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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

Success must have a price. Let's call it 'success tax'

It's called a progressive tax, and it's a great idea.

If taxing something discourages it, we should instead create a "failure tax", which you only pay if you don't make very much money, to discourage failure.

In that case, have a tax on tax, where the government takes 100% of it's own tax receipts, which should logically lead to no taxation at all, right? :p

There are taxes on tax too, its called “cess”, a lot of countries have that too -_- , so you pay taxes, and then there is an extra tax on the tax collected too.

A profit tax doesn't discourage increasing profit as long as the marginal gain is positive.

Is it that different to any sale tax?

The problem with "sales tax", or "value-added tax" in Europe, is that it applies only to consumers.

Businesses can directly deduct any VAT that they pay from the VAT that they owe. If they pay more VAT than they owe, they can get it back.

This means that Google, Meta, etc., who make almost all of their revenue from B2B transactions, effectively pay no VAT.

The "digital services" tax changes that, by introducing a tax on those revenues.

"If they pay more VAT than they owe, they can get it back."

Worth noting is that generally means the company has higher costs than revenues (not something you want).

Or if you have tax exempt revenue, like B2B sales to other countries.

That too

> The problem with "sales tax", or "value-added tax" in Europe, is that it applies only to consumers.

That's not quite correct. At each transaction you pay VAT on the margin, that's why it's called Value Added Tax. So if company B buys from company A and sells to company C then company B pays VAT on the difference between what it charges company C and what it paid company A.

Well, every gains tax is kind of success tax, aint it?

Yes, if your success relies on a complex framework of infrastructure and societal services, then your success owes that infrastructure a share.

That infrastructure does get its share, its called income taxes, sales taxes from products people buy, payroll taxes, mandatory employee provident fund contributions which governments use as their personal piggy bank in a lot of countries , and most importantly the product/service itself, good luck swimming in your pool of tax dollars, when that dollar is worth nothing, because you dont have much products or services to buy with it.

The reality is , recent politicians have been wasting money excessively, 50-60-70% of the tax revenue ends up being lost to corruption, inefficiencies, etc.

One can continue promoting taxing more and more, it’ll just end up killing the golden goose.

The problem is more with the oligarchic style of engagement between big corps and gov, its stifling innovation, making medicines 10000x more expensive than it needs to be, with extremely insane patents stifling competition and small startups defeating old barrons, a overly litigious society which is rampant in most western countries.

We keep losing our free market, and thus losing prosperity of the middle class, and we keep blaming it on not taxing enough…

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