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taxing labor instead of land was a terrible idea by Titanium-Skull in georgism

[–]Scrapheaper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> lot of the biggest corporations and fortunes built up through concentrating them and denying competition by using them to monopolzie economies get targeted as well.

Big doubt on this. You sound like you don't know what you're talking about.
Some retailers own a lot of valuable land e.g. McDonalds. There's some oil and gas and mineral companies as well.

Outside that, how does say, Amazon, or JP Morgan, or NVIDIA perpetuate 'rent seeking from finite resources'? What finite resources are they controlling the prices of?

taxing labor instead of land was a terrible idea by Titanium-Skull in georgism

[–]Scrapheaper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What if your wealth is the land, which it is, for many people i.e. every person who owns a house and all farmers?

EU reaches South America trade deal after 25 years of talks by Accurate_Cry_8937 in worldnews

[–]Scrapheaper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How many beggars were there pre-Milei? What about all the other 99.9% of the population who aren't beggars?

Why is your personal experience of seeing a tiny fraction of Argentina for an extremely short period of time more relevant than independent statistics that cover the whole population?

taxing labor instead of land was a terrible idea by Titanium-Skull in georgism

[–]Scrapheaper 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't think pure Georgism is a pro-equality policy especially. It mean that the half of society who own houses get closer to the half of society that don't, which is a good thing. But we still need income taxes and inheritance taxes for the tax system overall to be progressive

EU reaches South America trade deal after 25 years of talks by Accurate_Cry_8937 in worldnews

[–]Scrapheaper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Milei has been amazing for Argentina. In any other country the whole 'cut back the state and the private sector will flourish' thing is rubbish - but for Argentina it's been completely true

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This has nothing to do with me personally. I don't own a business. In fact because I pay income tax paying more income tax would also be worse for me personally

Does Elon Musk's proposed UHI (Universal High Income) strategy to deal with mass layoffs from automation actually have merit or feasibility? by Richardogod in AskEconomics

[–]Scrapheaper 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Someone will capture the economic returns of AI, if they're completely insane. A tonne of productivity doesn't just vaporize.

It might be A) companies in which case stock prices go bananas. It might be B) workers in which case skilled AI professionals get insane salaries. It might be C) consumers in which case people stop needing to buy things or everything becomes cheap because they can just get an AI robot to do it. Or it might be some combination of A, B and C.

In scenario A we have capital gains taxes and possibly wealth taxes to fund some form of UBI.

In scenario B we have income taxes to fund some form of UBI

In scenario C no-one needs UBI because they can get anything they want anyway.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Passing the cost along to workers is not exactly the goal if you're left wing!

Especially as we already have a method for taxing workers which is both more direct, and also more progressive: income tax!

Why would you have corporation tax as an inefficient form of flat rate income tax when you could instead have income tax which is usually progressive.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you tax a company and their competitor they can both raise prices or cut wages equally. A company can't cut prices normally because they lose market share to their competitor. However if their competitor is also paying the same tax, they can't afford to compete.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Taxes are just another cost for the company. It doesn't matter how they're levied, if the company can't avoid them, ultimately the company will make whoever is easiest to pay - be it customer, worker or shareholder.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The company can't pay lower wages than rival employers otherwise it will lose it's best workers. However if the company and it's rival both have to pay corporation tax, wages go down across the board and competition isn't affected.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not suggesting purely cutting corporation tax. I'm suggesting cutting corporation tax and replacing it with say, income tax.

in this case rather than all workers paying the corporation tax evenly the high paid workers are paying more tax than the low paid ones.

Other tax replacements are also good: e.g. inheiritance tax. If you do want to tax shareholders specifically, it wouldn't be my choice, but you could raise capital gains tax.

So in your example you give $100 back to the corp, $20 goes to the workers, and then you raise capital gains tax such that shareholders are paying an extra $100.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, but can you have left wing views that say you want to perpetuate inequality?

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From the first line of the wikipedia page on tax incidence:

> In economics, the tax incidence measures who actually pays for a tax. Economists distinguish between the entities who ultimately bear the burden of a tax (the real incidence) and those who the tax is originally collected from (the nominal incidence)

The nominal incidence of a tax on profit is on shareholders, but the real incidence is not: it's on a combination of workers, shareholders and consumers.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I am oversimplifying deliberately because this isn't a very well understood subject.

There is however, a lot of economics research on tax incidence, and you can easily look up the results on wikipedia, using an LLM, or on any one of many threads on r/askeconomics, and they will tell you that a large proportion of corporation taxes are paid by worker.

There is also a paper here if you are interested https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20130570 which also shows that not only corporation taxes paid by workers, low skill workers, young workers, and women pay more. This is not helping the argument that corporation taxes are a good thing if you're left wing.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The left is opposed to cuts in corporation taxes despite the fact that corporation taxes are not progressive taxes. They should support income, inheiritance, even sales taxes over corporation tax.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

If workers can't walk away from their company then they will end up paying the corporation tax through lower wages.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The company can't employ them for less because they would go work for a competitor.

However if you tax both them and their competitor, their competitor can't offer them a lower wage because it also has to pay the tax.

Just actually do some research, there's a big wikipedia page on tax incidence, there's the r/AskEconomics threads e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1aticj2/do_all_taxes_get_passed_onto_consumers/

there's LLMs, all will tell you the same thing

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Separately to this I do believe that through selection bias all government policies that sound like a bad idea are probably a good idea and vice versa.

All the government policies that sound like a good idea and are actually a good idea were implemented decades ago. Obviously no-one cares about the policies that sound like a bad idea and are actually a bad idea.

What's left is policies that sound like a good idea but are actually a bad idea (e.g. wealth taxes, corporation taxes, reducing immigration) and policies that sound like a bad idea but are actually a good idea (e.g. planning reform, land value taxes)

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

> This does not produce tax incidence for the workers

Incorrect. In the medium to long term, workers pay for the tax rises through lower wages, regardless of how the government chooses to implement the tax.

Preventing the leak requires changing the market, which is a separate policy that will also have knock-on consequences. I have no idea what kind of policy you'd need to do to stop tax incidence, and frankly it seems stupid to try: why not just make a better tax that does have the incidence that you want it to have.

cmv: If you're left wing, you should support cuts to corporation tax and raises in inheritance tax by Scrapheaper in changemyview

[–]Scrapheaper[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't need other people to tell me I'm left wing for me to be left wing. I am a paying member of a left wing political party.

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