[edwhitesell]

At a high level of just considering taxable income that is true. However, the difference is there are a lot more things a corp can do to reduce taxable income than an individual can do. If you happen to be the owner of a corp you can also use those things to your individual benefit.

If the argument is to say "income is income", then "expenses are expenses" should apply too.

Edit: typo

[chii]

> the difference is there are a lot more things a corp can do to reduce taxable income than an individual can do.

this is exactly it. Rental costs are deducted as expenses for a corporation, but the same rental expense cannot be deducted from income. Arguably, the cost of staying alive for a person is an expense for making the income!

To make it catagorized would be too complex though - i would propose that personal income should be average-able across that person's lifetime. I.e., if i made $1000000 in one year, i should be able to spread the income from when I first started working (and paying taxes), so that my average income per year is the same number. Then you back pay all the "missing" taxes from those years, rather than suddenly jump to the $1,000,000 tax bracket and the gov't taking 45% from you in one go.

[sokoloff]

Though I agree with the annoyance of high marginal rates for one-time windfalls of income, I think it's more practically workable to only allow forward averaging in the form of "pay all the taxes now and fill out this new form XYZ to allow you to perform the alternative averaging process over the next 4 tax years".

Otherwise, you end up effectively amending N returns (possibly opening them back up for examination), needing to calculate what taxes would have been due under the then-extant tax brackets and laws, possibly needing to make inflation adjustments for figures that are decades removed from the tax years in question, realistically needing to pay interest on the taxes that you didn't pay in 1972 but are now claiming are part of your 1972 income because you sold a company in 2019, and everyone would have incentive to file a tax return showing earned income from age 1. (Maybe I arrange for my child to have a job posing for photographs and being paid $20 just to get their income tax filing clock started and being able to income average all the way back to that year instead of only to age 17, 19, or 21.) Forward-only averaging avoids (or substantially avoids) those issues.

[hedora]

Computing tax rates against a moving average of the last 5 years income is a simple and elegant way to have the same effect.

Young people would have lower rates while they’re establishing themselves, people with windfalls would end up paying rates in line with their annual compensation (instead of just maxing out the brackets with a big percentage of their income).

Also, people with sustained high income would be taxed at a much higher rate than upwardly mobile members of the middle class.

Similarly, low income people with intermittent income would have a much better chance at building their savings.

Finally, it defeats all sorts of timing strategies, so people could make major financial decisions without first hiring a cpa.

[sokoloff]

That's interesting. In essence (assuming no tax law changes), you claim 20% of your income for the current year over each of the next 5 years for tax purposes. Has very nice properties for initial wage earners as you say.

Downsides: results in a 3x income tax charge if an income earner dies suddenly (assuming you want to settle their estate in less than 5+ years). Acts as a loan from the feds to the taxpayer, resulting in income taxes due after you stop working (perhaps you became disabled or got fired [or die, as above]), and results in deferral of income tax receipts to the government during the transition.

Overall, I really like it.

[temp1831]

If you go to a high level of abstraction, you remove useful distinctions. That is not a productive line of thought. Not all income is the same, and not all expenses are the same. Excise taxes and any "nudge" tax laws make this obvious.

It is true that there are some tax deductions that are abused. However, the effect of encouraging investment by businesses is much more important.

>If you happen to be the owner of a corp you can also use those things to your individual benefit.

This could be considered an abuse. However, the benefit of encouraging investment by businesses far outweighs the negative of this abuse. We tend to focus our attention on a few big individuals who cheat, and this excessive focus throws off our moral intuitions. Heck, the gas station owner might have deducted the cost of buying a toolbox needed at the workplace, and then borrowed a wrench from that toolbox to go home and fix his plumbing. That would be fine with me, to the extent that all the damn tax paperwork stops being worth keeping track of.

[edwhitesell]

> If you go to a high level of abstraction, you remove useful distinctions.

That's my point and what I was extrapolating from your high-level comment. If you're going to give an example, it's good to talk about things the gas station and software company do to reduce that income to, or below, zero. Things that can provide direct, positive, net gain impact on ownership of the corp. However, those same things are not available to employees of the corp.

To me, the rules should be the same for _any_ taxable entity.