Felix wrote: ↑May 16th, 2019, 2:34 am
GE Morton: "with respect to taxes, the relevant question is, are they (corporations) consuming more government services than they are paying for?"
Yes, that is the whole point. In many cases, they receive far more benefits than they pay out. For example, 60 of the most profitable U.S. Fortune 500 companies paid zero federal income taxes in 2018, including Molson-Coors, IBM, Amazon, General Motors, Chevron and Halliburton.
Well, first, Greta's accusation was unqualified and general: "However, corporations are already representing their own interests extremely well and don't hardly need naive ideologue time-wasters to champion their cause. Rest easy, the companies are doing fine, and dodging their tax contributions, and you rationalise their parasitism." That 60 out of (say) the Fortune 1000 largest companies paid no taxes last year doesn't validate that general accusation.
Here is how Amazon reduced its 2018 income tax bill to zero:
http://fortune.com/2019/02/14/amazon-do ... axes-2019/
You don't address the other side of the equation, i.e., what is the value of the government services they are receiving?
But I agree that US income tax laws often result in inequities. Amazon and the others you mention surely consume some government services, such as the benefits of national defense. They should be paying for that somehow. The problem is with the method of assessing taxes, i.e., on incomes. Revenues used to pay expenses are not income, as usually understood. Hence any sort of expense is deductible. In years when businesses have unusually high expenses, they may have no taxable income (Amazon paid substantial taxes in previous years). All of the deductions that Amazon claimed last year are standard, available to any taxpayer. The problem is that Amazon (and all other taxpayers) still benefit from certain government services, whether they have any income or not, and should be paying for it. That means we need a different basis for assessing taxes. Inequities are intrinsic to income taxes.
There are other problems with taxes on businesses --- any kind of tax --- which makes many politicians reluctant to impose them. First, all business taxes are ultimately paid by the consumers of the company's products. That tax burden is a production cost, like labor, rent, energy, etc., and will be reflected in the price of the product, making domestic products less competitive in the global marketplace. That means layoffs, plant closures, reduced GDP --- consequences no one wants.
Nonetheless, if a business benefits from government services it, and its customers, should be paying for them.
A second problem with corporate income taxes is double taxation --- the same income is taxed twice; once by the corporate tax, and again by the stockholders when they receive their dividend checks. The stockholders pay a reduced rate on their dividend income if the company paid income taxes (max 15%) but it is still taxed twice.
On top of that, many of them also received tax subsidies to establish local plants or branches in various states, with the promise that they'd hire many local residents to work in them, a promise which they then often failed to keep. And multinational corporations also engage in other tax avoidance schemes such as transferring revenue to offshore shell companies, etc.
I fully agree that any kind of subsidy for business --- or for anyone else (farmers, opera and dance companies, renters, Amtrak, local school districts and sewer/water utilities, etc.) --- is unjustifiable.
It should be mentioned that the tax evasion by major corporations is only the tip of the social ship sinking iceberg. Here in the U.S., they have many other negative social effects. For example, Walmart builds a mega-store in a small city, often with the aid of the previously mentioned local tax subsidies. Since they can afford to buy consumer staples in massive quantities from international sources (much of their inventory comes from China), they can sell them at retail prices below even the wholesale prices of local small dealers. The result: many local small retailers and their suppliers are driven out of businesss.
Yes, that is the way a free economy works. More efficient methods of producing and delivering a product or service constantly replace less efficient ones. But before you conclude that the "social effects" are negative, you need to factor in the advantages realized by consumers from the lower prices. When electric lights replaced oil lamps lampmakers went out of business and lamplighters and whalers lost their jobs. Should that innovation have been prohibited?
On top of that, Walmart executives are paid millions of dollars a year, and yet the corp. does not pay the vast majority of it's workers a living wage, nor do they provide them with health/medical benefits. So when a Walmart employees becomes sick or injured, they must rely on Medicaid, which is the Federal/State medical service for those who cannot afford health insurance. That is, most of Walmart's full time employees could not survive without Federal welfare programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, et. al., services which, remember, Walmart Inc. avoids funding via the use of elaborate tax evasion strategies and political bribes.
You have the cart before the horse. The only reason Walmart does not pay a "living wage" is because the government has volunteered to supplement that wage. If there was no Medicaid, no food stamps, etc., Walmart would pay a living wage --- because otherwise it would attract no employees.
Let's be clear --- employers are not responsible for their employees' welfare. They are not their mothers, their big brothers, their rich uncles, or their guardians. They have no duty to pay any more for labor than the market requires, just as with any other production factor they must buy. The employee is solely responsible for his own welfare, which means he must acquire skills and work habits that will allow him to earn a "living wage." But as long as long as the government is willing to subsidize his failure to do so he will have little incentive to acquire them.
. . . all in all, many large corporations are more of a curse than a benefit to society, and Greta's characterization of them as "parasitic" could be an understatement, "predatory" may be a better adjective.
Be sure you ask the customers for those corporations' products whether they share that opinion.