For those of us not from Texas, this article informs us that Travis County, which covers Austin, charges ~2.5% annual property tax on personal property owned by businesses.
Bird owns personal property (scooters) worth about $6M in Travis County.
Bird owns personal property (scooters) worth about $6M in Travis County.
If the assessor is not permitted inside a location, the assessor will assign an estimated value of property (which is usually higher than actual). Then, the business must go through an audit to show what property / equipment exists at their locations.
One time, L.A. county looked to go as far as taxing taxing satellites orbiting in space, because the owners were based in the county. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1006-los-angeles-plan... I don't believe this passed though.
Businesses get hit with endless fees and taxes from the gov :(
So do people.
Show me businesses being taxed > 40% of revenue.
And if they are, shouldn't they pay comparable taxes?
Let's say a small to med size Corp profits 1M. Take away your theoretical 40%. Then another 10% for the state (CA as an example). Then 5% for property taxes. Then 5% for payroll taxes. You're now left with 400k that flows to owners.
From that you take another 40 + 10% in income tax and you're left with 200K.
An 80% effective rate would seem a high wouldn't it?
But there are two questions that I can think of raised by eliminating taxation of corporations.
One is, will the revenue be made up by increasing taxes on rich individuals; and,
Two, how can we prevent wealthy individuals from using corporations to shelter their income from taxes, if they are all tax free? I'm not sure it is a simple problem.
Plus, do the complaints about "double taxation" really make much sense in the big picture? Money flows around and around in the economy and gets taxed an unlimited amount of times in the long run.
Maybe there are reasons for aspects of the current system that seem kludgy at first glance.
And if corporations want to "be people too", then they should be prepared to pay comparable taxes as "natural persons" do.
Otherwise, corporations should be corporations, and people should be people, and you don't mix the two up.
Well isn't the solution here to just permit the assessor inside all locations?
And i find complaining about fees and taxes companies have to pay a short time after governments directly demonstrated what companies are getting in return (Covid relief funds), on top of the less visible stuff like education, infrastructure, security, etc. really funny.
My point was not that the rate here in SF is lower, but that SF also taxes the same thing.
This was surprising to me, as I'm from the UK, where:
- businesses don't pay ongoing taxes just for having stuff, and
- businesses claim back VAT on things they buy for business use
If you ever want to pull your hair out, look at how BPOL (a different type of tax) is charged in Virginia, and more than that, which debt it is servicing.
But things a business uses to run its own business (e.g. laptops) are.