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>Why not then, dip into your bank account? By this logic, there are trillion of $$ in bank accounts all around the world. That's a lot of money.

My bank account is dipped into. It's called "tax". I pay it at a considerably higher rate than Apple does. Does that seem fair?

> Does that seem fair?

No, though it is not about fairness. Your slave owner takes part of the fruits of your labor. Why do you allow that?

It is entirely about fairness. We live in a society. Tax is necessary to maintain that society. Everyone needs to pitch in. If you want "rights", that comes with "responsibilities" - they invariably pair.

Responsibilty to maintain road and sewer, for example, are funded by use tax and sales tax. Those who use it are paying to maintain it.

Income tax pays for ... ridiculous things like endless wars and spying on American income tax payers.

> Income tax pays for ... ridiculous things like endless wars and spying on American income tax payers

12% of federal budget went to national defense.

Most of it went towards Health Insurance, Social Security, and Welfare programs.

Federal budget includes deficit spending.

Did trustfundians pay income tax? How does the son of George Soros, who does not need income, pay income tax? The children of ultra rich are not tax slaves. They escaped.

How do you think those kids acquire money? I guarantee you it's a in a form the government classifies as income.

Yes, a small percentage went to paying interest on loans, and some of the money spent was borrowed. And the majority of spending from income tax still went to the things I mentioned prior.

I'm not sure I'm following what you're implying.

Are you talking about the idea that taxes are theft, (which I didn't disagree with more) or the idea that wage labor is theft because your employer sells the products for more than they pay you to produce them (which is absolutely theft, imo)?

Sales tax and use tax pay for what we consume. Those and a few others, such as import duties, are reasonable.

Normally, I'd just flame you for this.

There's a baseline level of consumption required to survive. Meaning everyone eats, rents, drives to work, buys an entertainment system. Paying for what you consume is a regressive way of generating tax revenue as the tax is raised from the poor masses.

Progressive taxation exists because people with more income have more disposable income. When you tax a poor working single mother of three and she must choose between buying food or paying tax, you will get riots eventually. When you tax a millionaire who's choice is buying a sports car or paying tax, riots don't usually happen.

The cornerstone of a fair tax system is to avoid double taxation. Most countries currently practice triple taxation - they tax personal income, they tax the same income again through taxes on consumption, and a third time through corporate tax. And then there are still countless other small taxes. A fair system would tax people once, on their earnings, and stop there.

So, to answer your question, there should be no corporate tax, and no VAT, if income tax is set at the correct level. It makes no sense for you, as an individual, to compare yourself to a corporation.

> So, to answer your question, there should be no corporate tax, and no VAT, if income tax is set at the correct level. It makes no sense for you, as an individual, to compare yourself to a corporation.

This is outrageous. Why does, in your world, a corporation have amore rights than a real person?

On the contrary, there should be no personal income tax, only Corporate taxes.

Or no taxes other than a flat national sales tax, probably with some rebate to assist the poorest X% of families.

Which, like the "only income tax" would enrich the hereditary wealth dynasties at the expense of the sort of people that actually have to spend most of their income.

And repeal the income tax. And exempt from sales tax uncooked food at grocery stores.

Corporate taxes are among the taxes with the highest dead weight loss, and the cost just gets passed on as lower worker compensation or higher prices of goods and services.

The overhead associated with corporate taxes is also much higher for small businesses.

I know that's what a set of economists say theoretically happens, but I'm not sure that's actually borne out in the data.

If you look at periods of wage stagnation and/or inflation, they aren't exactly positively correlated with relative high corporate taxes.

> the cost just gets passed on as lower worker compensation

This applies to payroll taxes, but I don’t think it applies to corporate income taxes. Since corporate income taxes are typically levied against profit, not revenue, wages are paid out of “pre-tax” money. A high corporate income tax rate would actually incentivize paying higher wages and/or hiring more employees.

>The cornerstone of a fair tax system is to avoid double taxation

That's pretty arguable. To me, "fair" simply means that we all obey the same rules. Those rules can be anything we want, if we think they'll make society work better. In our current system, taxes are levied on money movement, which serves important functions. These functions include signalling to the economy which activities we'd like to encourage and discourage, and providing fair and proportionate funding to government services which deal with that specific activity. For instance, road tax is levied only on car users, and goes towards the maintenance of the infrastructure which car users disproportionately benefit from. That is much more "fair" than what you are suggesting. When you use terms like "double taxation", you are presupposing that tax is "attached to a person", and that income tax is the only "valid" form of tax, which is a radical departure from how most of the world thinks about tax - a fact you acknowledge.

>It makes no sense for you, as an individual, to compare yourself to a corporation.

I agree with this, but probably not the way that you mean.

