Do you believe all ethical behavior should be codified in law, or just taxes?
Am I unethical to choose standard deduction because it reduces my tax more than choosing itemized deduction? No? Yes? Maybe?
If you can call up a senator and say "You had better increase standard deduction to $X for married couples in Montana with three kids and a small business, or I'll have to rethink my campaign contribution," and you happen to be married in Montana with three kids and a small business, I'd say it's clearly unethical.
I think companies like Google fall in the latter category.
But it doesn't seem to help much.
For example, many Dems shout "tax billionaires" for years. This rallies a lot of people. "Yeah!!! Let's tax them more" we all chant.
Then, when Dems is elected, they are raising tax on salaried employees who earn more than 400k a year. (Not sure if they has gone through with it yet)
I didn't know I was categorised as a billionnaire.
Politics isn't about precise language. They just mean wealthy people. I thought they were pretty up-front about that.
It's of course easier to charge more taxes for moderately wealthy employees who don't have a clever tax setup and may need to.
Really rich people with clever tax setups will just move out and you'll get no more revenue.
Billionaires don't pay income tax, that's why Dems are raising the corporate tax rate too. They're also looking at increasing estate tax and capital gains tax, and those almost exclusively effect the ultra rich
Some people more likely have an obscene amount of envy to those who are more successful.
I grew up broke and understand how fortunate I am. I'm completely fine with paying a few percent more marginal tax rate. I have thousands of disposable income a month like most of us here. I doubt I would even notice.
Why would you ever think 400k is obscene or crazy amount of money? Companies that those developers work for, earn 10 times as much per developer. I wish every developer could be payed as much or more if possible. Do you find it shameful when other people find value in what developers do and are ready to pay them a lot of money for that value? I'm sure your company will gladly pay you less if you feel overpaid.
Specifically, collecting a reasonable amount of taxes is key to the function of governments as they're set up.
It would be unethical to sell somebody a car that secretly has no motor, but ethics isn't the only reason cars need motors.
If taxes were about financing the government there would just be one tax called the-cost-of-government-tax and that's it. There would be no need to tax everything you do, and at different rates and on some days but not others, but when the moon is full on tuesday you pay double except if you lived on 72nd street during 2008...
Taxes are about control, about influence, and about corruption. The loopholes are there becasue someone put them there, they are not hidden. The tax-code is so complex because someone made it that complex, someone doesn't want it to be easy.
No they didn’t. Most governments are mostly funded by taxes.
(The rest of your post doesn’t support this thesis, but instead the thesis that funding government. operations isn’t the exclusive purpose of taxes, which I don’t think anyone would dispute, and which is orthogonal to whether governments are mainly funded by taxes.)
Last year, the US collected $3.42 trillion in taxes, but spent $6.55 trillion for a record deficit of $3.13 trillion. This year is projected to break that record.
https://www.thebalance.com/fy-2020-federal-budget-summary-of...
No, most countries finance themselves primarily by taxes; they typically also use debt financing, especially (in relative terms) countercyclically in economic downturns.
> Last year, the US collected $3.42 trillion in taxes, but spent $6.55 trillion for a record deficit of $3.13 trillion.
So, even the best single example you could come up with is...financed primarily by taxes, even in the one year you tried to pull as a counterexample?
Since you mentioned the debt ceiling, that’s another concept that doesn’t make any sense (except as yet another thing more politics can be piled on to). It’s like first the congress votes on the size of the budget, and then separately on the size of the door that it has to fit through.
Or don’t you use roads, police, education, services, etc..,
On the other hand, by paying our taxes, we Americans maintain thousands of nuclear weapons, and the largest and most elaborate military on the planet. So ... not all of what we pay for is "good".
How are taxes _not_ a thicket of ethical issues?
However, I think a really ambiguous question is whether we should actually care about _corporate_ taxes over questions like treating capital gains income on the same footing as wage income. One expects that when corporations don't pay taxes, their shareholders eventually reap those savings as capital gains income ... so isn't it eventually taxed?
I'm assuming here that only large multinationals engage in this sort of scheme; if there were a whole economy among rich individuals who always push their transactions through Bermudan-Irish shell companies, then perhaps it might never get taxed at any rate?
What's ethical about playing in a poker tournament and paying the entry fee? Just curious.
If you are getting rich in this country, taxes are paying for what enabled you to get rich in the first place: the human capital.
If you don't pay taxes, then it wouldn't really be fair for you to be sending your kids to public schools, driving on roads to get around, or calling the fire department when your house is burning down, since you haven't contributed anything to their upkeep.
The structure and implementation of corporate taxes in the USA strikes me as needlessly complicated and corrupt, and I think corporate influence over the tax code is deeply unethical in many ways. At the same time, I wouldn't tell any individual or company that they're ethically obligated to forgo tax relief that's legally available to them. These two things are not in contradiction.
It is problematic in that corporations have a lot more resources to bring to bear than the average person does.
I don't find it unethical though. People have a right to express their concerns to the government and advocate for their interests, even if those people group themselves together into a legal entity such as a corporation.
It would be more unethical to single out certain groups of people and say "everyone else is allowed to talk to the government and advocate for their interests, but you are not".
Edit to add:
It's the government's job to listen to everybody's concerns and balance the interests of different groups against each other. If we're unhappy with the job they're doing, we should elect a different government that will do a better job, not just silence groups we don't like. They are not passive elements in this who are just helplessly acted on by outside forces.
In practice, this is exactly the problem with revolving-door politics and regulatory capture.
> we should elect a different government that will do a better job
Agreed, and I would add that one of the most important functions of journalism like the OP is to inform the voters about these situations.
Is all lobbying unethical?
- Correctional officers unions lobbying for harsh drug laws to ensure a steady supply of prison inmates.
- AccuWeather lobbying congress to prohibit NOAA and NWS from providing weather data to the public, so that AccuWeather can charge money for it.
- Intuit lobbying to prevent states and the IRS from providing free tax filing facilities.
When the question becomes, "what do we do about it", I'm well out of my depth, but I think the fight is worth having, and the practical effect of corporate lobbying is certainly a worthy subject for journalism like the OP.
Mutatis mutandis for, eg, roads so that employees can get to work, etc.
“Double taxation” refers to taxation post distribution not prior (source: I was a corporate tax accountant).
Finally, “evasion” is illegal. “Avoidance” is a legal tax strategy.
The point that the parent is making is that there's a legal obligation to pay taxes, but it's not an ethical one - the government says what you owe, and you pay that. It's muddied by companies lobbying to set the laws, but I would have to agree paying taxes the laws say you owe is not an ethical question.
What's the government doing by just collecting its citizens hard earned money? It should also invest in companies and other ventures and make its own money. It also has natural resources (oil, natural gas, etc.) at its disposal. Only if those are not enough can it ask its citizens to pitch in.
Laws are derived by the people and encode their ethical permissibility within them.
Otherwise, why is it worth discussing?
I pay taxes because the alternative is fines and eventually jail. That's theft, that's coercion.
The less taxes you pay the more power to you - and I'd appreciate if you shared how.