Comment by reinitctxoffset | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reinitctxoffset | Hacker News Reader

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reinitctxoffset

Your comment starts off strong with real facts that are a little cherry picked but not outright gerrymandered, segways smoothly into a controversial if not outright false water down ("...basically nobody paid...") before accelerating out of the corner into just stating a position on hotly contested stare decis as flat fact ("Corporate tax is meant to...").

Easy there rude boy, this is under dispute. There are many of us who think that punitive taxes in the top bracket brutally enforced are far better represented in the history of far more prosperous eras than the present than your characterization. Mostly we think that marginal wealth far detached from any realistic consumption of that wealth has basically nowhere to go but pricing tangible assets ever further out of reach for most everyone at an accelerating rate via capture further inducing market failure.

Neither side of this debate has conclusively prevailed, I'm going to be honest about that in the hopes of setting a better example than you have, but I'm still entitled to remind people reading this that the debate exists.

> segways smoothly into a controversial if not outright false water down ("...basically nobody paid...")

501 returns out of 50 million filers in 1963, with the top 1% paying on average just ~16% in 1962.

> before accelerating out of the corner into just stating a position on hotly contested stare decis as flat fact ("Corporate tax is meant to...").

The purpose of corporate tax in the US is to generate public revenue. The history shows this very clearly.

And just to be clear: the original comment conflated individual and corporate tax, and there's still an element of conflation in your comment.

C corporations, which most big businesses are organized as in the US, are taxed on their profits. If and when profits are distributed to shareholders, the shareholders pay tax on the dividends. This is double taxation. Owner-employees are taxed on their salaries. And when they dispose of their shares, they pay tax on the capital gains.

There are legitimate discussions to be had about wealth inequality, whether the current tax regime is suitable for the world we live in, etc., but the idea that punitive taxation (at the individual or corporate level) would be the best way to prevent exploitative business models and practices is dubious. This is exactly what tort law and consumer protection regulation is for.

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