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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

This is political grandstanding and virtue signalling. It also presumes that increasing taxes above current levels helps the economy-- that is definitely not a given. The real reason, I suspect, is that elites have a lot of political control, increasing taxes increases that power, and it makes it harder for competition to catch up. So increasing taxes is a moat for the elite and helps the government achieve the elites' political goals; win-win for them, but a loss for the economy and the common man. But great for virtue signalling.

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Could you please explain in more detail how a CEO of a profitable massive corporation signaling desire to pay higher corporate income tax is a loss for the economy and the common man.

If anything he might be suggesting in the letter that corporations aren't paying their fair share relative to the common man.

Because the the largest corporations often clamor for more taxes and/or regulations knowing that it hampers their competitors more than them.

It is a moat and keeps the status quo.

He understands how finance works, and he understands how compound interest rates work; he got the benefit of "low interest rates" on taxes and generated a lot of wealth; if he increases taxes for upstarts and himself, the upstarts are harmed more, since he has the legacy wealth from the historical discount.

Aristocrats made the laws favor themselves, and since they already owned all the land and wealth, no one was going to challenge them inside the legal framework.

There is a tendency, once you make your own fortune, to get political influence and make laws that make it harder for others to do the same thing. Change the rules of the game so you can't fall. Lobbying is a key business skill these days.

corporate taxes are _always_ passed on to the consumer.

Higher fees, higher prices, whatever lever you can pull.

That's not true - they are not always passed on to the customer. It depends. Unless the corporation has a monopoly, it can not just increase the prices. There is a concept in economics called elasticity of demand, to simplify, it states that with increase in price there will be a drop in demand. So corporations have to balance, and in most cases the tax increase will be shared between the consumer and the corporation.

They might not be the CEO of that profitable massive corporation for much longer if the board and shareholders do not hold the same sentiment.

To put it simply, private businesses will allocate capital more efficiently than the government does. (At least a few people still think that.)

The “direction” of that efficiency is always toward profit and against the very laboring class that makes the product the owners use for profit.

With a collective, co-op, employee owned, or government run industry - one can edict the various rates and ratios.

Look at the US energy company “eversource.”

Posting huge profits in an industry directly related to life and health and yet, doubled one of its rates this year. DOUBLED. Why? “Fuel costs”.

Fuel costs which have fallen.

With a gov run electric system, people will game based on votes. Not shareholder ROI.

Plus, people have a very “interesting” history when they disagree with a gov. From protest to removal of heads from bodies...

It’s not as simple when corporations are involved.

They are more evil than any of history’s evil men.

If corporations are accepted to be "evil" (and we have lots of examples of mega-corporations that haven't held to "don't be evil"), then simply taxing them and having them continue to be evil doesn't make a lot of sense. Perhaps it would be better to abolish corporate structures and find a new paradigm with greater personal responsibility with small companies more responsive to customers and their customers' values? If people feel responsible for their actions, then they are more likely to "not be evil", instead of being a raindrop in the flood that believes they should just do as they are told. A large part of the US economy is small business, small businesses can live by their values instead of the inexorable pull towards more profit. I'm not saying all small businesses do, but it's more of a personal choice of their values and their customers' values rather than a large tendency to "become evil with more profit and seeking monopolies".

Completely agree. In my opinion a solid start is worker-owned co-ops.

Question is if they allocate it in ways the democratic majority wants it to be allocated.

Or skip the middle man and let people keep their dollars and spend them how they want?

How do you decide on the path the road should be built on? Everybody building a few feet individually?

Most people are not debating the building of roads, and most of those are at state and local levels anyways. The bigger debate is on the actual federal budget, which has ballooned over time into all sorts of items which cannot be assumed to be uncontroversial or even generally agreed on by a majority of citizens.

A lot of us would prefer if the federal government actually did allocate some more of its funds to maintaining the roads and infrastructure that we have; that would be a great start.

They probably agree that A road has to be built, but exactly WHERE gives you about as many opinions as 5hwre are participants in the discussion. This requires some approach for structuring the decision making. Representative democracy is one. And yes, for such hands on topics it is relatively simple. But "big topics" have equal problem with many opinions, where some form of consensus has to be found.

It presumes no such thing. It says that they hope and expect to make more profit in future than they do today. As they pay tax on a proportion of profits, increasing profits will mean they are increasing the amount of tax they pay even if taxes are kept at current levels.

Can you explain what “virtue signaling” means? It always sounds like “they secretly agree with me but are saying something different because they’re bad people”. Which is just odd.

Taken literally, it’s when a person takes an action or says something -- the “signal” -- based on some principle -- the “virtue”. I think when it’s used as a pejorative (“this is just virtue signaling”), it’s being called out as disingenuous in some way. For example, if a fossil fuel company publicizes work they did to remove carbon from the atmosphere but doesn’t talk about (or even calculate) how much carbon they introduced. I could see someone calling that “just virtue signaling”.

I’m sure there are many other examples but that’s generally how I understand it. I don’t intend for my example to reflect any specific event in the past, if that matters (ie. “I made it up”). Hope that helps.

Do you recognize "self-promotion" as a kind of behavior people do, that makes their recommendations less reliable for you than recommendations from uninterested people? Virtue signalling is another kind of motivated speech where the speaker may be sincere but doesn't acknowledge their own self-interest. They gain status from professing to believe more extreme forms of socially approved views.

The benign form of virtue signalling is something like publicly mourning for a while after your spouse dies so other people understand you aren't a sociopath. The runaway form of it is jumping on your spouse's funeral pyre because it shows you are more devoted than anyone else. Or in this case burning up your company's profits on unnecessary taxpaying to show you are wealthy/socialist enough to do that.

I'm in awe at the level of pretzel logic on display here. The rich are famously supportive of higher corporate tax rates because it helps them entrench their moat?

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