Apple isn't even a person. It deserves no consideration of things like "rights" and "personal sovereignty". It's merely an organization - essentially, a pile of paperwork - that exists entirely subordinate to the parameters that we agree on through the engine of representative democracy, which is our current best effort at creating an avatar of societal cooperation, for the benefit of all. Ethically, we would be entirely within our rights to tax Apple at a rate of 100%, if we felt it would be a net benefit to society as a whole.

> Apple isn't even a person

Legally, that pile of paperwork gives the Apple corporation some rights of a person. Obviously it is not a living, breathing person in the biological sense. But it is treated as one from a legal perspective.

Should it be? That's a different question. Changing that would probably upend contract law.

IANAL

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

> Sure, let's make every 20-30-40 something work for these 60+ all day instead of having a life.

Most of the value produced by workers goes into the pockets of corporate overlords. For their bosses and managers, for the shareholders, and for the landlords of the corporate mafia who take in 30-70% of working people's income. By your own logic, abolish corporate profits and for-profit housing, and let every worker enjoy huge benefits and retirement.

> Now that the situation is not the same, it means each pensioner will get a little less.

This is not wrong. But it's entirely due to Macron reforming the pension system with a "point" system. Without such reform, pensioners would continue to get just as much money, adjusted for inflation.

> By your own logic, abolish corporate profits and for-profit housing, and let every worker enjoy huge benefits and retirement.

Corporations are owned by pension funds. Investment funds own 80% of the S&P 500. They would be insolvent if corporations stopped posting profits.

But also, the reason corporations make so much money is regulatory capture. They buy laws that foreclose competition which makes everything cost more. It's the same reason housing is so expensive (the anti-competition laws there are zoning rules). You can't fix this with taxes -- tax them and everything still costs too much. Meanwhile the government is not going to give the money to you, they give it to the politically connected or use it to buy votes from interest groups with inefficient programs.

You have to actually fix the laws that enable this -- as in repeal them, not add some more to the pile.

Let's breakdown the "tax the rich argument"

Government has become captured by wealthy interests and has created a legal system that benefits the rich at the expense of the working class.

If the power of the government can be seized, the wealth of the rich can be taken and used to help the working class.

Problems with this:

A) this essentially is a revolution to seize control of the government to take the wealth from the powerful and wealthy. B) there is a high risk that the attempt to seize control of the government will fail, but the wealth transfer will still occur, just from the middle class to the government/wealthy. C) it's unsustainable.

When most people say tax the wealthy they are actually literally saying, tax them on what they make. The middle class pays pretty much all the taxes in the US while the world's wealthiest tend to pay as much as someone who is upper middle class.

Some people are now proposing a wealth tax on anyone with more than a billion dollars. That's surprisingly reasonable. It is also completely sustainable, and does not require overthrowing any government ...

Where does your idea that “the middle class pays pretty much all the taxes in the US” come from?

As far as I can tell, the top 1% of earners pay 42.3% of income taxes and earn 22.2% of income. The average 1%-er makes 1.76 million dollars a year. They pay as a group approximately 722 billion dollars annually in income taxes [1]. Then factor in estate taxes and corporate taxes which are disproportionately ultimately borne by the very rich. Then factor in payroll taxes, which are 50% paid by companies. The top 1% bears an incredibly large portion of the national tax burden, as I see it. One could argue it should be more, but I don’t see the argument that the middle class pays “pretty much all the taxes”.

As for a wealth tax, a lot of wealth isn’t in a liquid form. Would you see it forcibly liquidated or would you like the government to have substantial holdings in US companies?

Personally I think there are much more fruitful ways to go about addressing inequality than the progressive “eat the rich” agenda.

[1]: https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...

I am highly sceptical of this accounting. Many properties, in say, London, are owned through shell corporations in secretive jurisdictions.

My landlord is in a tax heaven. It's a corporation and there is no way for me to know who own it! What if I am paying rent to a war criminal? How do they account for this?

But let's look at a simpler situation - say you own a company, company let's out apartments, the rent is used to buy new apartments -> if you time purchases of new property well, there is never a profit to tax, corporation tax is zero. If I never take money out, but just grow my net worth, then my personal tax is zero too. So my net worth can keep growing forever, without ever paying tax.

You only ever pay tax on the small amount of money you take out of the company for living expenses, like food.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/558352...

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/bezos-musk-and-other...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/us/politics/trump-taxes-i...

https://ktla.com/news/how-does-tesla-get-away-with-paying-0-...

The list goes on and on. Once you have enough money you use staff lawyers at your company to pay nothing taxes either for your company or for yourself.

> Corporations are owned by pension funds. They would be insolvent if corporations stopped posting profits.

