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?
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.
The overhead associated with corporate taxes is also much higher for small businesses.
If you look at periods of wage stagnation and/or inflation, they aren't exactly positively correlated with relative high corporate taxes.
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.
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.
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
No, though it is not about fairness. Your slave owner takes part of the fruits of your labor. Why do you allow that?
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.
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.
I'm not sure I'm following what you're implying.
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.