LOL I’ll take my chances. This kind of thinking is exactly what’s gotten us where we are. You think the current tax laws that apply to “us” exist because “we” thought they should? Stop with the fucking Stockholm Syndrome.
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Except corporations are not some kind of magical fairyland creature - they represent real people, and what damages them damages individuals.
Sure, the megacorps can be fucking monstrous, but you need to realize that the rules that affect them also are applied to small mom & pop businesses - if you harm them, you also harm others as collateral.
You need to stop looking at things in a way to try get some kind of revenge on megacorps for what they’ve done, but instead look at fixing the system as a whole. Megacorps are the monsters they are because of other deep-seated problems, but any “punishments” you try to hit them with are more likely to actually make them stronger in the long run. The megacorps will survive, but the smaller companies may not - and the megacorps will absorb their market share when they fail and be bigger in the long run.
Corporations are a legal fiction. They only exist because the government allows them to.
Do you see the anarcho-communist flag I have for my PfP now? Maybe that clears things up for you.
We used to have this little thing called antitrust law. It’s amazing how gutless and toothless it is now.
If you want to make capitalism work for social benefit, firstly GOOD FUCKING LUCK, secondly you’ll have to regulate the shit out of it, and literally destroy corporations that no longer serve our interests. Treating them like a special case of people/citizens is a terrible mistake.
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Bad move. Your chances are slim considering the deep pockets of lobbyists. If you give them a new weapon to use against you, you can bet they will.
Perhaps you need to re-read what I’ve said above. I clearly stated the tax laws need to be fixed, and the rich need to be paying a lot more than they currently do. The poor and middle class need their taxes to go down, and the rich need their taxes to go up - into the 90%+ range.
My issue with this proposed tax lies solely with the retroactive aspect of it.
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I 100% agree that antitrust laws need a revamp and to be given a lot more power. (And if corporations want to be “people” I also think we should have the equivalent of jail time and the death penalty for them.)
Capitalism can work, but yes, needs to be heavily regulated once something hits a certain size. Also, while capitalism can work well in some areas, in others it is a fucking nightmare (see: police / fire / healthcare).
I’m a proponent of vastly reigning in capitalism, but not abolishing it. I want to expand both communist and socialist concepts in this country, but don’t want either of them to totally take over. I think each of the three systems have pros and cons, and each addresses certain industries and areas better or worse than the others. Frankly, any of the three systems quickly expand themselves to catastrophic failure - for a stable economy and society you need a mix of all three, with constant guidance and adjustments as time goes on.
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In case you haven’t looked around rural America recently, that’s already happened - when the big boxes moved in. The only “small” store that’s expanding is Dollar General, and that’s sure as hell not mom-and-pop.
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Exactly my point. This is why all these “fuck the corporations” knee-jerk reactions are counterproductive in the long run. Trying to punish them doesn’t work, and only consolidates power further. People need to stop looking for revenge and start considering real long-term fixes instead.
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You are not a multi billion dollar company who used power and influence during an international crisis as a source of profit.
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The companies that saw a big increase in profits didn’t really do so by using their power and influence - for the most part, they were just the companies that were already in the areas that would naturally have an increase in business in response to pandemic conditions (for example, people staying home and not going out shopping naturally favors mail-order places like Amazon over physical stores). Other massive companies saw losses as industries ground to a halt for 3 months. These companies made money on this crisis, but someone makes money off every crisis, and the next crisis might not affect them - or might even seriously hurt them.
But that’s irrelevant to my point - if we say it’s OK to make retroactive increases to tax burdens this time, that sets precedent saying that it’s OK to do it to everyone in the future. If you suddenly found out that your paychecks were only having half the amount needed for taxes withheld for the first 8 months, and so they’re going to start taking out four times that amount for the rest of the year, I think you’d agree that this is a problem.
The solution is not to make a special tax law for a one-time event, but instead to learn from this crisis and come up with a permanent tax law that people can plan for in advance. Make a law now worded in a way to cover any national/international crisis situation and lay out the tax increases that can be expected when one happens.
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Yes, they do. But at least in my country they don’t usually change retrospectively. Are you saying they change retrospectively in your country? Can you give an example that will help me understand?
OK. Let’s go with the car insurance example, since I think car insurance runs the same way in most countries, while health insurance varies enormously.
Car insurance is a one year contract. If you decide to go with the same insurer next year, the insurer will calculate the price for the next year’s contract, which will almost certainly be different from last year. Occasionally the term and conditions may be different too. They aren’t changing the terms or price of your contract. That contract is finished. They’re negotiating a new contract for the next year.
That’s not analogous to this proposed new retrospective tax.
A scenario analogous to the proposed tax would be if you paid for a year’s insurance for your car, and then at the end of the year the insurer found their total premium income was less than their total expenses and they came back to ask you for more money for the year of insurance cover they’d already provided. That doesn’t happen in any country I’m aware of. (Though in Australia, with car use much reduced due to COVID and crash rates much lower than normal, some insurers HAVE been giving retrospective refunds to customers who can demonstrate reduced mileage. No one complains about a retrospective change that benefits the customer.)
Actually, since we’re talking about tax, there’s a better analogy that I missed. Say you run a one-person company doing local deliveries with your van, which is owned by your company. The insurance premiums on the van will be a deductible expense in your company’s tax. To keep things simple, assume your tax year is the calendar year. Say you paid the annual insurance premium on your van on 1 Jan 2020. Your pricing for your delivery service has assumed that that premium is a deductible business expense for the 2020 tax year. Today the government announces that tax revenue is down, so they’re changing the company tax rules so that insurance premiums are no longer a deductible expense for the 2020 tax year. So your pricing calculations for the completed 7 months of the 2020 tax year are now all wrong.
I suspect most people would agree that this is an unfair change because it is retrospective.
I’m with TheRizz on this one. If governments think it is OK to make retrospective tax changes for billionaires, they’re likely to think it is even safer to make retrospective changes for those of us who don’t have the political clout of the billionaires. If my understanding of USA tax law is roughly correct (which is far from a certainty), I’ve got no problems with USA taxing its rich more, either by prospective changes or putting greater effort into ensuring compliance with current law, but I wouldn’t recommend creating a precedent that retrospective changes are OK.
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It’s my understanding that the latest executive order on the pandemic is basically doing this - giving a “tax cut” that means that you’ll still owe the taxes, they just won’t be deducted because of the order. So, TPTB are doing it to the little guy already, but you’re still worried about the billionaires?
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Not even slightly related to anything I suggested.
I’m all in favor of much more regulation of all of those things than we have right now, as well as much more enforcement of the regulations we do have. I’m also in favor of much higher tax rates at high incomes, including corporate profits and capital gains. I am entirely confident in businesses’ ability to deal just just about any regulatory structure we choose to impose, and if some don’t, then that’s fine as long as the structure itself is doing enough good for society.
The problem is that this specific suggested course of action is changing the rules after the fact. Doing that makes it impossible for a business to make good decisions about what to invest in, and what risks to take. @TheRizz said it very clearly. This is an extremely fundamental principle, not just of business, but of governance. Law codes, from Hammurabi to the twelve tables of Rome to the US constitution’s ban on both ex post facto laws and bills of attainder are there, and public knowledge, because it is unjust to change the rules on someone only after they’ve done something that was legal at the time. Since Dartmouth College v Woodward the US Supreme Court has upheld the importance of respecting pre-existing contracts and agreements based on the rules as they were when the agreements were made. Making sure everyone is able to know the rules when making plans is a huge part of the reason for the principle of stare decisis. The fact today our laws are so complicated that this is essentially impossible for anyone except the very wealthy or large companies (but I repeat myself) is also one of the main reasons why, in Gideon vs Wainwright, the Supreme Court declared that a criminal trial is necessarily unfair if the defendant doesn’t have legal representation.
