Corporations are the legal equivalent of human beings. If you think otherwise, please cite. I’ve cited Citizens United. I would like it not to be so, but it truly is the case for almost all legal purposes that corporations are legally entitled to all legal protections. On edit: I suppose I should point out that juries are required to view corporations with the same status as human beings.
Entitlement has a semantic ambiguity here. Social security is a contractual relationship in the same manner as treasury bonds and notes that should and must be honored if US currency is to be respect. This Darth Vader “pray that I do not adjust our deal further” aspect of social security is dangerous to the value of the US dollar and trust in the government. You are using the word “entitlement” in this instance in the traditional meaning of the word “entitle”. It is usually used in political discourse to mean a gift and sneeringly lumped in with “welfare”. It isn’t a gift. It’s been paid for. I see that you agree with that. I object to the sneering tone with which it is usually used. When politicians sneer about “entitlements” they usually leave out their own pensions, which are far closer to welfare than social security.
You have “cited” it in the sense that you have mentioned it. You have not explained, for instance, how it proves a corporation is equivalent to a human.
Or perhaps you could provide an example of a corporation that has cast a vote in an election, or a case where corporations have won their freedom from their human masters - after all, most corporations are owned by shareholders, a state a human being cannot legally be in.
You’re confusing - as people invariably do when this issue comes up - the concept of legal personage with real people.
You have stated that legally a corporation is not the equivalent of a human being. In courts of law they are. No, they don’t cast votes, I’ve already mentioned that, and provided citation. You assert that they are not “legally” persons. That’s just wrong. Rick.
RickJay is right. Saying “corporations are the legal equivalent of human beings” is simplistic and wrong. Corporation status infers certain legal protections and requirements. Corporations cannot marry, they cannot vote or hold public office. OTOH, as a shareholder or employee of a corporation, your liability is limited if the company goes bankrupt or runs afoul of the law. Oh the horror.
Yes, and probably never paid taxes on much of it (assuming it was left in maturing investments and never cashed out).
Right now I have an investment that has increased in value more than 1200% over the past five years. While I did pay taxes on the money used to make the initial investment, I have not yet paid a dime on the increase. If I cash out and use the money, then I would owe taxes on it. Yet, according to the “no death tax” people, I should be able to pass it on to my kid with no taxes. Why does that money get a free ride?
Bet your money is in either a 401K or some sort of IRA, right?
-XT
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. - Wikipedia If you are at peace with a railroad exec. creating the personhood in 1886 through subterfuge, then you can buy the line that corporations are people. We used to charter them and would revoke the charters. They now make the decisions for us. They have all the power. The case in 1886 was not supposed to make that decision at all.
In 1886 the court was quite different than it is now,. the Supreme Court judges actually spent a lot of time wandering the country doing court decisions. They met in Washing ton for part of the year as a court and then went off again . The court reporter wrote up many of the decisions while the judges were gone.
This case should have been quickly overturned.
So in fact they’re not the equivalent of human beings. Do we really have to list the ways corporations aren’t treated the same way as real live people? They can’t vote, can’t be the legal guardians of children, can’t leave the country (I suppose the business can, but the corporation is an entity that doesn’t exist outside of the jurisdiction of incorporation,) can be owned by others, so on and so forth.
You don’t even understand what I was asserting. Corporations are legal persons. They are not natural persons.
Corporations are legal persons (as are a variety of other organizations; government departments, charities, churches, unions and the like are also legal persons.) A “legal person” is not the same thing as a real, live person.
I mean this in absolutely sincerity; you need to look up the concept of legal personage (versus natural personage) right now. You are badly misunderstanding a legal term.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tax/schemes/cayman.html Back to the point. Tax havens allow the rich and many corporations a chance to avoid their taxes. There is a building in the Caymans that has thousands of corporations registered there. It is a mail drop. They don’t even have an office.
I can agree with that except that in almost every case, you are shifting taxes from the very wealthy to the merely well to do.
Corporate taxation invariably affects the investor class more than any other, most small businessmen operate their business through a pass through of some sort so they avoid the corporate tax altogether.
Estate taxes exempt out the first few million dollars and eventually reach marginal rates well past 50%. Taxing all inheritances as income would tax the middle class widow in one year on the money that has to last her the rest of her life.
The system we have right now is the way it is for a reason. We need tax reform but most of what we have now is there for a reason. The biggest abomination in taxes right now is the preferential tax rates for capital gains and dividends.
I stand to oppose the Ajashi Mercy to Widows and Orphans Bill of 2010. If the Good Lord had not intended for these widows and orphans to be compelled to labor in sweatshops, he would not have made them widows and orphans to begin with!
