Considering, you know, everything, here's some ideas that have been building in my mind. I want some harsh criticism, even to replicate disingenuous criticism that I would receive from bootlickers. If the ideas hold up, I'll try to get a movement going. (The slightly right wing spin is intentional. This is about the general idea not nitpicking percentages.)
Two policies to protect businesses and ensure economic stability during the current crisis and impacts of AI:
- Business tax now based on revenue per employee. Instead of being taxed purely on profits, businesses will pay tax only on revenue above a defined amount per employee. For examples we will set the threshold at 100k per employee. For a company with 2 employees, revenue above 200k will be taxed at 100%. A self employed plumber who earns 60k per year will not be taxed at all. For a company that employees 500 people, all revenue above 50mil will be taxed at 100%.
This ensures businesses cannot lay off staff or increase prices to increase profits. Rather, to earn more profits they must employ more people. The increased tax naturally only applies to businesses that aren't already struggling, and provides much needed tax relief to most. The extra tax is used to offset policy 2:
- Raising the minimum income required to pay tax to minimum wage. So any income minimum and below has no income tax. Essentially moving the tax brackets upward to start at minimum.
This ensures that customers have a huge jump in disposable cash to spend and keep the economy from crashing. Businesses can take advantage of this by reducing salaries (since employees will have more in the pocket after tax and be happy to work for a lower on paper salary) and by hiring more people to increase profits and efficiency.
Please criticise and offer improvements. Also any tips on how to spin it in a more right wing flavour. This is obviously quite left, but if it's more 'business profits good' then I'm more likely to capture that crowd.
For context, I live in NZ.
Real world example (numbers may not be exact):
Amazon in 2024 had 1.5mil employees, made $700b, and paid $26b in tax. Under these policies, $550b would be taxed (Just think of the trains!). The hard part is ascertaining how much should be set aside for business operating expenses.