You run a business, you owe a deal to the infrastructure that made it happen and keeps it in one piece.
When you are profiting without paying for the maintenance and upkeep of that infrastructure, you not only undermine that infrastructure but yourself as well. Having to pay more out of pocket to make up the difference. Taxes are the price of doing business. Maintenance of the system from which you profit from.
That’s absolutely true. It is society’s job to decide what the right price is, inform everyone, and then enforce it. The libertarians are wrong to claim that taxation is theft, because we all know the rules when we decide how to go about our lives and could, if we wanted, organize ourselves to fight to change those rules. “Retroactive tax code changes” are not that, that is literally saying “hey, we never said you couldn’t do this, but we don’t like it, so we’re just gonna take all your stuff.” If you go along with that, you can’t later claim to be offended about officials violating the rule of law without being a complete hypocrite.
The rules change for regular human private citizens all the time.
Not retroactively. The government can absolutely raise my taxes at any time, but not on the money I already made. They can’t come say “hey, you now oh back taxes on your income from last year.” They can seize my property under eminent domain, but have to compensate me for it. They can ban things going forward, but can’t punish me for things that weren’t illegal when I did them. And yes, the courts’ rulings on contract law and clauses about arbitration, and unilateral changes, and so one, are completely screwed up, but shouldn’t the solution be to make things not work that way for anyone, instead of making the problem worse and more common?
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I 100% agree with these 3 points you made, btw. So does @TheRizz, I think, based on everything he wrote. I’m sorry we seem to be talking past each other instead of finding common ground.
They’ll cope. The 30 million Americans about to lose their homes because our government cares more about the ultra-rich and corporations will not cope nearly as well.
We really, really need to focus on a very different set of priorities right now.
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There have been retroactive taxes and fines to businesses for hundreds of years (the current tax year has always been subject to change until collection), it has not once caused society to collapse. This is some gaslighting bullshit going on lol.
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I’m SHOCKED… SHOCKED…
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except that’s not true at all. amazon has snapped up and undercut competitors using their market dominance, just like most of the big tech companies have.
( i love how google has suddenly integrated “meet” into gmail, giving it immense visual prominence and ease of access… almost like they’re annoyed by how well zoom is doing. almost exactly what ms did with internet explorer )
they’ll do it regardless if they want. time and time again, the republicans in particular have shouted to high heaven about debt, executive orders, troops on the street, states rights, etc. etc. and are more than happy to do the worst of what they claimed the democrats were thinking of doing.
the time for playing nice is over.
and anyways, we already had a retroactive tax with trump’s withholding changes, and now again with the payroll tax. ( hey look kids, free money! now pay it back. )
since all the same rules will be applied to all big companies, it’s a level playing field, they’ll be fine.
[ eta:
oops. you beat me to it.
they’re letting us know now, so we can plan. whereas for the corporations they’re letting them know now, so they can’t plan. totally different, see? 
]
where the country should be at is talking seriously about reinstating the postal bank ( so that we can take the profit motive, all the fees, etc. out of banking. and even encouraging the postal bank to setup at cost alternatives to the visa point of sale network ) … instead we’re dismantling the post office altogether.
it’s all so backwards 
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Yes we do, we absolutely need to focus on helping the tens of millions of people and families experiencing enormous hardship through no fault of their own. Addressing those priorities does not require this bill. Also, see my next comment below, I realize I made a number of mistakes in my prior comments above and apologize for them.
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Thank you for saying that. I honestly hadn’t known that, and now that I’ve looked it up I realize my arguments about laws like this being unconstitutional are wrong, based on the last century of precedent. I still believe that going this route is both unjust and unnecessary, but my previous comments overstated the case by quite a lot.
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Thats pretty rough for people who aren’t remotely billionaires or millionaires but have some stock. Perhaps something more like using their current property values to index into some kind of table so people that maybe just “own” a home with a mortgage they are paying off and a car don’t pay the same rate as someone who owns a few islands and a personal space program?
