We were "in the running" for HQ2 and I'm glad it didn't happen. Another 50K commuters wouldn't have made things any easier, I don't care how much the $5B payroll would "add to the tax base". The city has enough leftist morons to destroy it now.
You believe that campaign donations should be illegal. You believe that it should be illegal to pay to have your opinion known?
Free speech?
Someone has to.
Easy fix: give all businesses the same tax break.
or is actually a net benefit
Driving businesses out of the state, or out of business, kills jobs. It's just WRONG.
Tax people, tax sales, don't tax businesses. Those Chinese companies don't pay US taxes. Keep the jobs in the USA. When people have jobs and can afford to buy things, they can pay the taxes.
The tax breaks given to Amazon and BMW and movie companies show that politicians partly understand this concept.
I think the only tax should be consumption tax, sales tax to the end user. That should include services, which won't happen because most politicians are also lawyers.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
f NY.
it won't happen because it would be a regressive tax
It makes sense to put a distribution center near major highways and airports and near the cities where the customers are clustered. It's strange to me that big companies jam their IT and management folks into those same places, or worse. San Francisco is choking on density, and Apple just leased another zillion square feet for a couple thousand more geeks; goodness knows where they will live, or how many roommates they'll need to share the rent. You'd think the coders might prefer to be in Colorado or something. Some of these people might grow up and want kids.
I guess part of the dynamics is that Apple can pay gigantic salaries so move in where there are lots of other companies' employees available for instant poaching.
I work with a big big outfit that is horribly, astoundingly inefficient and truly terrible with electronic design. I have suggested that they open a design center in the Sierras, Grass Valley or Tahoe area, where great stuff could be done and others could make pilgrimages, and get in a little hiking or skiing in the process. No interest. They'd rather stay in places like San Diego and tolerate
100% engineering turnover per year; only the duds stick around.-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
No, it would be "progressive" (the term is usually mis-used) because poor people don't buy $90,000 watches or $8000 handbags. It would be simple to exempt rent and food and basic clothing and medical care, as many places already do.
About half the US population now pays net zero taxes, or less. It would be better to have them paying a lot more because they have good jobs and can afford to pay taxes.
Politicians are almost always bad economists, just like economists are almost always bad economists.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
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OK I agree with you mostly, but I don't see how 1/2 of the US pays no net taxes. It is true that only about half the people pay federal income taxes . My other taxes include, 'payroll' taxes (of which half are hidden and paid by employer) state income tax sales tax property and school taxes and other fees and such.
Everyone working and living in a house pays most of those. What percentage of the 'working' population is employed these days?
George H.
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You are very good at rationalizing and much worse at critical thinking. Yo ur consumption tax is regressive because it impacts proportionally more of the income of a poor person and so has a much greater impact on their lives .
Yes, we need to tax the wealthy more, but a consumption tax is not necessar ily a good idea. Have you considered how high this tax would need to be? From what I see, a consumption tax would need to be around 18%. I read onc e that when such a tax exceeds around 10% people start finding ways to avoi d paying the tax. At 18% a lot of diversions would be found... in addition to the ones codified by the law makers.
Yeah, tax grandma's expenditures from her social security to help pay for h er social security. Better yet tax the huge medical expenditures by those disabled folks to help pay for their disability payments.
Or... maybe we could just not reduce taxes on the wealthy. Oh, wait, John identifies with the wealthy, so he won't support that.
Rick C.
Tesla referral code +-+-+
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afford to support full-time lobbyists in Washington, and the major state ca ptials. It's the lobbying effort that pays off in giant tax breaks. "Levell ing the playing field" would start off with hanging all the lobbyist, or at least exiling them from the centres of power and locking them into internm ent camps without communications facilities.
hing you are also a lobbyist. you want to ban talking to politicians?
Around the world, it is generally accepted that allowing very rich people t o donate large amounts of money to their preferred candidates distorts the electoral process.
In the US this is not accepted, and the same rich people who make large pol itical donations are paying lobbyists to get tax loopholes written into law so that they can get even richer.
Its a universal law that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The U S is unique amongst advanced industrial countries in putting the boundary b etween rich and poor between the top 1% of the income distribution and the remaining 99% of the population.
Free speech doesn't extend to yelling "Fire" in a crowded theatre. There ar e also other constraints, even if the US Supreme Court is unenthusiastic ab out recognising them
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Why? If krw did, he'd be deluding himself, but he does make a habit of that. Once enough of your cognitive capacity has gone down the tubes, you make all kinds of mistakes.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
f NY.
Wrong. The concept that politicians understand is that large businesses can pay large bribes and large campaign contributions.
Politicians do understand that doing favours to large businesses who employ lots of people can be sold as encouraging employment, but that's just wind ow-dressing.
Consumption taxes are regressive, rather than progressive, which puts the b urden of paying for society-wide services on the less well-off, rather than the better off who could afford to pay out more in taxes, but have the pol itical clout to avoid paying for the society-wide services which happen to be worth more to them than they are to the less well-off.
John Larkin is well-off and gullible enough to swallow the usual right-wing justifications for exploiting the poor and being generous to the rich.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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, )e of NY.
US life expectancy is 79.5 years, so the under twenties are 25% of that fig ure.
It's fake news.
Not actually true.
They may be bad at economics, but probably not a bad as John Larkin, and hi s economics guru, Jame Arthur.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Don't tax businesses.
King Jeffery-1 wants to look out his office windows and survey his vast kingdom below, including the Capitol and Empire State Building.
Just tax the people that own them, who collect the profits. Strange how the y all seem to trust funds located in tax havens.
The advantage of taxing businesses is that you can tax them where they do b usiness, and make their money (and exploit the services that society provid es, like education and health care for the people that work for the busines ses, and police and the legal system to stop other people robbing the busin esses).
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Terrible idea. In fact, because state capitals are located in cities, it has long been noted that the tax-free real estate of state property is a drain on the local community's services. Most states, nowadays, make locality donations in lieu of taxes, to redress this inequity.
An immunity to taxes is like a license to steal: it's wrong. Don't let it be bought, like a business license.
Property taxes are horrid ideas. They tax wealth, not ability to pay.
Businesses don't pay taxes, dummy. They're passed onto consumers. Make collection more direct and more efficient.
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Ask any property owner. The good thing about property is that you know wher e it is, and can't transfer it to a tax haven.
it be bought, like a business license.
So get the business to do the collection from their customers. That's direc t and efficient - taxing the business owners on the profits they make is le ss direct, and fosters the tax avoidance business of vesting the ownership in trust funds located in tax haven, which makes the collection much less e ffective (and less efficient, since some of the money involved sticks to th e fingers of the tax avoidance experts who set up the off-shore trust funds ).
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
The function of government should not be to mete out punishment renamed as fairness, or to maximize government revenue, but to do the best for the governed. Namely, do what works.
There is an attitude popular in some circles that everyone should be taxed 100%, and that anything less is a gift from government. That makes sense if government owns everything. Historically, that hasn't worked well.
The accumulated cash and equipment and IP of a business do not take anything away from poor people. Quite the contrary: they are the tools a business uses -selfishly- to create genuine wealth and jobs.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
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