Political Memes

Corporations should pay more taxes, but since people are talking about how it all works in reality:

Not all corporate expenses are tax deductible, and people are able to deduct a fair amount from their income when calculating their taxes.
Additionally, individuals are taxed on a progressive scale where anything up to ~$15,000 isn't taxed. That number should be much higher to actually reflect cost of living, but you're still paying less to account for cost of living.

With $60,000 in income your taxable income is $44,000 after the standard deduction , and then you only pay taxes on about $30,000 of that because of the bracketing.

If corporations are people (under the law) then the money they make is income and should be taxed appropriately.

Corporation: We planned the next 2 years on an ever increasing income stream but the most minor inconvenience disrupted that so we had to lay off 9,000 employees with zero notice so we could meet our bottom line.

Government: That's a shame, here's $500,000,000 to help "mitigate" "economic conditions".

The 9000 laid-off employees: Can he get $200 a week unemployment so we can afford to exist?

Government: You should have planned better.

The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.

--Rutherford B. Hayes

Corporation privilege has been a problem in the US and the western world for a long time.

Edit: I found the longer version of the quote by Hayes.

/uj

The "money spent on survival" is the standard deduction and deductions in general. Deductions are viewed as if you never made that money in the first place. Whether standard deduction should be larger is another question.

I think part of OP's frustration is that corporations (and the wealthy, for that matter) have a lot more loopholes to be able to claim deductions compared to the average person. And people are spending money to just survive, which seems more important than making a profit. The average person doesn't have the resources to access these loopholes.

Loophole example: say you're just a common multimillionaire. You want to own multiple properties, but to just go out and buy them, you'd need to spend your income on them, which you can't deduct from your taxable income. Instead, you incorporate a private consulting company (just yourself) and instead of you buying those properties, your business buys them for you. You know, so that you can have somewhere to stay when you travel for business. Those become deductable expenses, and your company doesn't pay any tax on the income used to purchase them. You pay yourself a meager $50k per year, pay almost no tax, live luxuriously, and write condescending posts on LinkedIn. Congrats, you win capitalism.

I totally get what you're saying... but to be fair if you did allow people to deduct all the money they spent in a year from their income, it would specifically encourage a lot of people to spend every single dollar they earned just to avoid the taxes.

They'd be like "hang on, if I spend $3000 a month on rent I get taxed on the $1000 I have left over? What if I move to a place that costs $4000 a month? No taxes? That's what I've got to do then!"

Is that sensible? No. The tax they'd pay on the $1000 is way less than the extra $1000 they're planning on spending to avoid it, but people seem to have a real aversion to a little tax, and many would feel they "got something" for the extra money they spent on groceries or restaurants or rent, compared to the taxes which are simply taken from them.

I'm not saying it couldn't work, I'm not saying there aren't better ways to do it, and I'm definitely not saying there aren't weird cliffs in programs like this that lock people into poverty. But I'd be worried that people who are already wrong about graduated tax brackets, for example, would make a lot dumber choices if they felt they could spend $40 on fancier bread to avoid "$40 of taxes"

Well yeah, at this point the corporation and government are the same person.

I'm a Democrat. Not specifically in the party sense but in the genuine belief Democracy is the very organizational form of government we have... But damn if it isn't dependent on having a well informed, educated citizenry to thrive. Wealth inequality got so out of control and foreign governments undermined us to such an extent our citizens are mostly clueless to being played.

I'd rather just start with them taking the appropriate taxes out of my check rather than me paying a company for them to tell me I owe another 2-5k