(Translation from snark: I am quite sure we can find a way to craft a provision in our tax codes to address any such unfortunate result.)
(Sorry that this post continues the broadening of the OP topic, but I think it’s relevant, and it certainly is under yorick73’s legitimate definition of tax burden. Also, it’s really long.)
Wow, there is just something powerful about the conservative/“libertarian” mindset. I think that something is “denial”. In the great game of amassing wealth, of course there is an element of intelligence, skill, and drive. We get it; you work hard for your money. But it isn’t really your money: it’s society’s. Open up your wallet and look at a bill. It doesn’t say “IdahoMauleMan” on it, it says “Federal Reserve Note” and “United States of America”. Without these institutions, which are not naturally occurring or without cost, you have no money. Sure, you may have a bank account that says you have X number of dollars; which you could exchange for any other currency or store of value. If the bank decides to give it back to you. Yes, the free market would quickly take care of a bank that stole your money, but it wouldn’t help you. Maybe you’re a full-on Randian and you have a pile of gold bars in your basement for just such an eventuality. Until someone bribes your cleaning lady for a key or just burns your house down and sifts through the rubble.
That’s fine, you say, I’ll just go out to the market with my superior skills and rebuild my fortune. Now, I don’t know what you do, but I’m sure that to achieve your full potential you need to spend at least 40 hours a week doing it. Do you have time to run a chemical analysis on all of your food? Because the farmer down the road in Galtville that you barter with has an economic incentive to maximize production while keeping quality just high enough that you don’t notice the side-effects of the hormones. How often are you checking your water supply for heavy metals? Because every factory upriver from you is required by its fiduciary duty to its shareholders to cheaply dump its waste into your aquifer. Then there’s the matter of all the old hobos squatting on your property. These idiots did not have the foresight to be born with the noble traits that got you where you are today, and so having frittered their lives away making less money than you and possibly wasting their nest eggs on medical care for a loved one (who were, of course, dropped from their insurance plan for neglecting to initial a certain section of their original application), these lazy elderly bums are unable compete with the rest of the labor pool and continue to make enough money to eat. There’s too many to shoot, and soon as your private security team chases them off the south lawn, they just regroup at the west lawn.
And this is where the denial comes in for all you anti-tax blusterers. Deep down, you know that you don’t really deserve everything you have. Perhaps you’ve heard of the expression, “There but for the grace of God go I”. You should be saying that. A lot. Take me, for instance. My household income is more than double the US median, so I’m doing alright. Why is that? My natural intelligence and skill? Sure, that’s part of it. But it helps that I never had an opportunity to eat lead paint. It helped that the town’s property taxes paid my schoolteacher parents enough money that they could send me to a good college. How about my drive and bootstrap-pulling-up strength? Well, there’s not that much. Certainly, not as much as my grandfather, who put himself through college while raising the first few of his 10 kids. If he had been a lazy alcoholic, or died 40 years earlier, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I’m sure that fits into your theory of the deserving rich and natural selection and whatnot, but is it truly fair to judge a man on his ancestors? Or what about the rest of his family? Luckily for me, nobody in my family has been a drain on my resources. But what of all the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition stories out there? Man’s doing fine, working hard, then his kid is rendered paralyzed by a car accident. Or has a hole in her heart. Or he’s been adopting special-needs kids but loses his job down at the plant (market inefficiency corrected). Sure, that show does manage to find some of these people and build them new houses. But private charity is not the miracle cure that libertarians think it is. Some random people get helped out by rich angels, but I’d say 99% of these hard-luck cases fall through the cracks. Grandma gets Alzheimer? Little Johnny has to go work at McDonald’s to pay the rent instead of working his way through engineering school and inventing the world’s best motor. Is it really so bad that society can collectively cushion the fall, instead of just those who are closest?
Okay, so all that is my take on the general need for taxes and why you should feel both obligated and proud to pay them. In specific, yes, there are people who cheat the system and mooch off more than their fair share. These people are called defense contractors. Ha, that was a little joke there. But seriously, all levels of government in this country are spending about $760 billion on all of the welfare-type programs. Say that 10% of the recipients are just ripping us the fuck off and driving Cadillacs to their spa appointments. That’s $76 billion wasted. This year, we seem to be spending about $130 billion on Iraq and Afghanistan. So while I think that there are better ways to deploy the social safety net (coughuniversal health care for its preventative effectscough) and certainly some waste around the edges (including some guy playing an Xbox right now that was purchased with unemployment benefits), there are much bigger fish to fry. But I understand that it’s easier to picture and get angry at some lazy welfare queen popping out worthless kids than the military-industrial-prison-pharmaceutical-media complex which is actively wasting your money on things far more egregious than obnoxiously long manicured nails.
The purpose of the inheritance tax is to prevent a disconnected aristocracy from accumulating all of the wealth. I’m in favor of this goal. Maybe we can quibble about the exact percentage, but we can not abolish it. And just so you know, nobody has ever lost the family farm (or even a Park Avenue condo) because of the “death tax”.
And about “double taxation”. Shut the hell up and live with it. It’s absolutely ridiculous that you could call me out for insufficient argument from economic principles in a (somewhat glib) mirror-response post and yet not understand the basics of how money moves through an economy. As others have explained, the government taxes transactions, because that’s when it can see and get the money. It might be possible to redo the tax code to achieve similar revenue and results without the appearance of double taxation, but honestly, you just sound like a whiny victimist.
Oh, and I don’t think you’re using “whoosh” right. 
That’s an interesting argument if we pick 10%. But what if we peg it at, say, 18%, neatly surpassing the $130 billion mark? Would that mean it is the bigger fish to fry?
I’m not sure why you felt this was true. Let’s run some numbers, shall we?
Start with an arbitrary annual salary, say, USD $50,000 taxable income (after all relevant deductions, etc.) in 2009. Assume an average CPI(Consumer Price Index) rate of inflation of 2%. The Purchasing Power of the 50K has been reduced to $49,000. Most COLAs give the wage-earner a percentage (frequently 75%) of CPI. That means the COLA would be 1.5% of 50K, or $750, making the new salary $50,750. Let us assume, for the moment, that the COLA is 100%, or $1,000, and the 2010 salary is $51,000. From the IRS form 1040 tax tables (page 84) the 2009 tax for a wage-earner with $50,000 taxable income, filing singly, is $8,694, or 17.3% of the taxable income. For a taxable income of $51,000, filing singly, the tax is $8,944, or 17.5% of the taxable income.
Using the 2009 income of $50,000 as the basis, adjusting for inflation of 2%, the 2010 income of $51,000 has the same Purchasing Power as $49,980 in constant dollars (2009 basis.)
So, even with a 100% COLA (very seldom given in the real world,) the wage-earner has lost Purchasing Power due to inflation. But he is also giving a larger percentage of a smaller pie to the government (17.5% rather than 17.3%.)
Just because the dollar figure on the paystub is bigger, that does not mean you are actually making more.
To recap: In constant, 2009-basis dollars, you would have made $41,233.50 after-tax in 2010 v. $41350.00 after-tax in 2009.
Feel free to run the comparison for different incomes. I tried several, and the results were consistent with each other, with some variability.
All of this applies only if the tax brackets do not go up, which they generally do. We do not know 2010 yet, so let’s back up a year and compare 2008 and 2009.
$50k in 2008 would have tax of $8,850 or 17.7% $51k in 2009 would have tax of $8,944 or 17.5% You would be left with $41,150 in 2008 and $42,056 in 2009. Your take home pay has risen 2.2%, thereby exceeding inflation.
Your statements are only correct in years in which the tax brackets increase by less than inflation. How often does that happen? I am sure it happens sometimes, but to say that because the brackets are not indexed to inflation, then your scenario applies is grossly exaggerating the situation. Just because they are not formally linked does not mean that the brackets do not get raised.
Inheritance tax is IMO the most defensible tax of them all. It’s moral imperative is to prevent the sort of inherited aristocracies that existed in Europe, a situation I would expect True Patriotic Americans to want to avoid at all costs :p.
I do however think the threshold should be considerably higher. I have no problem with people inheriting significant funds from their forebears, provided it isn’t such a large amount that they never have to do a days work.
It seems that you, like others in this thread, are trying to justify taxes in general. I don’t think anyone here feels that we should pay no taxes. The question is what a corporate tax means and who pays the tax.
Two points: First, there is not a limited supply of wealth which results in anyone having less because someone has more. Second, the inheritance tax does nothing to prevent inherited aristocracies. It is simply a technique for the government to get its paws on the the money that they think they deserve.
First, the limiting or non-limiting of wealth is irrelevant. The problem is the intrenchment of power and privilege that comes with inherited wealth. Second, that is your subjective opinion and is rather miopic. Certainly governments the world over like to tax as much as possible but in democracies you can usually only get away with taxes that have some sort of basis in fairness or the promotion of societal values. Yes they want the money, but that isn’t the sole reason for it existing.