10 ms·

Let's call these "reforms" for what they are - a shameless and unjustified money grab by the government.

by dmk23 13y ago

nodata 13y ago
Can you explain your comment a little bit? From the way I understand it, this is a way to get large companies to pay the same amount of tax as smaller companies.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  To me it reads like the usual right wing rhetoric, and that any tax collection is some form of evil socialism. Not quite sure how these people expect their flag waving military, for example, to be funded without the big corporation paying their fair share, but there you go. Never understood why many Americans don't see paying tax as the ultimate act of patriotism, paying for the country they claim to love. They love the country, but resent paying for it. How does that work? Are they the ultimate freetards?
  - alexbilbie 13y ago
    I'm confused by your statement - a right-leaning Government is attempting to collect more taxes from multinationals who have huge sales in a country and pay little tax and yet you're claiming that they also consider tax collection some form of evil socialism?
    - mercurial 13y ago
      This is clearly an attempt to explain dmk's post, but not the article which was submitted.
    - anon1385 13y ago
      The Conservatives are right leaning from a European perspective and compared to most of the UK governments since the war. From an American perspective they are more akin to the Democrats: they support gay marriage, support legal abortion, don't support reintroducing the death penalty, support public health care (to some extent), generally support public education, do at least claim to accept that environmental issues are a concern (although we do have an environment secretary who denies climate changes science…). They support giving benefits to at least certain groups in society (pensioners, land owners) and accept the need to provide some level of support for the disabled, unemployed, single parents and so on. They made commitments to maintaining the level of foreign aid. For all their talk of pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights they have not actually done so. So they have a lot of policies that your typical Republican would be fairly disgusted by. I wouldn't vote for them myself of course…
      - timje1 13y ago
        This is because the US Democratic party could be considered center-right by European standards, with the Republicans heading into extreme-right. If a party in the UK hinted at dismantling public health care (the NHS) out loud, they'd be lynched (either in the polls or the streets, whichever was more convenient).
  - mercurial 13y ago
    I could understand not wanting to contribute to NSA funding, but it does sound like a vocal minority (?) does believe that tax collection should be as low as possible. Possibly due to a mistaken belief in trickle-down economics (if something yellow-coloured trickles down from the top, it doesn't mean it's gold...), or maybe caused by a belief that increasing disparities between social classes is a desirable goal.
  - coolsunglasses 13y ago
    What sort of value do you think the typical American taxpayer gets out of their taxes as contrasted with somebody in one of the wealthier European countries?
  - kelnos 13y ago
    I love my country in spite of what our government has done to it in recent decades. I do not support the majority of dollars the US government spends, but feel powerless to effect change. I resent paying for foreign wars I don't agree with, for secretive government agencies that unnecessarily pry into our private lives, and for ridiculous departments like the DHS which are largely ineffective and throw money away. I would love to pay more for public education and a public healthcare system. I would love to pay more for innovative, effective solutions to poverty and homelessness. I'm happy to pay for the maintenance of our roads and for services like police and fire departments and public libraries. Unfortunately, there's no good way for me to express this preference. All viable political candidates at the national level want to spend money on too many things I do not want for the voting apparatus to be of any help here. So I sit back and grudgingly pay my taxes, hoping that people of like mind but with more political acumen and drive than I have will be able to make sense of the mess eventually.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    To me it reads like the usual right wing rhetoric, and that any tax collection is some form of evil socialism. Not quite sure how these people expect their flag waving military, for example, to be funded without the big corporation paying their fair share, but there you go. Bunk. Being anti-tax has nothing to do with being "right wing" at all. In fact, the entire term "right wing" is 100% meaningless in modern terms. Plenty of us who oppose taxation ALSO oppose our empire building overseas military operations, and aggressive foreign policy, and want the military rolled back to only what is required for defense of the USA. I for one want the US out of the "world police" role. Just cutting a huge chunk out of the military budget would be a great start on reducing government spending and decreasing the tax burden. Never understood why many Americans don't see paying tax as the ultimate act of patriotism, paying for the country they claim to love. Our country and our government are not the same thing. And Americans have a long history of having issues with excessive taxation by the government.
- soup10 13y ago
  Small companies(S corps and LLCs) don't pay corporate taxes. C corps pay a wide variety of taxes depending on where they earn their profits, how aggressively they working to minimize tax burden, and how hard their industry lobbyists work. Certainly some companies pay far more and far less than their fair share. I'd wager the tech companies who generally have little in the way of physical presence where they earn revenue, and have towns and cities competing for the chance to host their offices and data centers, probably pay very little relatively.
Eye_of_Mordor 13y ago
Is there any point in taxing companies at all - they provide jobs for tax payers.
- lmm 13y ago
  Taxing their profits encourages them to spend any spare cash hiring more tax payers rather than sitting on it.
  - Eye_of_Mordor 13y ago
    Corporations pay out taxed dividends from their profits.
    - lmm 13y ago
      Taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary people's income though. (And more to the point the kind of person who gets money from dividends is less likely to spend it on tax-generating economic activity like buying food)
      - Eye_of_Mordor 13y ago
        Yes, the logic is that the corporation paid tax on their profits before dividends. Perhaps there's a case for corporation tax abolition and increased dividend taxation?
        lmm 13y ago
        I actually wouldn't be averse to that, but it'd be hard to internationally coordinate such a change (and it would have to be internationally coordinated, or corporations would move to the places that had the lowest corporation tax while their owners would move to the places that had the lowest dividend tax). And there's still the problem of keeping your wealth in a corporation and avoiding paying tax on it until you use it (which creates the wrong incentive - we want to encourage rich investors to spend the money and put it back into the system, or at least invest in new ventures, rather than leaving it in their company's bank account accumulating compound interest).

