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Comment by interactivecode | Hacker News Reader

How about we tax billion dollar corps an extra 10% because we expect them to use their considerable wealth to exploit loopholes. Like any healthy budget it should have a little bit of a safety net built in.

That 10% could be a considered an economic incentive similar to giving any non billion dollar company a tax break. However this idea would add money to the countries budget instead of removing it.

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Cue every 10 billion dollar company splitting into 11 supposedly unrelated 0.9 billion dollar companies (with the same shareholders, CEO and board).

That would be somewhat OK, IMHO. The power of big companies comes from the fact that they can throw money around. Breaking them up would limit it, and make these flows publicly visible.

A $10b company is pocket change to the beomouths that run the world.

Sure $10b seems like a lot to you and me, but to split Apple, Microsoft, Google to just $10b would require hundreds of different companies to form from their split. To go to $1b companies would make that thousands of companies.

You could split apple into 3000 companies and still need to split further. The CEO would be able to spend less than 1 minute a week on each company.

If that really is a problem we can just still count it as a single company for the tax office. Or make it illegal for companies to own other companies. That would even encourage competition and break down monopolies! All things capitalism thinks are good things.

10% should beats the current 0% most of them pay. The unfortunate truth is we have a system that allows you to legally bribe politicians called campaign donations. The corporations and the politicians are totally in bed w/ one another and typically they're the same people e.g. the revolving door of going back and fourth. It's fucked up.

The problem is you get 10% of a tiny number because most of the profit gets outsourced to other jurisdictions. This global minimum tax idea allows you to charge taxes for profits in other jurisdictions that are undertaxed so it lets you hit the numbers on the global revenue. Apple for example has a tiny fraction of profit in the US because they move their IP to a low tax jurisdiction and license it to themselves at high prices which makes their profit in the US very low because most of the profit from the phones goes into the technology licenses making it profit in the low tax jurisdiction rather than in the US.

What if europe and the us collaboratively just anex these tax heavens?

Are you certain your idea has no loopholes (for corporarions to stay technically under a billion dollars)? :)

Its not difficult or unprecedented to apply these things progressively, on sliding scales

You’re right. It would be better to abolish corporations and only allow fully worker owned co-ops. That way at-least all employees benefit from their companies loopholes

Or just abolish corporate taxes and tax individuals more and be done with it.

But this sort of tax allows governments to use businesses & corporations to tax the general population through increased prices without it being noticed as being a tax by that same population. It's not terribly efficient, as it has to be filtered through those myriad businesses, but it does the job of removing wealth from the lower classes.

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