[conanbatt]

> The richest entities in society are businesses

I can never get this narrative. A business is an organization of people, of investors workers and consumers. You cant offload taxes to an abstract business, you are putting it on one of the groups of people above.

[rpedela]

Yes except that the vast majority of the population are part of the businesses in some manner so if you tax all businesses then you are taxing the whole population (or vast majority). And as I said, personal income taxes on wages are actually a business tax. The requirement to provide workers comp, healthcare is a business tax. Businesses are taxed all the time.

And those groups of people are financially more powerful collectively than individuals which means those groups of people have a responsibility to help pay for society which they benefit directly from such as roads, power cables, etc.

If only one or a very small group "abstract business" was required to pay all the taxes for the entire society, then I would agree with you. However no one is arguing that.

[conanbatt]

> Yes except that the vast majority of the population are part of the businesses in some manner so if you tax all businesses then you are taxing the whole population (or vast majority). And as I said, personal income taxes on wages are actually a business tax. The requirement to provide workers comp, healthcare is a business tax. Businesses are taxed all the time.

There is little merit in name of a tax that it gets to "the majority of people". It can fail equitability super hard because of who pays the economic burden of the tax.

> And those groups of people are financially more powerful collectively than individuals which means those groups of people have a responsibility to help pay for society which they benefit directly from such as roads, power cables, etc.

Sorry, but this is just not economic thinking, not even of the wrong kind. If the burden of a tax is on consumers, your assertion falls hard. If it falls on workers, then you are punishing labor. If it falls on investors you are punishing investment. "Being powerful parts of society" is not an argument for taxation.

[rpedela]

I think you and I fundamentally disagree on what a tax is. You seem to view it as punishment or a burden. I view it as the method for paying for things that help the collective good. Not a punishment but rather a duty for those with the means. If we aren't using taxes to collectively protect society (e.g. military, police, courts), help the less fortunate, etc then why collect them at all? The richer the entity (individual or business), the more means they have and the more they actually benefit from those taxes even if they have to pay them.

EDIT

Just to add, if you agree we need taxation to have functioning society, why wouldn't we get the money from the richest? Why wouldn't we put the burden on the richest? In terms of people inside rich organizations, it is only the already rich, owners and investors, which would feel the burden. Supply and demand will continue to give consumers high quality and low prices. Employees will still get their market-rate wages or minimum wage for low-skill jobs.

[closeparen]

You're responding to a technocratic argument about how to allocate taxes equitably with a moralistic argument that taxes are good. From a meta-debate perspective this is both infuriating and tragically common. Details matter. Incentives matter. "Taxes are actually good" isn't a reason to stop caring about which taxation schemes produce the best outcomes or are more fair.

"Punishment" carries some unnecessary connotation. How about "disincentive." People respond to incentives; good policy exploits this by taxing the things society wants less of. Failing that, it levies taxes that don't depend much on behavior, to avoid undesired distortions.

The argument is not that corporations have some kind of right to their income that's being unfairly abridged. It's that taxing corporations is sloppy: the true cost of the tax falls on consumers, workers, and owners in not-very-deliberate proportions. If you want to put the burden on "the richest," great, so do I. But let's tax those actual people.

[rpedela]

Okay but why is it sloppy? Saying the true cost is on consumers, etc is a start but it is not a full argument. How do you know where the true cost lies? And like the other commenter, you seem to think a tax is a cost/disincentive which it is but there is a positive side too. Morality or not there is a benefit to taxes which many purely economic arguments on HN ignore.

In other words, the true cost may be on individual people. But so is the true benefit. So would taxing solely corporations have more cost or benefit for those people? Both for the people in the corporations and those without? I have yet to see a coherent, let alone persuasive, argument against the idea.

[conanbatt]

> Okay but why is it sloppy? Saying the true cost is on consumers, etc is a start but it is not a full argument. How do you know where the true cost lies?

These are the questions the field of economics studies. Thats what they say.

> Morality or not there is a benefit to taxes which many purely economic arguments on HN ignore.

Saying that there is a benefit of taxes is an economic argument. Thats why it gets responded with economic arguments. If you imply the act of paying taxes is moral, I would compare it to the donation to church, where self-sacrifice is a virtue of its own. Much like the donation to church, it should be for those that want it. After all, its not self-sacrifice if its not voluntary!

> In other words, the true cost may be on individual people. But so is the true benefit

The ones that pay are not the ones that receive the benefit. Under this Doctrine you could always see a robber stealing a wallet and conclude that society is not a dime poorer. After all, one side gained what the other side has lost. What a defense the criminal has! That he has not made society poorer!

> So would taxing solely corporations have more cost or benefit for those people? Both for the people in the corporations and those without? I have yet to see a coherent, let alone persuasive, argument against the idea.

Its very hard to tell , precisely because corporate taxes hit different people in different ways in a chaotic way. It is much easier to make a conclusion with different taxation methods, but corporate taxes are very obscure and distortive.

[conanbatt]

Great way to say it.

[conanbatt]

> think you and I fundamentally disagree on what a tax is. You seem to view it as punishment or a burden. I view it as the method for paying for things that help the collective good. Not a punishment but rather a duty for those with the means. If we aren't using taxes to collectively protect society (e.g. military, police, courts), help the less fortunate, etc then why collect them at all? The richer the entity (individual or business), the more means they have and the more they actually benefit from those taxes even if they have to pay them.

