[ajross]

Actually one of the strongest arguments against corporate taxation is the corruption/tax-break angle. Big organizations are always going to be able to lobby more effectively than small ones or individuals.

A reasonably fair personal income tax or VAT can be implemented reliably (and has, in virtually all of the industrialized world). A fairly distributed corporate tax is nearly impossible (again, the existence proof being its absence basically everywhere). No matter how well the statutes are written, a big enough entity will be able to lobby the government into changing the law to its benefit.

[tonyedgecombe]

I have thought for a while it would be better not to tax businesses at all, instead tax individuals when they draw funds from the business, either as dividends or salary.

I'm not sure how you could get from here to there though.

[zanny]

But then you use the same loophole where you write all your personal expenses off as business write offs, except its even worse because you can tax exempt everything under the pretense of it being a business purchase.

The real proper tax is a transaction tax. Not a flat sales tax or anything, just whenever money changes hands between entities (personal or institutional) in exchange for goods or services (including you paychecks, which are an exchange of your time for money) you get flat taxed on that.

The exception to this is capital gains, since those are not really transactions, just money you are making for owning some form of the means of production. You would definitely want a strict yet simple progressive tax on that, to curtail wealth concentration of the pandemic nature we see happening today. Rather than tax brackets, they should just use a linear function with no capital gains below the happiness threshold up to, say, (now these numbers are fudged and should be researched) 100% tax on capital gains over 1000 times that threshold.

[dredmorbius]

I agree with you up until capital gains.

Those are in fact transactions, at least when they're realized, and are supported by a huge class of apparatus of the State, from property laws to courts to communications infrastructure, and more.

[3pt14159]

Transaction taxes are inefficient because they punish market makers that build books across active, volatile markets with low average yields.

[tonyedgecombe]

In the UK we already have rules that stop that sort of thing, for instance if you use a company owned vehicle for personal use you have to pay tax on that. You also have the fact that these avoidances are local so are easier for the tax authority to stop.

[ajross]

Really it doesn't matter where, specifically, you draw funds from. Taxing corporations makes their products more expensive. Taxing individuals reduces their purchasing power in the economy, which is sort of the same thing. Taxing all transactions with a VAT is the cleanest expression of this idea, the government basically ends up being (by definition) a fixed size relative to the economy.

A VAT or sales tax has the advantage of efficiency and ease of implementation. A personal income tax can be made more progressive and socially fair more easily. Most western governments have settled on some mix of these for the bulk of their revenue.

[tonyedgecombe]

I don't disagree, I wasn't arguing about VAT or sales tax, rather corporation tax which international companies seem able to avoid but their smaller competitors end up paying.

[dsfsdfd]

Exactly, this is why you need to make lobbying a criminal offence. Seriously, jail time. Money must not be allowed to buy political power.

[ajross]

Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the [...] right of the people [...] to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Yes, we're talking about a UK law, but the principle remains valid. "Lobbying" is just the advocacy for the government to do something. Most of the time it's a good thing, because governments on their own tend not to have many good ideas. Making that illegal in general is (quite literally) isomorphic to living in a totalitarian regime.

I suspect what you really mean is that lobbying by "bad people" should be illegal. Well... good luck defining that in statute. You say banana and I say banana.

Let's say you have a horse-and-buggy paratransit company (call it "Unter" for short) that you think is a great idea. But it turns out that existing cities have dumb, ancient laws that disallow horse-drawn carriages. But your users love your service and everyone agrees that it's a great idea. So you call up a legislator to pitch them on the idea of updating the law.

...and end up in jail, because you're a "corporation"?

[jxjdjr]

I think what he means is money should not buy you the ear of government. Using it for this purpose should be illegal, otherwise you no longer have a system where one vote buys you one unit of power, you instead have a system where one unit of wealth buys you one unit of power. Which in some people's opinion, is fascism.

[ajross]

Buying the ear of government with money already is a crime, though. "Lobbying" is regulated already, and certainly does not involve bribery. The problem is far deeper and more complicated than that.

You aren't going to drive much social justice if you paint your enemies as cartoon characters.