I can't wait until they start scrambling all of their cash to get it back home when the White House passes the Bill taxing at a 14% rate any money kept overseas. These greedy companies love it when the tax payer bails them out or when they help them with their infrastructure. But when it's their turn to pay their taxes, theyre good at hiding it.
Oh dear. I'm not sure you understand how taxes work very well.
Or laws.
----------
I don't understand how the people ever allowed the emergence of sales tax, property tax, and income tax? For the poor it's double taxation, and for the wealthy it is triple taxation. Sales tax might just be the worse, because unless you barter your services for goods, you have to spend your income at some point.
On the other hand property tax ensures you can never be 100% self sufficient. Even if you have no debt, grow your own food, and supply your own water & power/heat you still have to have a cash reserve to pay the government for your right to live.
1) All money is taxed over and over again. That's how taxes work. As money circulates through the economy, it is taxed at various places to fund public operations. Whether or not you agree with how that money is being spent is beside the point.
There's nothing more inherently wrong with taxing for both income and sales than taxing you for selling a pencil to me, and me for selling that pencil to someone else. In fact, taxing economic activity at multiple places in the circular flow diagram has distinct advantages -- it's actually spread much more evenly and helps ensure it is more difficult to escape any sort of taxation all together!
2) Yes, you must always pay property taxes. But, then again, even if you do not use any public roads, and are completely *self-sufficient* you still receive certain public benefits, e.g. access to the court system, public defense etc. etc.
So why is it such an evil that you continue to contribute towards public benefits that you continue to receive?
----------
I was trying to point out that even though the top rate is rarely reached by individuals or corporations, it doesn't prevent them from paying higher average rates: much higher than any other segment of taxpayers.
However, it does generate a disincentive against engaging in what would be productive behavior -- because when a rate is too high (more than 50% in many states in the US, combined), there's no marginal gain. It's why lowering tax rates have resulted in an increase in revenues -- every time. And increased revenues from higher taxes have always stalled out.
I certainly applaud your rational attitude here. But I'm not sure I agree with the point above. While it makes sense anecdotally, and incidents where marginal tax rates were lowered from *very* high rates (think 80-90+) there was an increase in the marginal willingness to work for those brackets, this has certainly not happened "every time" if I recall properly.
I think the data is actually inconclusive. I'll have to double check to be certain, but I recall reading in Taxing Ourselves (hands down, best resource on public finance and taxation I've seen) chapter 4 that the empirical studies don't actually show significant change.
EDIT:
Here are the passages from chapter 4 of Taxing Ourselves:
Page 124:
What does the evidence show? The responsiveness of labor supply, both in hours worked and the labor-force participation rate, has been studied extensively. A preponderance of evidence suggests that
male hours worked respond hardly at all to changes in after-tax wage rates.
Note from page 123 to explain how income taxes and sales taxes affect marginal willingness to work in the same way:
It is also true that a consumption tax such as a retail sales tax has the same kind of effects on the incentive to work as an income tax because it reduces the purchasing power that an additional hour of work provides. This must be kept in mind when we address moving from an income tax to a consumption tax.
Page 125:
Yet another strategy for learning how taxes affect labor supply is to study policy changes that affect the after-tax wages of one group relative to another to see how changes in hours worked matched up with changes in incentives.
The tax cuts of the 1980s arguably provided such an experiment. Nada Fissa of the University of California at Berkeley examined changes in hours worked by men with education beyond college, who typically have high incomes and received large tax cuts during the 1980s. Compared to the recent historical trend and trends for workers with less education (who did not on average receive large tax cuts), she estimates that
these men increased their hours of work by only 2 percent in response to the sharply reduced marginal tax rates after 1986.
Here's the bottom line:
Page 126:
Although, as with many economic questions, there is controversy, it is still fair to say that the consensus is that
labor supply responsiveness is fairly low.
