I’m not “confusing” the two types of taxes. The discussion–to give it a label it probably doesn’t deserve–has veered between “taxing them nasty rich folk” and “taxing them nasty corporations that want to keep the money they make.”
I have taken 21 credits’ worth of upper-division economics classes, earning a GPA of 4.0 in those classes (at a major university). So piss on that if you wish, as despite all those courses, I don’t agree with you, which means I didn’t learn anything.
It’s obvious that increasing personal tax rates on business owners–those who own sole proprietorships and the variations thereof–will have the same effect as increasing corporate tax rates–it will decrease the ability of those business entities to invest and yes, Virginia, to create jobs. When you take money out of someone’s pocket, they can’t spend it any longer. (Duh.)
Now, you could argue that the benefit of the increased taxation will be that the government can spend it on all sorts of neato and worthwhile things; you can also argue that when the government gives people money to spend, that creates consumer demand and therefore jobs. True up to a point–but taking money away from job creators, running in through the pipes of the government welfare system, and then putting some of it in the hands of the consumer seems horribly inefficient to me. Also (and I’ve said this before), if the rich/big corporations/whomever have decided to hold on to their cash and not invest for the time being, doesn’t forcing them to stop doing so produce an inefficient outcome? (I realize that the populist view of corporate management is that they’re incompetent as well as evil, but I think we have to assume that their decision to retain earnings for the time being is rational, especially since their tax liability increases by doing so rather than reinvesting it in capital improvements.)
Except the government spends it, and the government is part of the economy.
Also, in case you hadn’t heard or it hadn’t dawned on you: college economics courses are mostly about learning the lingo and indoctrination. It’s a religious institution. Sure if you do well at assimilating language and business tools you can get rewarded by a corporation that likes having as many of the faithful around as they can who happen to be able to do simple analysis. Just because a college professor asserts something don’t make it so. Since you’re not likely to be running a whole economy any time soon it won’t matter that you are woefully incompetent on macroeconomics, and so graduates of these programs are happy if they succeed that they had the right mindset that had nothing to do with their success or fail and get to be angry at what their professors told them to be angry about.
Oh, the problem is not that you don’t agree with me. The problem is that it has taken you something like 50 posts to even acknowledge there is a thing called demand.
BTW, please give specific cites about anyone calling rich people nasty. I haven’t paid much attention to the corporate tax angle since that is not at issue. The US has high corporate taxes, but so many ways of avoiding them that large companies don’t pay any. Reform there is really needed.
If you have been following the news, you’d know that only about 3% of small business owners would even be affected by Obama’s proposal. My wife and I are independently small business owners under IRS rules in that we both file Schedule Cs. It has also been noted that among the 3% who would be affected are a goodly number of finance people and people making a lot on royalties and the like, who would not be hiring more people in any case. Clearing $250K on a business is pretty good. I’m not crying about them.
The relative effectiveness of various types of stimulus has been studied - I leave it to your economic expertise to find some of them. In general stimulus that leads to keeping people employed or putting them into new jobs is better than tax cuts for the wealthy. Now digging holes and filling them up wouldn’t be that effective, but our infrastructure could use some work, so we have lots of holes already which we might trip in.
so, some welfare - but mostly paying for construction projects which need doing, and paying to keep teachers, police and fire fighters employed. That isn’t welfare.
Every person in this thread - and me explicitly - have said that companies are not spending money because there are not good investment opportunities due to lack of demand. That is not incompetence. No one has been talking about forcing companies to spend money, just about stimulating demand to make spending money a good business decision. We’ve been over this again and again and you don’t seem to be comprehending what everyone is writing very well.
Hee hee. “You must not have learned anything about economics.” “Well, actually, I took several economics courses in college.” “Colleges don’t really teach you anything about economics.”
I’m sorry, but I am more inclined to believe what I learned in college than the postings of a few random internet loons. You’re beginning to sound even more ridiculous now.
Yes, you have stumbled on the truth, at least partially. Increasing taxes on corporations won’t stimulate consumer demand. I cannot see how anywhere in your argument, that equates to a good reason to increase corporate taxes.
I comprehend what you and others are writing quite well. Strip away the money that the evil, incompetent corporations and rich people are hoarding, and then the government will give it to the little guy, who will then spend spend spend and thereby create business opportunities for those same corporations. So you advocate taking money from the rich/corporations in order to give them the chance to make some of it back. Breathtakingly inane.
I certainly do understand the populist, anti-rich mentality that doesn’t consider the practicality or efficacy of a soak-the-rich plan; the far more important consideration is that the rich are getting soaked in some fashion.
By the way, do any of you proto-Marxists realize that the cash socked away by the evil rich still works in the economy? Even if they just stick it in a bank, that money is available for lending, and not just to other rich people. Once again, you folks need to put away the comic books that show Scrooge McDuck rolling around in his money in his basement vault.
