Right? Because even if the companies are super valuable, the wealth is with the shareholders who own them. Plus the US corporate tax framework does not tax corporations based on wealth/assets (there’s enough nonsense in good will and intangibles that would be a nightmare), so it hardly matters.
Actual wealth of US households is reported by the Fed quarterly so it’s not some mystery. The current value is something around $140T and is split roughly like this:
$40T stock
$32T real estate
$17T cash/bank accounts
$16T pensions
$13T partnerships and small biz (I think)
$11T bonds
$6T physical goods
-$15T debt (2/3 mortgage, 1/3 CCs)
Since when is accusing you of only repeating talking points a “personal attack”?
I’m being serious. You just claimed that the majority of wealth available for taxation resides in corporations, which makes no sense because, as @xerty points out, we don’t take corporate “wealth.” Even if you meant the majority of our economy was in corporate stock, which I honestly can’t tell if that is what you meant, that is still incorrect (also as @xerty link shows). Add up stock, pensions, and bonds and you still aren’t over 50% of total assets.
Most land, buildings, factories, etc. are owned by corporations. Nearly everything you buy is the products and assets of corporations. This is not rocket science. Do a little research instead of just looking for things that confirm a preconceived bias and pretending that anything else is not real.
Taking that as a happy medium - which is pretty meaningless because it totally ignores loopholes and tax avoidance strategies -, isn’t anything between the current 20% and 30% fine?
Top countries by GDP are basically all around that level: China 25%, Japan 30%, Germany 30%, UK 19%, France 32%, Italy 28%, India 30%, Brazil 34%, Canada 26%. I don’t think moving it from 21% to 28% would make many companies spend the money to relocate considering the corporate tax levels elsewhere. Maybe the UK but with Brexit still not totally sorted out, I doubt it. So sounds to me like a lot of alarm over not much.
spoken like someone who clearly spent most of his life in a city on one of the coasts
But I do need to reiterate, because you keep saying this like corporations are some sort of discrete entity like the government. PEOPLE own corporations. Anything that corporations own is actually still owned by people.
You go off on tangents, assuming something obvious not mentioned means no one but you knows it. Everything in human society is run by people, including the government. The government is much more run by the people than corporations. Corporations are “discrete entities” as well, if you want to use that term. Happy now? Successfully distracting from the real issues?
You do realize that corporations behave differently than individual people, right? They follow different laws and regulations. Do you not know most of the economy is controlled by corporations?
The nonsense you spout at me is all in your head in an effort to make someone else wrong and supposedly ignorant so you can feel superior.
When you resort to obnoxious insults, you lose all credibility with me.
Corporate income that is passed onto the stockholder in the form of dividends is taxed at the individual level.
Can you please stop saying “most of” when you really don’t know what you are talking about. “Most wealth…” WRONG. “Most land…” WRONG. “Most of the economy…” WRONG.
Here’s the thing. I probably dislike/distrust corporations as much as you do (but for completely different reasons). But that dislike/distrust doesn’t mean it’s useful to make up statistics about them to make them look and sound terrible. They do enough terrible stuff truthfully that it’s silly to try and make things up.
I insult your arguments and your made up claims that aren’t based in factual reality. If you take that personally, that’s on you. I don’t use ad hominem attacks. If any tact I take as a retort to your claims/opinions is out of bounds, feel free to report it to the mods. If they want me to tone it down, I will. But don’t act like my tone is why you don’t think I’m credible. You don’t think I’m credible because you simply disagree with me on the fundamental role of government in our society. I, on the other hand, judge your credibility on your reputation and your sources, and I take each post mostly on its individual merits. When you provide sources and they are honest, I take your claims as credible. When you spout talking points that sound like they came from a CNN pundit without any independent source, I know you aren’t.
… at a special ultra low long term capital gains rate and not at regular income tax rates – because it’s (supposed to have been) taxed already at the corporate level. And income that is retained or used for share buybacks and not distributed as dividends is not.
There are some pass-through entities, which the “owners” do pay taxes on their own returns. My point was the pass through entities seem to most closely match what you were describing, where the owners are already paying income taxes for their ownership share.
We’re talking about what’s called the corporate income tax, not a tax on assets. It’s a tax on profits, not revenue, so if companies actually paid 100% of the corporate profits as tax, they would still break even.
That may be a tax cut for some shareholders. Let’s take the 28% proposed rate, plus say 5% for state. 33% corp tax. The “rich” would presumably fall in the top federal bracket (after a puny ~400k) and pay the top cap gains bracket, or 20%.
Cumulatively, that’s about half. 46.4%. I’m not familiar with how states handle cap gains taxes - around half of the original profit is gone due to taxation.
I would love to see the SALT proposal spun out as its own topic, so it’s not lost amongst the other discussions here. Would love to see bendr and Argyll’s take.
I didn’t the figures for myself, but a nugget here from the link:
The total dollar amount of federal revenues for the years 2017-20 are $3.32, $3.33, $3.46 and $3.71 (estimated) trillion respectfully.
or
think that the business tax cuts had no effect on the unemployment rate, which went from 4.87% in 2016 to 3.5% in 2019? Also, the median household income went from $62,898 in 2016 to $68,703 in 2019, especially benefiting those at the bottom end of the scale.
The market sure didn’t like Biden’s latest tax hike proposal, which sold off 1.5% midday on those headlines.
In other news, we may get tax rate futures, ie a product where you can bet on corporate tax rates in the future and, if they actually become a liquid product, companies could hedge the risk of tax changes on their business. For example, by heading, a company wouldn’t have to halt expansion / hiring plans like they do now since they don’t know whether Biden is gonna take 10% of their cash flow at any moment with his proposed hikes.
Here’s more on why high capital gains taxes are bad for the economy. Basically they impede good capital allocation (which benefits new companies, their workers, innovation, etc), but you can’t do that since its too costly to sell your current investment and pay 2/3 of your money in taxes just to reallocate to something that’s better but not insanely better.
Several empirical studies vindicate the conclusion that high capital gains tax rates create a lock-in effect and cripple growth in the real economy.[5] A Harvard study found that a 10.0 percentage-point increase in the marginal tax rate reduced the probability of selling a stock by a full 6.5 percentage points.[6]Another study concluded that eliminating capital gains taxes wholesale could increase GDP by 1% to 3%.[7] Interestingly, historical evidence suggests that a lower capital gains tax rate often improves economic growth such that it increases net tax revenue.