cruise ships

"Must"? Corporations have existed for centuries, not as "fictions", but because they have a function, as do lots of other group activities, like clubs, churches, professional organizations, unions.

John Larkin, President Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation

the

become

Please study up on the term legal fiction. A corporation is not a = natural person. Granting powers associated with natural persons to any corporation, indeed the term corporate person is part of what the whole legal fiction is about. Get your lawyer to explain it to you.

?-)

Hey, I have a C corporation. My wife has an S-corp. Corporations allow groups of people to get stuff done without personal liability beyond their investment. That makes sense: without that separation, it would be difficult to get people to invest in, or to manage, large-scale enterprises.

I don't understand your concept of "equity" between corporations and people. A corporation isn't a person: is has no feelings, no pleasure, no pain, no consciousness; it's just some papers filed in Delaware. There's no reason to be jealous of a corporation over its profits; it can't enjoy them.

Noted: "total income" ^^^

Repeated: "lower rate of income tax" ^^^.

Ah, the dumbass moment arrives. "Capital gain isn't income."

Buffett pays 35% on ordinary income. The overall average effective rate you've been complaining about INCLUDES capital gains, which is most of Buffett's "income." You've been complaining about his CAPITAL GAINS rate.

Here, re-read your own link:

You think that's unfair. It's not unfair. a) Anyone can get that rate. b) We tax capital gains favorably because society has decided that capital formation and investment is beneficial, if not essential-- Warren Buffett's activities taxed at 15% create a lot more jobs (thousands)--and tax revenues (billions)--than his secretary's (zero jobs) taxed at who-the-heck-cares %.

You also think there are buckets of your fair share of OPM (other people's money) there for the taking. That's wrong too; we've already been over why.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

cts

el-

en,

--

Any place I've lived. I've not lived in the US which does seem to do things foolishly differently.

Which treats "long-term capital gains and qualified dividend income" as identical. It goes on to say the Warren Buffett's main assett, Berkshire Hathaway, has never paid a dividend. It also says that Warren Buffett has an extraordinarily low income considering his net worth - he collect just 0.2% of his net worth as income - so we can't make any assumptions about how he engineers his income. For all we know he could be living off the interest on Berkshire Hathaway's petty cash - but whatever he lives on we can be confident that the income stream has been engineered to attract the lowest possible rate of tax.

If they've got a $63M income, they can afford to have a couple of accountants working full time to reroute the their income through any convenient tax loophole. People on lower incomes have less flexibility. My father once got $25,000 as an unsolicited and unexpected gift in appreciation of his contributions to the pulp and paper business (in North America). It should have been entirely tax exempt, but the Australian Income Tax authorities didn't see it that way. After my father had paid for some rather expensive representations to the Tax Office, they condescended to treat it a payment on retirement (which it wasn't) which meant that he'd have to pay income tax on 5% of it, some $750, which was less than he'd already paid his advisors, so he took it. Warren Buffett would be dealing with sums that would justify taking the rapacious bastards to court.

That's the formal justification. In fact the way the system works simply provides loopholes that fat cats can use to avoid paying much more than 15% tax on their incomes, if they are in a position to organise their finances with this in mind.

The Australian "imputed tax" system works rather better. You only get to credit "imputed tax" on your income against your dividend income if the company paying the dividend had actually paid corporate tax to the government to create that "imputed tax".

It's not my fair share. I'm not a US tax-payer and I don't get any money from the US government. It may be your fair share - as I've pointed out before, the top 1% of US incomes have collected the lions share of US economic growth since the late 1970's.

My point is not that this is a rip-off, which it is, but that it is a stupid rip-off. The top 1% of US incomes are short-changing the rest of the population, particularly the poorest 20%, who don't get enough to feed their kids well enough to take full advantage of the relatively poor education they get offered, making the kids less productive workers than they might have been when they get into the work-force.

Bleeding heart socialism likes subsidising the poor, but practical socialism limits the subsidies to levels which are profitable for society as a whole. If nothing else, adequately fed and educated kids from the poorest classes tend to grow up into productive employees, rather than low-level criminals who end up incarcerated (which costs society a bundle).

John Kenneth Gailbraith wrote a relevant book a long time ago - "The Affluence Society" - which doesn't seem to have persuaded anybody in the US, though it made "private affluence and public squalor" a popular phrase.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Actually the above is a crock. Warren Buffet and Mitt Romney own portions of corporations. The corporations pay taxes so a portion of the corporate tax is out of Warren Buffet and Mitt Romney's income. And then they get to pay again on the same income as individuals. So their effective tax rate is more like 30 or 35 %. In Mitt Romney's case he gives a lot to charity , about the same amount as his federal income tax. So naturally some people think he should pay more in taxes to help make things more equal. Of course that would mean he had less money to give to charity.

What the U.S. should do is change the tax code for corporations so the corporate tax rate is about the same as it is in other countries and there are less ways to organize business to reduce taxes. But also change the tax code so that money paid out in dividends is not taxed at the corporate level. But have dividends taxed as ordinary income at the personal level. In other words dividends only taxed once and corporate taxes at the same level as they are in most of the world.

Then those with a lot of dividend income would pay more taxes, but the corporations would be competing on an equal base with the rest of the world.

=20 Dan

"Income" isn't gold bars or herds of cattle any more. It's just numbers on a disk drive somewhere, indicators of dollars which the government can create, for free by the trillions, at will. There's no reason to tax bits on some hard drive somewhere.