Let's call these "reforms" for what they are - a shameless and unjustified money grab by the government.

by dmk23 13y ago

Let's call these "reforms" for what they are - a shameless and unjustified money grab by the government.

Can you explain your comment a little bit? From the way I understand it, this is a way to get large companies to pay the same amount of tax as smaller companies.

alan_cx 13y ago
To me it reads like the usual right wing rhetoric, and that any tax collection is some form of evil socialism. Not quite sure how these people expect their flag waving military, for example, to be funded without the big corporation paying their fair share, but there you go. Never understood why many Americans don't see paying tax as the ultimate act of patriotism, paying for the country they claim to love. They love the country, but resent paying for it. How does that work? Are they the ultimate freetards?
- alexbilbie 13y ago
  I'm confused by your statement - a right-leaning Government is attempting to collect more taxes from multinationals who have huge sales in a country and pay little tax and yet you're claiming that they also consider tax collection some form of evil socialism?
  - mercurial 13y ago
    This is clearly an attempt to explain dmk's post, but not the article which was submitted.
  - anon1385 13y ago
    The Conservatives are right leaning from a European perspective and compared to most of the UK governments since the war. From an American perspective they are more akin to the Democrats: they support gay marriage, support legal abortion, don't support reintroducing the death penalty, support public health care (to some extent), generally support public education, do at least claim to accept that environmental issues are a concern (although we do have an environment secretary who denies climate changes science…). They support giving benefits to at least certain groups in society (pensioners, land owners) and accept the need to provide some level of support for the disabled, unemployed, single parents and so on. They made commitments to maintaining the level of foreign aid. For all their talk of pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights they have not actually done so. So they have a lot of policies that your typical Republican would be fairly disgusted by. I wouldn't vote for them myself of course…
    - timje1 13y ago
      This is because the US Democratic party could be considered center-right by European standards, with the Republicans heading into extreme-right. If a party in the UK hinted at dismantling public health care (the NHS) out loud, they'd be lynched (either in the polls or the streets, whichever was more convenient).
- mercurial 13y ago
  I could understand not wanting to contribute to NSA funding, but it does sound like a vocal minority (?) does believe that tax collection should be as low as possible. Possibly due to a mistaken belief in trickle-down economics (if something yellow-coloured trickles down from the top, it doesn't mean it's gold...), or maybe caused by a belief that increasing disparities between social classes is a desirable goal.
- coolsunglasses 13y ago
  What sort of value do you think the typical American taxpayer gets out of their taxes as contrasted with somebody in one of the wealthier European countries?
- kelnos 13y ago
  I love my country in spite of what our government has done to it in recent decades. I do not support the majority of dollars the US government spends, but feel powerless to effect change. I resent paying for foreign wars I don't agree with, for secretive government agencies that unnecessarily pry into our private lives, and for ridiculous departments like the DHS which are largely ineffective and throw money away. I would love to pay more for public education and a public healthcare system. I would love to pay more for innovative, effective solutions to poverty and homelessness. I'm happy to pay for the maintenance of our roads and for services like police and fire departments and public libraries. Unfortunately, there's no good way for me to express this preference. All viable political candidates at the national level want to spend money on too many things I do not want for the voting apparatus to be of any help here. So I sit back and grudgingly pay my taxes, hoping that people of like mind but with more political acumen and drive than I have will be able to make sense of the mess eventually.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  To me it reads like the usual right wing rhetoric, and that any tax collection is some form of evil socialism. Not quite sure how these people expect their flag waving military, for example, to be funded without the big corporation paying their fair share, but there you go. Bunk. Being anti-tax has nothing to do with being "right wing" at all. In fact, the entire term "right wing" is 100% meaningless in modern terms. Plenty of us who oppose taxation ALSO oppose our empire building overseas military operations, and aggressive foreign policy, and want the military rolled back to only what is required for defense of the USA. I for one want the US out of the "world police" role. Just cutting a huge chunk out of the military budget would be a great start on reducing government spending and decreasing the tax burden. Never understood why many Americans don't see paying tax as the ultimate act of patriotism, paying for the country they claim to love. Our country and our government are not the same thing. And Americans have a long history of having issues with excessive taxation by the government.
soup10 13y ago
Small companies(S corps and LLCs) don't pay corporate taxes. C corps pay a wide variety of taxes depending on where they earn their profits, how aggressively they working to minimize tax burden, and how hard their industry lobbyists work. Certainly some companies pay far more and far less than their fair share. I'd wager the tech companies who generally have little in the way of physical presence where they earn revenue, and have towns and cities competing for the chance to host their offices and data centers, probably pay very little relatively.

Eye_of_Mordor 13y ago

Is there any point in taxing companies at all - they provide jobs for tax payers.

lmm 13y ago
Taxing their profits encourages them to spend any spare cash hiring more tax payers rather than sitting on it.
- Eye_of_Mordor 13y ago
  Corporations pay out taxed dividends from their profits.
  - lmm 13y ago
    Taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary people's income though. (And more to the point the kind of person who gets money from dividends is less likely to spend it on tax-generating economic activity like buying food)
    - Eye_of_Mordor 13y ago
      Yes, the logic is that the corporation paid tax on their profits before dividends. Perhaps there's a case for corporation tax abolition and increased dividend taxation?
      - lmm 13y ago
        I actually wouldn't be averse to that, but it'd be hard to internationally coordinate such a change (and it would have to be internationally coordinated, or corporations would move to the places that had the lowest corporation tax while their owners would move to the places that had the lowest dividend tax). And there's still the problem of keeping your wealth in a corporation and avoiding paying tax on it until you use it (which creates the wrong incentive - we want to encourage rich investors to spend the money and put it back into the system, or at least invest in new ventures, rather than leaving it in their company's bank account accumulating compound interest).