business incentives

te:

w,

it has long been noted

community's services.

ess this

it be bought, like

Only right-wing scare-the-voters propaganda.

Central planning, Soviet style, couldn't collect and process enough informa tion to work all that well. Information processing has come a long way sinc e then. It might be made to work today - the free market is just a sort of analog computer with money flows representing an controlling the activities that do stuff, and there might be better ways of regulating the economy.

Free markets are already regulated to prevent unfortunate interactions (lik e booms and busts, and the tendency of big firms to form cartels and monopo lies).

Which is no reason not to tax them. Collecting taxes is a process of creami ng enough out of the immediately productive parts of the economy to pay for the parts - like roads, defence and the law enforcement system - which don 't lend themselves to the free enterprise model.

Businesses are highly visible money making machines. Taking taxes out of th em directly is a lot simpler than going after the people who actually own t hem and trying to tax their dividends.

John Larkin asserts that "the best tax is a consumption tax" without providing a shred of supporting evidence.

I don't know where John Larkin finds his "most people". We'd all prefer to pay less tax, but most people have enough sense to realise that some tax is inevitable and want to see it spread out fairly.

Most governments invests in universal education - not the US central government, which dates back to time when universal education would have been impracticable - which is a long term investment in the future productivity of the working class as a whole.

That's precisely the kind of investment that John Larkin claims that governments don't make. He's got some very silly ideas.

Yes, there are good practical reasons to create and sustain a governing body. In a century of income taxes, no legislative effort has been made to remove income taxation from business. Your idea that business should be tax-exempt is a radical departure from anything we've seen in practice.

Tax is not punishment, it is income to support the costs of government.

Drained of excess verbiage, that paragraph indicates your idea is not accepted.

So, cash amd eqiipment is virtuous? Virtuous persons DO pay taxes, sometimes on property (like, my car's yearly license fee). So, why oughtn't virtuous businesses?

No reason.

Maybe I could try self-publishing a novel on Amazon that starts out like one of those Tom Clancy-style armchair-warrior fantasies for wingnuts like "Rainbow Six" or "Executive Orders" and fill it full of a lot of military-nerd and political intrigue stuff, and whack-off material about minutiae of military hardware and stealth bomber crews and such.

Then at the end the communist feminist eco-terrorists win and there's a big lesbian orgy. And nobody gets shot or dies at all all the bombs are filled with glitter and pink paint. Lol they would be ripshit.

The US recently reduced the max corporate tax from 35% to 21%. That's halfway radical. (We'll have some giant bonuses this year.)

And states compete for people and businesses. A lot of companies are moving from high tax states to low tax states. Or out of the USA. "Legislative effort" happens in multiple legislatures.

Of course government is way too big. But given that it needs actual revenue (and can't just borrow without limit) it matters a lot where the taxes come from. Why not just tax businesses 100% of their profits, or 200%, and let people off the hook?

Absolutely. Cash lets a business survive change. Equipment makes stuff. A society must defer consumption for investment (or steal from someone else) if it is to survive.

Domestic jobs and productivity and balance of trade are reasons.

Venezuela and Cuba are virtuous, and poor.

But, taxation supports domestic government-as-client businesses, and public-sector jobs. It isn't clear that 'domestic jobs' is anything but a nice-sounding noun phrase in that sentence; I counter that reasoning with 'cute puppies', and reinforce my counterargument thus: 'kittens with mittens'.

Snark is not economic analysis.

Freakonomics 2 does point out that communities that contain lots of potential employees also contain lots of other firms with a larger range of expertise. As soon as you try to do something new you can rope in lots of new experts.

Big cities do justify the extra cost of being located there.

At least they are staying in a place where it is easy to hire more-or-less competent replacements. Truly competent candidates would know the company's reputation and avoid it like the plague, but there aren't that many of them.

It is as close to it as anything that John Larkin posts.

Perhaps but it _is_ accurate.

How would krw know?

Tell that to the leftist idiots like whit3rd.

Huh? You're not making any sense.

Define "point of sale tax".

My (former) house in AL was taxed lower than that ($1300 on $300K) but the income and sales taxes were through the roof. Well, the income tax wasn't through the roof as in NY or VT but high.

That _is_ nuts.

Not going to happen but I could learn to like it. More likely, they'd forget to repeal the 16th and we'd get yet another tax.

At least everyone would see what the government cost.

It follows that government could tax business 100% or 400% on earnings and do no harm.

My company sure writes a lot of checks to multiple government agencies. We don't pay any more than token dividends, so taxes don't affect that. We can't just increase prices arbitrarily (oh how I wish we could) to make up for taxes, for a lot of what should be obvious reasons.

We rarely collect sales tax on stuff that we sell, because most of our customers are exempt somehow.

You'd have to be either a true wingnut white person or a terminally stupid/criminal illegal immigrant to want to settle somewhere like e.g. TN and get continually ripped off with high sales tax on everything, even food at the grocery store, gobbling up a significant fraction of what little income you have while your millionaire neighbor pays virtually nothing, relatively-speaking.

They probably deserve each other

The best tax for a wealthy old Republican is surely a consumption tax it means the poor get f***ed out of a large fraction of what little income they have to pay for the stuff everybody uses, the wealthy included.

A lot of poor white people are for that arrangement too for some mysterious reason; I call it "faith-based taxation" where if you white-knight hard enough for the Job Creators and take the shaft for them, they will be there for you and help you to make it to where they are.

That is a laugh.

Racism noted.

At least he understood what he read.

This is a phenomenon seen worldwide. Governments everywhere do favor billion dollar companies. If you don't like this just become one {-D

Tennessee is a nice place. Not sure why you have to bad mouth it. My only problem with the tax situation there was that the schools were mediocre. Anyone with the scratch will send their kids to private school.

School/ property taxes are ~5x (here in NY) what they were in TN.

George H.

Not so much favor big companies as such, but give breaks to largish incremental deals that have high local poltical visibility, that "create jobs" in apparently large numbers.

Driving out or killing a few thousand small businesses over the years doesn't get much press coverage.

It's good that states and countries have to compete to host businesses.