[vel0city]

> That's what the standard/itemized deduction is supposed to represent.

If they wanted you to deduct housing costs they'd just let you deduct housing costs. Instead they play games about mortgage interest deductions because they want to incentivize certain kinds of living arrangements over others and give handouts to some voters but not others.

I agree the idea of only having households pay taxes on savings is pretty much untenable with existing revenue structures and would be disencentivizing things we want to incentivize. Just pointing out how corporate taxes just seem pretty absurd from what households pay in comparison.

Let's imagine two groups of people. One group gets a bonus and takes that money to go on a cruise. Easily 30%+ of that money gets taken by income taxes (including FICA). The other group gets their company to just pay for them to go on that cruise as a team building exercise/corporate summit/planning meeting/whatever you want to call it. That's negative taxes in the end, the cost of the business operating, it's a cost that offsets revenues. Good luck getting that audited and declared taxable.

Totally seems fair.

[derefr]

> Instead they play games about mortgage interest deductions because they want to incentivize certain kinds of living arrangements over others and give handouts to some voters but not others.

Your "they" is doing a lot of work here.

In reality, this system isn't top-down; it's bottom-up. Influential groups of voters (corporations, sure, but also just various stripes of "rich people" — and even upper-middle-class people at the municipal level) go out and lobby their local and regional representatives to get exceptions carved out for them (and, mostly coincidentally, people like them.)

The voters who don't get handouts are the ones who have no political influence.

(Fun fact: our current situation with capital-gains taxes, was an attempt to "rationalize" a system that was previously similarly cronyist in shape. It used to be that there were particular exceptions carved out for investment classes A and B and C that rich-and-influential people invested in, and none carved out for your regular Joe. People got mad, and the government's solution — rather than removing the carve-outs — was to just make them equally accessible to everyone.)

[gruez]

>That's negative taxes in the end, the cost of the business operating, it's a cost that offsets revenues. Good luck getting that audited and declared taxable.

How is that negative taxes? At best it's tax free, but calling it negative tax (because it's lower than the alternative?) is double-counting. Moreover AFAIK this sort of tax evasion mostly happens at the small business level (eg. a plumber buying a pickup truck and then using it to go to the grocery store and pick up his kids from soccer practice), but it doesn't really happen at the corporate level because 1) such spending will almost be in contravention of corporate governance policies and be flagged by auditors and 2) you need so many people in on the conspiracy that it's impossible to keep a lid on it. Plenty of companies get flak for their subsidiaries in tax havens, but I'm not aware of any serious allegations of corporate tax evasion by the way of fringe benefits.