Not in France, where retirement fund is a nation-wide socialized entity, which was the core of this debate. Private pension funds are close to non-existent here ; i personally cannot name a single person doing that because the public model worked so well for decades.

> It's the same reason housing is so expensive (the anti-competition laws there are zoning rules).

I don't entirely disagree because France has the more draconian housing regulations you can imagine: it's to my knowledge the only country in the world where it's illegal to build your own house (or lightweight housing) and produce your own electricity off-grid on land you actually own.

However, the argument doesn't stand scrutiny. According to public studies there's hundreds of thousands of empty dwellings in France... not even counting secondary/vacation housing or AirBnBs. There's two faces to the housing crisis here in France.

The first is the landlord mafia keeping apartments empty on purpose for speculation. Because if the entire supply was put on market, the prices would collapse, and people could actually afford housing. We could design a law to tax empty housing proportionally to the owner's wealth, and see how fast we get housing for everyone.

The second is the government backed off on public housing. Low-cost housing (HLM) programs started after WWII have been mostly cut, and whatever funding is left has been diverted to "ownership accession" and higher-standing "low-cost" housing which are luxury housing below market rates but very inaccessible to minimum-wage workers. To give you an idea, a two-bedroom apartment in standard HLM usually costs 200-500€/month in Paris. The newer ones being produced from public funds are rented for ~800-1500€/month, while the minimum wage is around 1300€ after taxes.

I have a hard time calling this a "crisis" when it's a massive defrauding operation orchestrated by the State and the housing mafia.

> Not in France, where retirement fund is a nation-wide socialized entity, which was the core of this debate. Private pension funds are close to non-existent here ; i personally cannot name a single person doing that because the public model worked so well for decades.

It's not that extreme. There are a lot of "assurances-vie" which are quite literally meant to be private pension funds (with lots of tax incentives...). That being said no-one actually relies on it, and the core of pensions are definitely the nation-wide entities. (Yes plural, we wouldn't be french if there weren't dozens of competing institutions doing the same thing, with of course people getting sucked dry but that administrative complexity)

> The first is the landlord mafia keeping apartments empty on purpose for speculation. Because if the entire supply was put on market, the prices would collapse, and people could actually afford housing. We could design a law to tax empty housing proportionally to the owner's wealth, and see how fast we get housing for everyone.

I don't agree on the "proportionally to the owner's wealth", simply on the empty apartments' value. But yes, we need to tax empty housing. And we're getting there. There has been a lot of changes with regards to housing taxes that are largely going towards taxing (relatively) more empty housing, with this year being the first year you need to properly declare for every housing you own what its use. And I feel like it's just the start, and we're going to keep those taxes evolving towards taxing empty apartments while taxing less family housing.

The labor theory of value is simply incorrect. Profit isn't stolen from workers.

The biggest problem in this day and age is cost of living, not wages. Housing is way too expensive. But that's not because it's provided by the market for profit, it's because government hasn't allowed it to be build in large enough volume to satisfy the demand of people moving into cities.

> The labor theory of value is simply incorrect. Profit isn't stolen from workers.

Why?

I mean you don't provide a justification that's more defended than me saying the opposite is true.

> Why not then, dip into your bank account? By this logic, there are trillion of $$ in bank accounts all around the world. That's a lot of money.

Because wealth is immensely concentrated. There isn't nearly as much money in everyday individual bank accounts as in those of ultrawealthy individuals and corporates; and the trend since the 80s is for this to accelerate.

> Why not then, dip into your bank account?

The government does it every time when it prints money. Note that with cryptocurrency or golden money that would become impossible. Maybe that is why government set up obstacles for buying gold or cryptocurrency.

Way to attack a straw man. >> The richest people and biggest corporations own such an unimaginably large amount of wealth that taxing them would fix just about anything.

> Still peanuts comparing to the "global" economy or a country needs (in terms of pension or health). Also a significant portion of this wealth is paper money that will take a significant hit at sale.

> In 2017, Apple's cash reserves were $250 billion. That's just a single company, hoarding reserves that could clear the national debt of most countries. Think about that for a second.

> Why not then, dip into your bank account? By this logic, there are trillion of $$ in bank accounts all around the world. That's a lot of money.

Well they mentioned Apple's cash reserves that's traditionally easily accessible funds that do not take a significant hit at sale (although the number I read is $55 Billion), but if we talking about Apple's cash and cash equivalents, that was $20,535. That money would fix quite a few economies (and pension funds).

I'm not sure why you bring up peoples bank accounts. They were specifically talking about the worlds richest people and companies, you're average Joe doesn't count. The whole argument is that many economies are in this mess because the super-rich companies and individuals have not been paying their fair share of taxes (as sufficiently document by e.g. the Panama papers etc.).