Hacker News Reader

Comment by temp1831 | Hacker News Reader

Let's say you run a gas station, which is a notoriously low margin business. You have $1,050,000 in revenue this year, and $1,000,000 in expenses, so you make $50,000.

Let's say you run a small software company, which is a high margin business. You have $1,050,000 in revenue this year, and $500,000 in expenses, so you make $550,000.

You should be taxed on the $50,000 and the $550,000, not on the $1,050,000. Otherwise, if business expenses were not deductible, low margin and capital intensive businesses would be punished severely. We would have decreased investment in the economy and everyone would suffer for it.

If individuals could deduct their expenses, it would encourage people to spend every penny they make. The mortgage interest deduction is one example where this nudge becomes apparent (albeit real estate has merit as an investment, not just consumption). We already have a low enough savings rate as it is.

View on HN

By the logic that justifies subsidizing low margin businesses, housing, food, and other necessities should also be tax free.

Let’s say you make $100,000 a year as a school teacher in SF, and pay $7K a month for a three bedroom house for your family. That’s $84K just for housing. Food clearly uses up more than the rest.

If people and corporations were taxed the same, you could carry over the loss to a future year where your spouse cashed out some stock (or you got a job that paid a living wage).

Alternatively, we could pay everyone a fair wage, and stop subsidizing zero margin businesses that can’t afford the labor costs (which means things like gas would cost a bit more).

I’m for the latter. People have to work in these zero margin places, and their employers should figure out how to make more of a profit (and pay better), or go under.

Why should my taxes subsidize petroleum distributors, Walmart, Amazon, etc?

At a high level of just considering taxable income that is true. However, the difference is there are a lot more things a corp can do to reduce taxable income than an individual can do. If you happen to be the owner of a corp you can also use those things to your individual benefit.

If the argument is to say "income is income", then "expenses are expenses" should apply too.

Edit: typo

If you go to a high level of abstraction, you remove useful distinctions. That is not a productive line of thought. Not all income is the same, and not all expenses are the same. Excise taxes and any "nudge" tax laws make this obvious.

It is true that there are some tax deductions that are abused. However, the effect of encouraging investment by businesses is much more important.

>If you happen to be the owner of a corp you can also use those things to your individual benefit.

This could be considered an abuse. However, the benefit of encouraging investment by businesses far outweighs the negative of this abuse. We tend to focus our attention on a few big individuals who cheat, and this excessive focus throws off our moral intuitions. Heck, the gas station owner might have deducted the cost of buying a toolbox needed at the workplace, and then borrowed a wrench from that toolbox to go home and fix his plumbing. That would be fine with me, to the extent that all the damn tax paperwork stops being worth keeping track of.

> If you go to a high level of abstraction, you remove useful distinctions.

That's my point and what I was extrapolating from your high-level comment. If you're going to give an example, it's good to talk about things the gas station and software company do to reduce that income to, or below, zero. Things that can provide direct, positive, net gain impact on ownership of the corp. However, those same things are not available to employees of the corp.

To me, the rules should be the same for _any_ taxable entity.

> the difference is there are a lot more things a corp can do to reduce taxable income than an individual can do.

this is exactly it. Rental costs are deducted as expenses for a corporation, but the same rental expense cannot be deducted from income. Arguably, the cost of staying alive for a person is an expense for making the income!

To make it catagorized would be too complex though - i would propose that personal income should be average-able across that person's lifetime. I.e., if i made $1000000 in one year, i should be able to spread the income from when I first started working (and paying taxes), so that my average income per year is the same number. Then you back pay all the "missing" taxes from those years, rather than suddenly jump to the $1,000,000 tax bracket and the gov't taking 45% from you in one go.

Though I agree with the annoyance of high marginal rates for one-time windfalls of income, I think it's more practically workable to only allow forward averaging in the form of "pay all the taxes now and fill out this new form XYZ to allow you to perform the alternative averaging process over the next 4 tax years".

Otherwise, you end up effectively amending N returns (possibly opening them back up for examination), needing to calculate what taxes would have been due under the then-extant tax brackets and laws, possibly needing to make inflation adjustments for figures that are decades removed from the tax years in question, realistically needing to pay interest on the taxes that you didn't pay in 1972 but are now claiming are part of your 1972 income because you sold a company in 2019, and everyone would have incentive to file a tax return showing earned income from age 1. (Maybe I arrange for my child to have a job posing for photographs and being paid $20 just to get their income tax filing clock started and being able to income average all the way back to that year instead of only to age 17, 19, or 21.) Forward-only averaging avoids (or substantially avoids) those issues.

Computing tax rates against a moving average of the last 5 years income is a simple and elegant way to have the same effect.

Young people would have lower rates while they’re establishing themselves, people with windfalls would end up paying rates in line with their annual compensation (instead of just maxing out the brackets with a big percentage of their income).

Also, people with sustained high income would be taxed at a much higher rate than upwardly mobile members of the middle class.

Similarly, low income people with intermittent income would have a much better chance at building their savings.

Finally, it defeats all sorts of timing strategies, so people could make major financial decisions without first hiring a cpa.

That's interesting. In essence (assuming no tax law changes), you claim 20% of your income for the current year over each of the next 5 years for tax purposes. Has very nice properties for initial wage earners as you say.

Downsides: results in a 3x income tax charge if an income earner dies suddenly (assuming you want to settle their estate in less than 5+ years). Acts as a loan from the feds to the taxpayer, resulting in income taxes due after you stop working (perhaps you became disabled or got fired [or die, as above]), and results in deferral of income tax receipts to the government during the transition.

Overall, I really like it.

If you tax revenue, the government can be funded with much lower tax rates. Businesses will always pass costs on to customers. To claim your benefit is really for everyone else seems a bit narcissistic.

Take another low-margin business: supermarkets. Do you want to raise supermarket (or other necessity) prices across the board by whatever the revenue-based corporate tax rate is? That would have a substantially regressive overall impact on consumers (in that the poor would bear a greater portion of that tax than their share of income).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com