We already have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world. Increasing the corporate tax rate endlessly isn’t some kind of panacea–at some point, arguably already reached, it hurts productivity. No sane person could argue that it doesn’t–the only question is, is it worth it? Fans of redistribution clap their hands and say, “YESSSSSSSSS!!!”
You know, if you go back and look at some previous threads on this topic, you might find a few people saying this even before you showed up to guide us in our stumbling.
No, you really, really don’t.
I’m still waiting for you to retract the statements you made about beliefs I expressed in this thread.
Sigh. Another thing I guess I have to spell out. If you raise the tax rate on retained earnings, which would, in effect, be executed by raising the corporate tax rate but retaining the tax breaks for capital investment, you are essentially blackmailing companies into making the decision to invest in capital improvements because they will lose so much of their profits otherwise. It’s both a carrot and a stick. But on their own, they have decided that the existing incentives to invest, coupled with the existing tax rates, in the context of the current economy, make it prudent to postpone capital investment. So raising tax rates is coercive in that it forces corporations to invest rather than save–regardless of how advisable such investment is right now, and ignoring the fact that the managers of those corporations have made a rational decision to conserve cash and not invest.
So what you are advocating is forcing corporations to conduct their business in a way that they have already decided isn’t prudent, not for the time being, anyway. (And yes, raising tax rates is INDEED “forcing” their hand; no tax is effective, in fact, unless it is backed by force or the threat of force.)
You, singular. You, singular, seem to have taken quite a while to even get that far.
I do believe I gave a partial retraction, but I’m not sure. In any event, I acknowledge that you have not explicity said that the rich/corporations are evil. Your arguments and their ideological origins merely strongly suggest that you feel that way. You are certainly not alone, if that gives you comfort. Just about everybody hates the eeeevil rich and the big, bad corporations; they are exceedingly easy targets for blame. If you are truly neutral in your feelings toward them, I applaud you. (I’m sure a lot of people here think I’m a raving right-winger and want to kiss the rich people’s ass. Au contraire. I merely think that imitating the 1789 French Revolution mob won’t get us anywhere.)
The term job creators is pure unadulterated Bullshit with a capital “B.” When I hear a right winger use it, what I hear is someone too cowardly to say they’re standing up for the rich, choosing instead to couch their argument in a cynical buzzword.
And a cynical buzzword is exactly what “job creators” is, like something created in a corporate suite by the marketing department.
Reacting to the failure of your own argument by making ever more ridiculous assertions will not redeem you. You are now comparing the position we’ve taken on a mild increase to the tax on the wealthiest 2% to storming the Bastille. Is that really the analogy you want to make? What’s the over/under on when you throw out a Hitler reference?
This thread has become a greenslime beatdown. Clearly he’s not going to provide any form of citation for the numbers he’s throwing out and he’s going to dodge every example that runs counter to his disproven theories. At this point we’re just picking on him. It’s like fishing with poison.
Have you ever been involved in a capital purchasing decision? I’m sure taxes play some role, but all the ones I’ve been involved with have been decided around replacing or upgrading equipment, or expanding when needed for new projects.
If you are a manager facing an increase in orders with a factory running at near capacity, do you think you are going to worry about taxes? I sat in way too many meetings about purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment for a new project, and taxes never came up once.
You are still mentioning corporate tax rates for no reason I can fathom. But there are tons of ways government influences corporate decisions - oil depletion allowances, R&D tax credits, etc., etc. Deal with it. (I was in charge of filling out the R&D credit form for a few years - not much fun.) If you told your average VP or CFO this was coercion, he’d tell you you were out of your mind. And force? You must be confusing business executives with wacko militia men from Idaho. Even in the rare instances execs are arrested, guns are seldom involved.
Since taxes apply to everyone, some measures of corporate performance don’t even include them. I daresay few execs are going to make bad decision decisions because of the threat of taxes (even if there was such a threat) because the market is not going to judge them on things beyond their control. Panicking and spending more than needed and having overcapacity will get them judged. Now, they will move purchases backwards and forwards if it is beneficial. But we do that for other reasons also, such as to get a good deal from a vendor wanting to make quarterly sales numbers.
Join date of July 2012, huh? I invite you to search on my posts, and you will notice I’ve been saying this long before I had your oh so valuable help.
Are you deliberately distorting my position, or is your reading comprehension so bad that you don’t understand it?
Some extra money is good. Some just drives up prices. The bubble was driven in part by excessive venture capital driving too few good ideas. A large cause of the recent disaster was the bidding up of risky and thus high returning mortgage instruments by those chasing high returns. And maybe they didn’t teach this in your econ classes, but banks don’t lend to just anybody - or shouldn’t. If they do we get a disaster like we just saw.
I’m sure GE was crying about the high tax rate they paid. :rolleyes: