane amount of money to pay for a government. I know he's probably talking about the marginal rate not the effective rate but it's still just nuts.
Historically, we've collected something like 18-19% of GDP in tax revenue. Even that seems pretty high to me. I'd be much happier at 10%.
(I'm trying to do the math from memory. I think Apple has a net margin of something like 25% which means paying half of that would give them an effective tax rate of 12.5%. That's a little high given that everyone pays an additional tax on whatever they receive as dividends. But this is Apple we're talking about, which has the highest net margins of any company I've ever heard of. Most companies are delighted with a net profit of 7-8%.)
Well, actually no, this is the theory, the fact is that the companies charge what the market will bear, and then pay taxes, this is why so many companies migrate to locations with tax shelters or tax deferments etc.
You forgot employees. A company could react to higher taxes (or a higher minimum wage) by either cutting profit margin, raising prices, or cutting employee compensation. None of those is easy. If you cut profit margin, you'll have a tough time raising new capital when you need it. If you're in a competitive market, your competition may keep you from raising prices. If you're in a competitive market for talent, you can't cut salaries or your good employees will head for the exits.
The likely answer is some combination of all three. I have no idea how the burden of a higher tax rate would play out, other than more companies re-incorporating in some other country and/or leaving income outside the US so doesn't get taxed at all. Neither of those seems like outcomes we want.
I don't think there's any "should" about this. One can easily argue it's best to tax a company, a person, both, or neither.
If you want to talk about which one promotes more social good, I'm inclined to tax individuals and not companies. Eventually all the money a company earns flows back to individuals (either as dividends, capital gains, or ordinary income). IMHO, it's better to tax the individuals because it makes the cost of government crystal clear. Politicians and populists like to tax corporations because it makes it harder to see who's actually bearing the burden of paying for our government.
People don't make profits? I trade my time and energy for a paycheck. Clearly the money is worth more to me than my time. In what sense is that not a profit? I suppose if I wanted to do a profit and loss statement the same a business I'd want deductions but I really don't see a point.
In reality in America the IRS collects income taxes illegally from individuals.
Illegally? How do you figure that? There's a constitutional amendment and statutes in place to make it, by definition, legal. Immoral or counterproductive, perhaps, but not illegal.
What is being gained, does it make economic sense?
Yes, this is an interesting perspective. I don't get the impression law enforcement (or government in general) being terribly concerned about cost/effectiveness. It's hard in this case: how do you put a cost on a successfully prevented terrorist attack? How do you know you actually prevented anything? How about catching a bank robber? How about all the other incidental data you hoovered up in the process--how much is that worth? Especially if that is the real purpose and following suspects is just a plausible cover story.
Thing is, given what was reported in TFA, I'm not at all clear what their specific goals are and whether there was a cheaper way to achieve that result. For example, there's the weekday/weekend pattern. Maybe that's sinister, maybe they're honest that it's easier and cheaper to follow a suspect with cars on low-traffic days, cheaper and easier to use planes on weekdays. I really can't say, there's not enough information. But there sure seems to be enough information for someone to say "gee, that's odd" and ask some pointed follow-up questions.
...this should come out the same day as the FBI director saying how bad it might get if People Get Ideas about using end-to-end encryption to avoid surveillance. They're so unbelievably tone deaf about why people don't trust them when they say they need the ability to monitor everything and trust us, we wouldn't do anything nefarious with that power.
For goodness sake, throw us a bone. I know the FBI doesn't want the bad guys to know our surveillance capabilities but can you at least offer the tiniest fig leaf of accountability? Or even admit we the people have a legitimate demand for some accountability and oversight?
My recreational pilot buddies don't typically fly much above 5000 feet. I think you need oxygen or pressurization to fly above 10,000. Getting to Truckee, CA airport (5,900 feet) actually takes some planning to make sure you don't get too high in the passes.
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My local elementary school had only women working at it (except a janitor). My doctor's office is dominated by female doctors in the family health department. The office where I work doesn't exactly match the demographics of my street either. For that matter, my management chain is dominated by British ex-pats.
"Time is what keeps everything from happening at once." -- mis-attributed to John Wheeler
I had a very different experience. I went shopping for used cars for my daughter and to replace my old car. I found used cars hold their value much, much better than they used to. 2-4 years in, they were only selling for a 20% discount under prices for new cars. It seems the days of a car losing half its value when it rolls over the dealer curb are over.
I just quickly googled for some stats. MADD reports 10,000 people killed in accidents where the driver was over the legal limit for blood alcohol content. Even if that's exaggerated by a factor of 10, installing breathalyzers in all cars would likely save many, many more lives than anything you'd do about guns.
To answer the actual question, mass killing are tragic but very rare. I don't want to sound callous but if you really want to save the most lives, there are other preventable causes of death where you'll do more good.
Don't blame me, I've never voted for her.
I hear there's a mutant space goat about to eat the planet so we need to build three space arks...
This has a rotten smell to it. Seems to me HP is being slowly dismantled for money. A great company slowly being flushed down the toilet by short termist used car salesman types.
The rotten smell could be coming from the services division. Sounds like Meg noticed the EDS acquisition wasn't panning out so toss the mess to someone else and cut your losses.
I'm really not sure what HPE has left. x86 servers, storage systems, some network stuff. The servers and blades are pretty well respected. I work at a storage competitor and we kind of laugh at HPE storage. The network gear they had when I worked at HP was pretty good but not nearly well respected as Cisco and other giants. There's nothing which is a real standout that I know of. You've got to be the best at something and I'm not sure what that something is for HPE.
This also seems eerily like Agilent. HP's test and measurement got spun out and kept shrinking and shrinking. It's still around but a shadow of its former self.
While I am not a proponent of ethanol fuels, the US didn't take food stocks to produce it. They did use feed stock corn, but that corn would never have been for human consumption in the first place. Since then, many have changed their crops to switch grass which has similar yields but requires much less water to grow.
The feed stock corn would be fed to livestock or used to product other products. Whether humans would directly eat it doesn't really matter, that corn had other uses. I believe you're incorrect about switchgrass. People are working on ethanol from switchgrass but it is still mostly experimental. I don't believe any substantial amount of ethanol comes from cellulose today.
I'm with you, none of this has anything to do with fuel cells. I remember reading a paper something like 15 years ago from the Rocky Mountain Institute which actually ran the numbers. They walked through all sorts of ways to power cars using fuel cells and batteries, computing the energy losses and costs all along the way. It probably needs updating but it was quite interesting. I don't remember the conclusion. My takeaway was it's not like fuel cells or ethanol are good or evil, it's all about the end-to-end efficiency and cost, and that's not easy to compute.
Basically -- you want people to be available to deal with stuff at other hours? PAY them to do so. Nothing hard about this.
Unless it's made illegal to do so. That's my beef, or would be if I lived in France, that my employer and I can't come to an arrangement we're both happy with.
Back to the original post, "they eventually break down". Really? Any evidence for that, Benoit? I've worked with hundreds of people who check email after hours and I don't recall hearing of one single breakdown. How about you document it's a problem before legislating against it?
Wow, two huge companies with long-term net profit margins of around 26%? That's pretty incredible. Most companies I know of are thrilled with net profit of 10%.
There should be a law, the amount owed should be definite, failure to pay would be a crime. That law should apply to everyone, equally.
Agreed. Isn't that the US tax code (modulo exemptions which sound generic but are tailored to apply to only one entity)? I'm not aware of any special provisions just for Apple.
I would be in support of Apple paying its rightful share of all the taxes needed to support the city infrastructure and government that it burdens. Not much more. Sounds like these councilmembers want the "more".
Question is, what's the "rightful" share. I thought we generally used property taxes for that, not corporate sales taxes. So, Apple's rightful share would be the property tax on all its extensive real estate in Cupertino.
It also sounds like Cupertino gave Apple a property tax break to keep them in town. OK, fine, admit that's what you did, take responsibility for the consequences, and talk about whether you want to re-negotiate. But don't whine about how you want a slice of Apple's accumulated profits, that was never in the cards. And use this as an object lesson about why you might not want to do that in the future.
But why couldn't each state just create a single interstate commerce tax rate for this situation?
They could. In fact, I seem to recall a movement a few years ago to do just that, harmonize the sales tax rules among many of the states. The thinking was this would reduce the burden of computing sales tax and undercut the same ruling. I don't remember what happened to that effort.
The practical issue is the sales tax rules are horrendously complicated. Things like what's the tax rate on a Snickers(tm) bar. In some juristictions, it's a snack with one rate, in others it's a food with a different rate. And it varies not just state by state but sometimes county by county or city by city. Legislators just can't resist inventing their own their own classification rules which are better in some way or other. The result for a seller is mass chaos.
Obligatory funny example: in Kansas, candy is taxed at 6% while food is taxed at 1%. If a candy bar contains flour, it's a food, not a candy. So my Snickers bar is taxed at 6%, a Kit Kat at 1%. Starting to see the problem?
In my opinion, capitalism is the only market form that works reasonably effective and ensures progress and freedom, ...
It's not just your opinion, virtually all the evidence points that way.
...but it absolutely needs to be combined with moderate egalitarianism and effective laws to prevent monopolies and cartels.
You'd have to be more specific about what sorts of rules you're in favor of. There's evidence that monopolies and cartels tend to fall apart soon enough if there's free access to markets and no use of force (e.g. legislation or regulation) to enforce the monopoly. I'd also say that an egalitarian and compassionate society is a wonderful thing but I'm less convinced government is a good way to ensure that.
Why? Well, regarding the first point, we can always discuss how much wealth should be transferred and in which way, but that there should be universal agreement that some transfer is necessary. You can show that to almost anyone by explaining the Gini index and asking that person at which point society becomes unjust - people will only disagree about where the point lies, but nobody will honestly and sincerely defend a country with index 1.
And here's where we depart ways. A high Gini constant by itself isn't a bad thing if everyone is getting richer (e.g. the United States for the last century). Heck, if most people are content with their lot, even getting richer doesn't matter. Problem is, that's not how we're wired. We innately want to compare ourselves to the Other Guy, to keep up with the Jones'. That leads to envy and class warfare. IMHO, that's the problem, not the actual inequality.
I also believe your hypothetical country with a Gini index of 1 is a strawman. I don't think that can exist in the real world. Or if it did (e.g. Tom Hanks in Cast Away), it would be a very poor country.
Because, you know, without any sort of employment regulation we always get the best of all possible worlds with absolutely the best economy and wages that there is possible to be. Because right wing ideology says so!
Well, no, Microeconomics 101 says so. And Fredrich Hayek. The observation is no one agrees to a deal unless both parties think they benefit and benefit by more than their other available options (would you buy something if it wasn't worth it or you could get it cheaper somewhere else?). Given that, I trust employees and employers to strike the best possible deal between themselves. It's the height of arrogance for me to think I know their situation and can craft a better deal than they do.
Economists "agree" on no such thing.
Fair enough, it's not unanimous. I hope (but can't prove) virtually all of them will concede that theory and practice show if you have a price floor, you get surplus supply and reduced demand. In a labor market, one calls that "unemployment". They should also generally agree employers can adjust in other ways than cutting jobs (e.g. by cutting benefits). Finally, they should agree the effects might be small and difficult to measure. The current natural experiments suddenly raising the minimum by large amounts (e.g. Seattle) ought to be enlightening.
Personally, I suspect the economists who signed that statement want to believe the minimum wage doesn't cost jobs and are suffering confirmation bias. I may be doing the same thing in the reverse direction. I don't think so. Supply and demand analysis is pretty simple, compelling, and matches my own observations of how the world works. That raising the price of labor would not reduce demand seems such an extraordinary claim it demands really clear, extraordinary, and compelling evidence to believe it.
And "...there are exactly 57 known communists in Congress."
If they track your hours then you should automatically be hourly. If you don't set your own schedule then you should be hourly. If you can't leave at noon because things are slow then you should be hourly. If you don't have a set amount of tasks that once finished you can leave then you should be hourly.
And that matches, let's see, exactly none off the full time salaried professionals I've ever worked with. The deal is, I more or less work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So long as my boss thinks I'm getting enough done and I think I'm working reasonable hours, we're all good.
You want the government to give us free shit?
Well, it's not free. Someone is paying for it. Funneling it through the government/employers/insurance companies just makes it harder to figure out who.
If the U.S. Government can't manage to give every U.S. citizen free basic healthcare, then it sure as fuck can't afford to give everyone enough cash to live on every month.
Interesting thought. Let me ask you this: which do you think is more complicated, sending everyone a check or managing a $1 trillion healthcare system? And do you think the provision of health care and health care financing to everyone is hard because of a lack of cash or the inherent complexity of the system? I think it's hard to provide because it's mindbogglingly complicated. Writing checks to everyone seems way, way simpler, something the usual gang of idiots could probably pull off (although I wouldn't put it past them to screw it up).
Then there is the question of how much a UBI would cost. Let's see, there are something like 245 million adults and 50 million children. That's $7.4 trillion basic income for adults and $400 billion for children. So we're talking roughly $8 trillion per year. Gulp. That's a lotta cash, something like double the entire federal budget (including Social Security and Medicare). SS and Medicare are around $2 trillion a year. Let's assume you cancel those because you don't need them any more, we're still talking raising taxes by around $5 trillion dollars. Wow. That's a total non-starter.
It always seemed to me that the more successful you were, the more well-off you were, the less actual work you appeared to do each day. I know there's research involved in say running a major investment fund like Warren Buffet does, but he doesn't do the majority of it. 95% is delegated out to subordinates who do the legwork and write up the analyst reports, Buffet himself just goes over those reports and makes the final decisions. It's something only he can do, but he's not spending 40 hours a week nailed down to a desk...
I'm guessing you don't know many C-level executives. Or executives of any kind. Every successful business leader I've ever met works their a$$ off every day. Meetings from sunrise to after sunset, tons of decisions to be made, activity to review, guidance to dispense, email to slog through, shareholders to placate, customers to schmooze, and on and on and on. I don't know anyone running a company who routinely kicks back smoking a stogie and barking "Get me New York" into an intercom.
Seriously? A 50% tax rate? That's highway robbery. It's an insane amount of money to pay for a government. I know he's probably talking about the marginal rate not the effective rate but it's still just nuts.
Historically, we've collected something like 18-19% of GDP in tax revenue. Even that seems pretty high to me. I'd be much happier at 10%.
(I'm trying to do the math from memory. I think Apple has a net margin of something like 25% which means paying half of that would give them an effective tax rate of 12.5%. That's a little high given that everyone pays an additional tax on whatever they receive as dividends. But this is Apple we're talking about, which has the highest net margins of any company I've ever heard of. Most companies are delighted with a net profit of 7-8%.)
Well, actually no, this is the theory, the fact is that the companies charge what the market will bear, and then pay taxes, this is why so many companies migrate to locations with tax shelters or tax deferments etc.
You forgot employees. A company could react to higher taxes (or a higher minimum wage) by either cutting profit margin, raising prices, or cutting employee compensation. None of those is easy. If you cut profit margin, you'll have a tough time raising new capital when you need it. If you're in a competitive market, your competition may keep you from raising prices. If you're in a competitive market for talent, you can't cut salaries or your good employees will head for the exits.
The likely answer is some combination of all three. I have no idea how the burden of a higher tax rate would play out, other than more companies re-incorporating in some other country and/or leaving income outside the US so doesn't get taxed at all. Neither of those seems like outcomes we want.
Actually it is individuals who shouldn't be paying any income taxes. Taxable income is actually profit and only corporations have profits, individuals don't have profits unless they can depreciate their own bodies, time, deduct expenses such as food, shelter, etc.
I don't think there's any "should" about this. One can easily argue it's best to tax a company, a person, both, or neither.
If you want to talk about which one promotes more social good, I'm inclined to tax individuals and not companies. Eventually all the money a company earns flows back to individuals (either as dividends, capital gains, or ordinary income). IMHO, it's better to tax the individuals because it makes the cost of government crystal clear. Politicians and populists like to tax corporations because it makes it harder to see who's actually bearing the burden of paying for our government.
People don't make profits? I trade my time and energy for a paycheck. Clearly the money is worth more to me than my time. In what sense is that not a profit? I suppose if I wanted to do a profit and loss statement the same a business I'd want deductions but I really don't see a point.
In reality in America the IRS collects income taxes illegally from individuals.
Illegally? How do you figure that? There's a constitutional amendment and statutes in place to make it, by definition, legal. Immoral or counterproductive, perhaps, but not illegal.
What is being gained, does it make economic sense?
Yes, this is an interesting perspective. I don't get the impression law enforcement (or government in general) being terribly concerned about cost/effectiveness. It's hard in this case: how do you put a cost on a successfully prevented terrorist attack? How do you know you actually prevented anything? How about catching a bank robber? How about all the other incidental data you hoovered up in the process--how much is that worth? Especially if that is the real purpose and following suspects is just a plausible cover story.
Thing is, given what was reported in TFA, I'm not at all clear what their specific goals are and whether there was a cheaper way to achieve that result. For example, there's the weekday/weekend pattern. Maybe that's sinister, maybe they're honest that it's easier and cheaper to follow a suspect with cars on low-traffic days, cheaper and easier to use planes on weekdays. I really can't say, there's not enough information. But there sure seems to be enough information for someone to say "gee, that's odd" and ask some pointed follow-up questions.
...this should come out the same day as the FBI director saying how bad it might get if People Get Ideas about using end-to-end encryption to avoid surveillance. They're so unbelievably tone deaf about why people don't trust them when they say they need the ability to monitor everything and trust us, we wouldn't do anything nefarious with that power.
For goodness sake, throw us a bone. I know the FBI doesn't want the bad guys to know our surveillance capabilities but can you at least offer the tiniest fig leaf of accountability? Or even admit we the people have a legitimate demand for some accountability and oversight?
My recreational pilot buddies don't typically fly much above 5000 feet. I think you need oxygen or pressurization to fly above 10,000. Getting to Truckee, CA airport (5,900 feet) actually takes some planning to make sure you don't get too high in the passes.