The money I spend of my income buying goods from other businesses is "already taxed" and then when those businesses collect it from me its "taxed again".
Mysteriously, the one form of taxation the already wealthy benefit from is very concerned about this happening.
The argument is not junk, there's value in understanding how taxes work through the value chain.
A little bit like a VAT, we don't want to tax, tax and tax some product that has a long and complicated line of distributors, rather, tax the final product, either using VAT rebates etc.. This is more economically beneficial.
With corporate and individual incomes, we think at little bit the same way - i.e. how the taxation will flow through via corp tax, income tax, dividend tax and cap gains.
In Ontario, if you pay small business corp tax and then a dividend, it's pretty much the same as if you were to take a salary and pay income tax. Obviously, this because the million or so small businesses out there would rig their outgoing cash flows one way or the other, depending on tax treatment.
While cap gains is a special situation, it does still form part of those block of taxes that should naturally relate to one another in terms of how net surpluses are taxed.
When you spend your 'already taxed income' on an entirely new product or service, then that's separate economic activity, and so it's taxed without consideration to your 'previously taxed income'.
Ah, yes, double taxed: once at 0%, due to Ireland, and once at 15%, due to the special capital gains rate. I wish my income was double taxed like that! Where do I sign up?
Different scenario, but tech giants in the US have some amazing arrangements. I’m in New Zealand and their clever arrangements here see them paying minuscule bills on massive revenue
“In 2018 Google NZ Ltd (an entity of Alphabet group) paid income tax of NZ$398,341 – about 0.055 per cent of the estimated gross ad revenue “extracted” from the New Zealand market.”
Facebook, Apple and Amazon have all been in and out of the news here for their arrangements too.
Better question: what proportion of corporate profits are taxed like that? Because the cheesemonger down the street isn't pulling a Double Irish to avoid taxes on the ~0% of GDP that they're generating.
Look up double Irish with a Dutch sandwich. Not really my area of expertise, but in the past at least basically all big tech companies used that strategy.
Yeah, everyone knows what it is, and has known for a long time. It goes to show that the loophole is not an accident but rather an intentional result of our political process. Unfortunately.
True - but of the business activity is in EU, then really it's Ireland's issue to sort out with the EU, it's a separate issue from the 'other side' of the taxation in the US. What they should do is sort it out.
That doesn't make sense. Those are taxes with different bases. It would make sense to talk that way about corporate profit tax and corporate dividend tax for example.
> Personally, I'd prefer higher capital gains tax and lower corporate tax.
Same, but it'd mean more tax money for foreign governments, too, since those untaxed profits would be contributing to cap gains tax in another country (in the case of foreign investors) instead of domestic corporate tax.
> The argument I have heard is corporate profits are already taxed
I've heard time and time again that it's a moral imperative for corporations to reduce their tax burden to zero using every loophole available. Are big corporations actually paying tax?
The concept of “tax burden” or more precisely “tax incidence” is a rather complex topic. For instance, no consumer pays gas taxes since the gas station pays them all, but most people are smart enough to realize the consumer bears a lot of the burden of fuel taxes even though none pays it directly. There is the question of who faces the burden of corporate taxes? Executives? Stock holders? Employees? Consumers? This question has been studied extensively, and with so many multinational companies, in the long term employees are the most burdened by the tax because corporations make investments in lower tax areas. The cost of an investment in a location are wages+taxes. If taxes are high, then wages must be lower for the investment to make sense. This only becomes true in the long term, but it is a good argument for lower corporate taxes and higher capital gains taxes.
The argument is that dragging on corporations hurts customers and staff as well as owners. It's better to precisely target the owners.
However, I think it misses that most of the benefit to owners is in the form of unrealized gains, not subject to any of the tax rates that people talk about tweaking.
That's certainly a perspective you can take. Then you'd really want to look at consumption inequality instead of wealth inequality. Consumption inequality is both much lower at an absolute level than either wealth or income inequality, and pretty much flat over time [0].
To the extent that we care about the distribution of net worth, though, unrealized gains are an important part of the story.
Under current US tax law the original value of an asset is rebased upon death. Thus, you can borrow against an asset, such as stocks, and then your heirs can repay the loan immediately after your death and pay zero capital gains.
This only costs you the interest of the loan and exposes you to the risk of declining value in the assets securing the loan. Appreciation of the assets or dividends may fully offset the interest or more.
Additionally if you a founder, for example, you retain the influence/control of your company that you derive from the stock ownership, while still be able to enjoy their cash value.
No, corporate tax is of corporate profits, which is just capital gains that haven't been dispersed and may be dispersed in the future (or may be reinvested). Salaries and wages are not profits, so they are not subject to the corporate tax. In theory, the sum of the capital gains rate + corporate tax rate is supposed to approximate the individual income tax rate.
But because most people will never understand this, we can't have a tax code that makes sense. Mass democracy is incompatible with sensible rulemaking in this area.
I use my cameras to check in on my cat when I am out of town. Typically a friend only visits briefly once a day and I get peace of mind out of knowing that the cat is eating.
If the cat was not eating, I'd ask a friend to take it to the vet or to sit with a while to make sure it eats.
Can't you just ask your friend to note if your cat ate during the day? I mean, they're probably refilling the bowls anyway, so they will notice if they're full
Also the whole notion of an imminent danger for a semi-wild animal in a big house with daily renewed water and food is a bit weird to me. It seems like Amazon&co just amplify the existing irrational fears, don't you think so?
I think this calculator is counting "State/Local Income Taxes" as a credit instead of a deduction. Input a salary of $60,000 and a $6300 deduction into "State/Local Income Taxes".
$6300 was the single filer standard deduction amount from 2016. It shows different outputs when toggling between itemized and standard deduction.
In my experience, yes. I previously took it for alcoholism. I found it very broad acting. I stopped drinking compulsively. I also became indifferent overeating, smoking cigarettes, sex, and pretty much everything else compulsive.
I've heard of people using it off label to lose weight.
For me it is a very strong & powerful drug, but I also know of others where it did not seem to work. I've heard if you have a family history of alcoholism it is more likely to work.
In the last month I've used hotels.com twice because it was lower than booking directly.
In SF: Hotels.come was $180/night, hotel's website was over $300/night.
In Copenhagen: Hotels.com was $120/night, the hotel's website was over $180/night.
I'm not sure why these places are running sales on hotels.com, and not on their direct website. I try not to book on hotels.com because hotels have a reputation for giving those travelers the worst rooms (double beds vs. king bed, next to elevator, unrenovated rooms). However, it's hard to say "no" to 30%+ off.
I don't think consumer software has been that valuable in my lifetime. MS Office, & Turbo Tax are killer apps that people pay for. People willingly pay for online games too. Other than that? I guess some people buy apps.
I don't think it's regional. I've never bought an app. I paid for some dev tools, but that's it. Selling productivity outside of people's work is an uphill battle.
I think knowing the hardware is less challenging than previously. The trend is to make everything whitebox and then abstract as software. Hypervisors replace supporting many hardware configurations and software defined SANs replace dedicated appliances.
The Google dataset might not be the best for measuring this. Names and abbreviations rank highly. I think Warren Buffet might help contribute to the high ranking of 'warren'.
One thing I also did before I bought the exact model was do a little research -- the TV I bought has 1 HDMI port (out of the 5 available on it) that runs at 60Hz instead of 30Hz like the other 4 ports. I use that port for my laptop. I also read online that that port also skips the "Ultra HD engine" in the TV but I can't find that in the tech specs.
That might be due to HDMI, if I remember correctly HDMI 2 supports 4k at 60hz, but HDMI 1 can only do 30hz. If you have display port on it, use that instead and you should be good.
I have two Samsung 4k monitors and they are unbearable to use with HDMI at 4k, I had to get a new video card to drive them both over display port.
Personally, I'd prefer higher capital gains tax and lower corporate tax. I think it would be more transparent and easier to collect.