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Comment by jdimov9 | Hacker News Reader

This must be the most blatantly hypocritical statement I have ever read. Money is STOLEN by corporations by not paying taxes??? How ignorant and thankless can you be? Money is CREATED by these corporations and you owe a huge chunk of your well-being, and quite likely your life, to the existence of said corporations.

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Wealth is created by small companies too, perhaps even more so that the big ones. However, they don't have the resourcers to evade taxes like the big ones do.

You realize what that means, right?

A company creating value and the same company committing theft are not contradictory. One can take commendable actions AND reprimandable (?) actions.

As far as whether there is an obligation to pay taxes, well, "render unto caesar what is due to caesar" and all that.

reprimandable (?)

Deplorable.

reprehensible

Ah, yes, because corporations exist in a vacuum and generate money from thin air, typically using up none of earth's natural resources.

And they usually pay royalties on said resources? Pay for rights to said resources? Trust me, we learned a long time ago how to extract $$$ for said resources.

By resources you mean financial systems, roads and other infrastructure, legal systems, access to educated workers, being defended by an army...?

I could accept a company making profit and paying no taxes if they didn't have offices, staff, use roads or electricity etc. It would be pretty hard to do anything as a company "outside" the framework of a society.

I was responding directly to the comment about natural resources. Your comment is entirely unrelated to what I said.

I noticed the discussion on natural resources so I just wanted to point out the obvious - that corporations exist within a society and use a multitude of important "resources" to function at all. That's why it's pretty natural to have corporate taxes too.

> I noticed the discussion on natural resources so I just wanted to point out the obvious

While what you said is certainly obvious, it had nothing to do with what I said.

> That's why it's pretty natural to have corporate taxes too.

It is absolutely idiotic to have corporate taxes. Corporations are nothing more than proxies for the shareholders. All profits are passed to the shareholders. Once they are, those shareholders then have to pay taxes on those profits.

You end up with double taxation.

In recognition of this, we create something called a capital gains tax, which is less than the normal tax rate ... and then tax corporations to compensate for that. Nice.

You end up with a situation where most of the taxes the corporations pay end up being passed to the consumer and the rich get a tax break. Is that what you support?

Get rid of capital gains, tax all income at the same level, and get rid of the corporate tax.

I'm sure there are structures where corporate tax is 0 and dividends are taxed at the same rate as any other income. That is a reasonable structure.

If one wants a cap gains tax that equates to the double taxation then cap gains would be higher than income tax. Could also be reasonable.

How do you think we make roads, energy?

With natural resources. Which have royalties, permit fees, etc. Read what I wrote again.

Money is created through loans. It's not created by corporations (other than commercial banks who are in the business of loaning).

Money is just an unit of account, and in this context rather uninteresting. I could give you a billion Reichsmark, and you would be no better off than you would have been if I gave you a roll of toilet paper.

Corporations and individuals create wealth, which benefits us all.

If you owe money to someone and don't pay it deliberately... what else would you call it other than stealing?

Corporations get many benefits from the government (as do we all, in different ways) so is only fair that they pay taxes.

The corporate tax rate is less in recognition that they are capital generators.

If you owe money to someone and don't pay it deliberately... what else would you call it other than stealing?

Defaulting. I understand that the RIAA has succesfully popularised the term "stealing" beyond its legal definition, but that doesn't mean we should expand it even further.

Defaulting on a debt is stealing - especially if the debt is, like taxes, principle only - it's a specialized form of it.

Besides defaulting applies to loans. In this case you're specifically withholding something that is legally someone else's.

That's theft, no matter how you cut it.

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