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by nugget 4303 days ago
Competition between the states is one of my favorite aspects of the US structure of Government. It goes a long way towards encouraging efficiency. True democracy is being able to "vote with your feet" and move around based on personal preferences and values.
1 comments
bluthru 4303 days ago
Why are you labeling a business not paying taxes an "efficiency"?
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bmmayer1 4302 days ago
Because business taxes are a drag on the economy, and universally acknowledged to be a bad thing by economists.
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dragonwriter 4302 days ago
> Because business taxes are a drag on the economy, and universally acknowledged to be a bad thing by economists.

Maybe universally by Austrian school economists; certainly not universally by economists more generally (e.g., its pretty clear that neither Brad DeLong nor Paul Krugman think that business taxes are an unqualified evil, and its pretty hard to argue that they aren't economists.)

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bmmayer1 4302 days ago
Hardly just the view of Austrian economists. Plenty of liberal economists including Robert Frank, Dean Baker, even Matt Yglesias think that corporate income taxes are a bad idea.

It's not about "unqualified evil," it's more about the fact that business taxes decrease productivity, take money directly away from employees and consumers, and could easily be offset by any other individualized progressive tax, not to mention the repatriated corporate dollars that would result from a competitive tax scheme.

Here are some fun sources from the NY Times and NPR:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/opinion/abolish-the-corpor... http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/10/18/163106924/a-tax-pl...

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dragonwriter 4301 days ago
> Hardly just the view of Austrian economists.

Its certainly not universally held among economists in general, as was claimed upthread. I didn't suggest it was exclusively the view of Austrian-school economists (a very different thing that Austrian economists), but that it might just possibly be universal among Austrian-school economists.

> Plenty of liberal economists including Robert Frank, Dean Baker, even Matt Yglesias think that corporate income taxes are a bad idea.

"even Matt Yglesias"? Matt Yglesias might be a liberal, but he isn't anything like an economist.

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