[FpUser]

The easy ( yeah right ) fix would be single universal sales tax. You buy something - you pay. Does not matter corporation or person. No expense claims on that either. This will also eliminate need to count assets as the taxes has already been paid on those. Tax can be progressive with the possibility of rate going negative for low income people.

[imtringued]

The easy fix would be to have a land value tax that pays for everything. You can trivially dodge sales taxes by not declaring them. There are legal ways and illegal ways to not declare them.

Meanwhile with land value taxes, you either own the land and you pay, or you don't own the land and you don't pay. The only way you can dodge this is by not owning assets in the US and by not living in the US. Landlords pass the land value taxes onto renters (individuals and companies) who then end up paying their fair share of the US taxes.

[thehappypm]

I used to think this was a good idea but it ends up really, really favoring big corporations.

Startup A wants to get into a market and it buys Zoom licenses, GSuite, AWS servers, etc and pays a hefty tax bill.

Microsoft wants to get into that market? They don't have to buy any of that stuff, they already own everything. No tax dollars, lower cost to the incumbent.

[FpUser]

I am a startup among the other things. So far I feed myself and was for the last 20 years ( startup of course is not that old ). I host my own servers and also rent dedicated servers elsewhere. I have no need for GSuite and Zoom. I talk using Skype which is free. I use vertical scalability and my servers are C++ so this infrastructure serves thousands requests per second without breaking sweat from a single server. In the end my current app serves tens of thousands of clients with very little monthly costs.

Microsoft and other do own their infrastructure but if they're not renting it to clients it wastes money as it has ongoing costs so not, them using their own infra is anything but free.

[thehappypm]

You're missing the point. You still need to buy servers, right? You still pay for electricity to power those servers, right? You buy hard drives, right? Those would all be taxed transactions. Whereas Microsoft's startup would use Microsoft's existing infrastructure. Even Microsoft's hardware costs are pennies on the dollar compared to yours, so their sales tax revenue would be also.

[castlecrasher2]

yeah, the vast majority of government taxes and regulations on paper sound like they'll hurt the big guys but really just hurt the small ones