Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

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> "the flip side the alternative is that they don't sell their goods here"

That's a silly concern. Businesses do not forgo profit simply because they'd prefer if there were more. They always prefer if there were more. And yet they still seek the profit that's available. So long as cost/benefit suggests the US is a profitable market, they will continue to sell their goods here.

The only "risk" of corporations "taking their ball and going home", is if the United States pursued a transparently self-destructive tax rate on foreign-based corporations. Which there is absolutely no reason to expect would even enter rational conversation.

Imagine a husband and wife are talking about what car they should buy next and they disagree on the budget. The analogous case to a tax rate so high corporations leave the US market, is the husband deciding to burn the house down so that there's no garage and no money at all.

While that's certainly a possible alternative to negotiating their differences, discussing that alternative is, at best, silly. And attempting to ascribe serious weight to the possibility is downright intellectually dishonest.

I have to disagree. They will go other places if those places aren't going to tax them as much and they expect a similar return. Obviously with Burger King, they're basically everywhere already so it doesn't matter as much, but if the profit margin in the US is smaller then other countries because of tax they'll consider putting stores somewhere else if it's more profitable.

That said, IMO the concern with them selling their goods somewhere else isn't that we won't be able to eat their burgers, but that they employ tons of people at their stores. People are going to be pissed if Burger King decides they're going to close down their slower stores in the US and open some new stores elsewhere that doesn't have tax because they'll end-up making more.

I agree in that we could put a tax in place without anything imploding, they aren't just going to run away obviously. The question is more can we implement a tax which would be worth the money we'd make off of it without it resulting in Burger King closing places around the country because they're not profitable anymore.

Both the possibility that corporations may not come to the US market, or may only come to the US market after having expanded into other, more-profitable markets require an assumption that the US would (substantially) raise taxes above the current level.

We're hypothetically setting out to close a loophole that results in two distinct effective rates, a lower rate A for foreign corporations and a higher rate B for US-based corporations.

So, again, why should we spend any time worrying about what might happen if we were to introduce an even higher rate C? No-one's talking about that. It's not on the table. It's not remotely politically plausible. It's not even a thing anyone's seriously proposed.

Talking about it is either entirely besides the point, or a motivated attempt to conflate closing the loophole with raising rates to C, to scare people away from trying to close the loophole.

> The only "risk" of corporations "taking their ball and going home", is if the United States pursued a transparently self-destructive tax rate on foreign-based corporations. Which there is absolutely no reason to expect would even enter rational conversation.

What's more likely is that corporations would split into the global corp, and the US corp. The US corp pays the high taxes and does work in the US. The global corp owns all the IP, and leases it to the US corp for some amount of money.

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