A tax IS a punishment. It is a charge not reciprocated by a service to the person that pays for it. Collective goods dont require individualized sacrifices, just individual collaborations. But okay, we can divert ideologically on that point, but nevertheless any effect of taxation is a cost on the person paying for it, and will have the same effects to him as if the person lost the taxed money into the abyss.

> Just to add, if you agree we need taxation to have functioning society, why wouldn't we get the money from the richest? Why wouldn't we put the burden on the richest? In terms of people inside rich organizations, it is only the already rich, owners and investors, which would feel the burden. Supply and demand will continue to give consumers high quality and low prices. Employees will still get their market-rate wages or minimum wage for low-skill jobs.

I think I've always had a curious thought about the idea of not discriminating minorities, except for the rich, you better discriminate those! If we can agree at least that taxation is the cost of government, why should the cost of government only come from a section of society? A society that achieves to make a part of it responsible for its whole will not thrive in collaboration and cohesiveness. A society where some expect to make a living at the others expense is not a free one.

In economic terms, there are multiple criteria on measuring how good a tax is. There is of course how the burden affects the person itself, but also how efficient it is to levy it, how convenient it is to pay or how predictable it is. Satisfying multiple criteria will not give you much room to tax "the rich".

There are normative arguments as well: just placing a tax on the rich doesnt mean you'll be able to raise that money, as the rich have the highest recourse to escape. Human beings are very hard to corner!

[sjwright]

> A tax IS a punishment

A tax is a legitimate cost of a functioning economy as much as an electricity bill or a truckload of cement. That tax pays for the infrastructure which makes that same transaction possible in the first place.

Ideally the cost of participation in the economy should scale linearly with how much excess benefit you derive. Total benefit minus the cost of being a functioning human in the society. This requires the insight that a person who has $1,000 of discretionary money every week has a lot more than ten times the excess benefit as someone who has just $100 discretionary every week.

Put another way, from the perspective of a rich person, it's in my interest to have everyone else in society well fed, free of disease, mentally healthy and able to work productively. The best way for rich people to ensure that is to require them all to pay a much larger proportion of taxes.

[GabrielBen]

These are 3 very different arguments. I will answer each:

> A tax is a legitimate cost of a functioning economy as much as an electricity bill or a truckload of cement. That tax pays for the infrastructure which makes that same transaction possible in the first place.

A tax can be used to pay for the infrastructure, and also pay many other things that are terrible and inefficient and immoral. Government spends a very small fraction of its budget on infrastructure, what about the rest? If only a fraction of the spending justifies the whole, then as long as you use some part for good you are entitled to rob the whole.

Moreover, as time progresses, we find more and more ways to pay for infrastructure without taxes. Why is the infrastructure of the US is crumbling, and tax pressure is equal or higher? Its just not real that taxes are necessary for infrastructure, and that taxes are spent on infrastructure.

> Ideally the cost of participation in the economy should scale linearly with how much excess benefit you derive. Total benefit minus the cost of being a functioning human in the society. This requires the insight that a person who has $1,000 of discretionary money every week has a lot more than ten times the excess benefit as someone who has just $100 discretionary every week.

I dont see well the justification for 'excess benefit'. What is excess benefit and who decides? For me, goverment employee salaries are excess benefit, because many of them do actual damange and collect a paycheck. Can we tax those 100%? The second part talks about the ability to pay: if someone has higher ability to pay a tax they should pay a higher tax. I dont think this is in everyones best interest either. If someone is earning a lot more because he produces more value, the tax will punish the productive fields, and prize the least productive fields. This means more people will work on the least productive, and less people on the most productive. The end result is worse wealth for the entire society.

> Put another way, from the perspective of a rich person, it's in my interest to have everyone else in society well fed, free of disease, mentally healthy and able to work productively. The best way for rich people to ensure that is to require them all to pay a much larger proportion of taxes.

It is not true that taxes are the way to help people advance. The greatest advances of human kind in quality of life and wealth happened in time of low government tax and intervention. Equating taxes to benefit is a grave mistake, one that reality has once and again shown extreme dangers. The society with the ultimate taxation, Socialist-communist, has shown greatest decline and misery of its people.

[rpedela]

> taxation is a cost on the person paying for it, and will have the same effects to him as if the person lost the taxed money into the abyss.

In my town, in addition to the normal local taxes, there is a special greenery fee/tax that all residents must pay. It is only $25/year. The purpose is to pay the upkeep of all the green spaces which there are many. I happily pay this because I like to walk through these green spaces. Individually there is no way that $25/year would pay for that, but collectively the town can afford to and it improves living here for all the residents.

There are of course many examples where tax money is not used wisely, but there are also many examples where it is. We should get better at spending it wisely which is of course easier said than done. But to say that taxes are like throwing money into the abyss just doesn't stack up to the data.

[sjwright]

And while we all would prefer greater efficiency in government, an inefficient government is still universally preferable to an absent or non-functioning government.

Also, if that inefficiency is in the form of salaries or domestic spending, it's only partly wasted as it adds to movement of money in the economy.

[conanbatt]

If you are happy to pay for it, why do you need it to be a tax? You can pay your government directly.

Unless you want other people to pay for it, of course.