A lot of Olympic athletes don’t face one tenth of one percent of the scrutiny of someone like LeBron James or Tom Brady.
It’s measly return for the amount of effort and dedication it takes to become, for instance, a top-flight pro-footballer. Let me ask you, would you be willing to devote the best years of your life to exhausting training regimes, constant practise and marathon gym sessions, all the while maintaining a religious adherence to inflexible diet protocols just so that you could maybe, perhaps, possibly get a shot at playing a hugely demanding sport which carries a very real risk of serious injury and even long-term brain damage, all for a hundred grand a year? I certainly wouldn’t. Nor would most people. There are easier ways to make that kind of money. In my line of work, I meet successful small business owners every day who make that kind of money. They run restaurants, plumbing firms, software companies, all occupations which, though demanding in their own right, are nowhere near as masochistically punishing as what pro-footballers put themselves through. Pro-footballers do what they do, not only because they love the game, but because the money is so damn good.
If a 100% tax on income over 100 grand were ever to be implemented, the effect on pro-sports would be this: The pool of potential players would shrink dramatically. This would cause the standard of competition to fall. If the standard of competition falls, fans will be less willing to pay high ticket prices. The teams would thus bring in less money, and the government would consequently lose taxable income. If the plunge in ticket revenue is deep enough, this loop might repeat itself several times before the market value of a professional sportsperson settled on a figure somewhere under 100 grand a year, possibly considerably under 100 grand a year.
This is, of course, assuming that other countries not burdened by such an exorbitant tax levy don’t just snap up all the best American players, which they obviously would. The end result: A drastic drop in the quality of professional sports, and a drastic drop in tax revenue.
This analogy is not on point for a few reasons. First, the payer of the gas tax is the consumer directly as the gas station that collects the tax is simply a pass through.
Second, the amount of the gas tax is a specific dollar amount or percentage levied against the underlying purchase price of the fuel, similar to a sales tax. In the case of property, the property tax is a function of the underlying value of the property and is divorced from the market rent (price of gas in your example).
Third, gas tax is a consumption based tax, it’s only levied against gas actually purchased. This is in contrast to property tax which is paid by the property owner regardless if the property is rented or not.
Additionally, the average NBA career is less than 5 years. So while $100k may be a lot to someone, at 26 when he’s out of a job, he isn’t making even his $100k anymore.
I know that was just an example of yours, but it makes a point: in these arguments, “the rich” are whoever makes 10% that you make right now.
Put another way, the rich take advantage of tax loopholes. That mortgage deduction you’re taking? That a legitimate tax deduction!! But to the guy that can’t afford a house, that’s a loop hole.
Your…uh…“theories” of economics are so bizarre that Ayn Rand and Karl Marx are closer to each other than either of them are to you.
Expenses are paid out of gross revenue to get net revenue/profit*.
So the $5.00 dry cleaning fee is gross revenue, you subtract .50c for postage, $1.00 for employee salaries, another $1.00 for supplies, $1.50 for taxes/rent/overhead and you have $4.00 in expenses, leaving you with $1.00 in net revenue (aka profit, for our purposes here).
Do you now see how the $5.00 dry cleaning fee pays for expenses?
*It’s more complicated than that, but give where we’re apparently starting, this is close enough.
You guys can go back and forth with your terrible accounting practices and make believe business models all day long. Ultimately what it comes down to is that poor people are not “owed” money from rich people simply because we have “more” (regardless if it’s billionaires or people like myself struggling to survive in New York on hundreds of thousands a year.)
What they are “owed” are reasonable level of government services and social safety nets paid for by a progressive and fair system of taxation.
But these extreme leftist proposals for confiscatory tax plans do nothing but scare honest hard-working people into voting for the Donald Trumps of the world.
I would disagree with this in that the wealthy have control over the means of production in a way that the poor, or even the not so well off, cannot. And as the owners of that production profit from the surplus that comes from the labor of others, it is needed to return that wealth to the classes that are actually performing the labor. If nothing else, for the practical consideration of maintaining a healthy labor force.
At the least.
I see beren’s fairly radical and confiscatory tax plan. I think such a thing is a bit silly, but it’s the only one I see that way, but you indicated plural. What other plans proposed seem radical and confiscatory? Do you think that any plans to raise your taxes are extreme proposals for confiscation? Where do you draw that line?
I have no idea where you are going with this, but they publish their earnings reports with those number to give investors an idea as to the fiscal health of the company.
The T in EBIT stands for income taxes, not property taxes. Property taxes would always be under operating expenses.
John Stephens, the CFO of AT&T, testified today before the House Ways and Means Committee that AT&T pays the equivalent of $2/share to the shareholders, and $4/ share to various governments in taxes.
That situation doesn’t make a lick of economic sense.
Got a link? Google isn’t coming up with either a transcript or a video.
I don’t see why that doesn’t make sense. If he is including all his taxes, including property taxes on the company property, registration taxes on the company’s vehicles, payroll taxes on his employees, any excise or tariff taxes on importing or exporting goods, fees for H1B1 visas, sales taxes, those are all taxes that are part of the cost of doing business. People often times informally even consider actual costs of doing business, like maintenance on property and equipment to be a “tax” as well, though I do not know if, and so I do not think that he was using that colloquialism for a tax.
Point is, you are going to pay quite a number of taxes as a cost of doing business before you get to income tax, which is the only one that actually cares how much you actually make.
They can set the dividend to be whatever they want it to be. They have chosen for themselves that $2/year/share is reasonable. Bully for them.
Many stocks do not pay dividends at all which makes sense too…use the dividend money to grow the company and by extension share value instead. As someone who buys stocks you can decide for yourself what the best deal for you is. No one is getting ripped off.
On a total revenue of 163,786,000,000 leaving a gross of 86,902,000,000 they paid 6,479,000,000 in income taxes, leaving 12,976,000,000 as net income, which mostly gets paid out in dividends.
That’s not all the much, really. That’s 2 dollars a share to shareholders, and only 1 per share to income tax.
The only way I can see that he comes up with the other 3 dollars a share is if he is counting payroll taxes, which is not invalid, but is absolutely disingenuous if you are using these numbers to complain about tax policy.
That’s an inaccurate description of his comment. The point wasn’t that they are only paying a 5% yield, it’s that they’re paying twice as much in taxes.
Since this “point” has already been exposed as absurd (presuming that the tenants’ landlord hasn’t come up with some scheme to avoid paying property taxes), I’m not sure what you hope to gain by repeating it.
I never actually heard his comment, as you haven’t provided a link, and I haven’t found this hearing yet, and so I was not attempting to describe it either accurately or inaccurately. I was just saying that 5% yield is a pretty good yield, and I was just pointing out that there shouldn’t be complaining about it only being 5%, I did not claim that that was his complaint, my claim is that the numbers on T’s fiscal sheet don’t back up his numbers if he is trying to imply that these are income taxes on his company, rather than payroll taxes on his employees and other incidental taxes like property taxes on buildings and equipment.
It did sound like you were complaining though, that the yield is so low, so if you were, let me assure you, T’s paying out just fine.
Highest statutory tax rate. The effective tax rate, what they actually pay, is much, much lower.
Taxes paid by corporations used to account for 33% of federal revenue. Now it is 9%. So, corporations’ taxes are better now than ever. Not a lot of room to complain.