If we have to tax something, tax consumption. Consumption is real.

Warren Buffett's corporation - Berkshire Hathaway - never makes a profit and never pays corporate tax. How Warren buffet gets his income out of the company doesn't seem to have been made public, but there'll be a loophole in there somewhere.

I don't know what Mitt Romney does, but he's probably no less careful to minimise tax payments.

They appear to get most of their income as qualified dividends and capital gains which are taxed at 15%. Berkshire Hathaway doesn't make a profit, so Warren Buffett isn't paying any corporate tax.

You hope. The corporate tax system is riddled with loop-holes - the maximum US corporate tax rate is one of the highest in the world, but very few corporations pay it. Almost everybody seems to have had some kind of private loophole written into irrelevant legislation by a "friendly/well compensated" congress person, so the actual US corporate tax collection rate is relatively low by international standards.

This is a rather poor way to run a country.

A lot of the rest of the world goes in for tax imputation to avoid double taxation

Perhaps.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You're moralizing again. We should do what makes people better off, not what you think is fair. People tend to get poor because they don't have jobs, and income taxes, especially corporate taxes, kill jobs.

You talk about "save and invest" like it's a bad thing.

As far as regressive goes, a sales tax is neutral, not regressive. But it's easy to reduce the burden on poor people: exempt food, cheap kids clothes and such, and have no sales tax on used stuff.

But have sales tax on services. It's crazy that we don't.

John Larkin, President Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com

Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation

the

of

become

natural

I really hate to believe that you are such a blockhead. Thus, i suspect that you are just jerking me around. Reminder on the crux of the discussion (sub-thread), is whether to grant _all_ the rights and privileges to corporations that natural citizens have, and what would be the result of such grant of privilege. BTW, study up on the original startup of the corporate form of business and why and how it was done, = and the differential in rights and obligations of share holders, and executives. Compare that to situation for ships Captains.

?-)

Actually corporate dividends are taxed as ordinary income in the US. Capital gains is a whole different thing, very different; like variations is stock prices, manipulated or not. It has had some interesting side effects, including an unreasonable run up in the value of stock prices over the past 20 or so years. The run up is unreasonable because of the lack of relative change of book value of the company's possessions. But with the whole IP idea, reasonable valuation goes out the window.

They don't have all the rights of people. That can't get married, can't vote, can't hold public office.

BTW, study up on the original

Wow, you really are in schoolmarm mode today.

I figure the Supreme Court did better legal study on this issue than I can. Go review their reasoning.

Taxed twice: to the corp as profit - not an expense - then to the recipient as income.

I'd go for that. I'd even go for two simple rates on income, no deductions. The amount of time and energy we spend on tax planning is insane--that's free productivity for the taking, being burned by the gov't.

BTW, is it my explanation, or is Sloman just impenetrable wrt: cap. gains / Buffett / etc.? Anyone can get that rate, yet Bill keeps bleating about rich people and their accountants, secret loopholes, and other conspiracy theories. It's bizarre.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

What does he have left after being "charitable"? Bill Gates is "charitable". But what he has left is more than he and his great grandkids can spend in a lifetime. After buying everything they want, maybe they enjoy having other people beg them for money. In other words... Charity depends on the giver's wealth as much as it depends on how much is given. That's an ancient principle.

Well, big corps can exploit loopholes and pay little or no taxes. And the big corps tend to export labor; GE and Apple (two of Obama's favorites) are examples. Small companies create the most domestic jobs, but usually pay the max rates, because they can't afford a staff of tax lawyers. Again, tax policy kills jobs and creates poverty.

"Capital gains" is mostly market speculation these days. That's not productive.

That said, Sloman is remarkably dense about all of this. But then, he's been on the dole for ages.

At least Barack Obama talks about keeping jobs here in the United States. Republicans act like they admire Communist China. The only thing Republicans say that sounds contrary to that admiration is when they make excuses for big companies shipping jobs to China... "We can't stop big companies from shipping jobs to China, we are helpless." Communist countries would fall flat without our markets. Big business want to destroy labor, and they own our politicians. There is another perhaps coincidental factor, that is women bringing home more of the bacon. If the one-way media would publish poll results separated by gender, you would probably see a significant difference in opinion between men and women concerning issues like illegal immigration and outsourcing manufacturing jobs. But for some strange reason the one-way media never publishes poll results separated by gender.

Since companies run our country, I vote with my money. Some are better (or less bad) than others. I consider the fact that saving a few pennies by buying a product made with Communist Chinese slave labor can help put my fellow countrymen out of work. Unfortunately, some people believe that greed is good, money is everything. And they don't give a damn about anything else.

ir.

James Arthur can't get it into his head that Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney are paying around 17% tax on their income - a lot less than the peak average rate of 29.7% paid by the group earning between $2M and $5M per year - and bleats about everybody paying the same rates of income tax, when one of the advantages of having a great deal of money is being able to spend a small proportion of that money with accountants to set up schemes that minimise the amount that you have to pay in taxes.

The US tax system is over-supplied with loopholes, in large part because friendly congress-people keep on writing new tax-loopholes into irrelevant legislation, but James Arthur can't see that because it doesn't fit with his delusion that the US political system is perfect and consequently not susceptible to improvement.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

air.

John Larkin is as out of date as ever. The dole stopped when I turned

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen