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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

Two things: Making companies pay their legally required tax bill is not 'taking'. It's just making them follow the spirit of the law. Secondly, accountants can only move faster than the law if there are loopholes - if you close those loopholes it does in fact get harder and harder for them to move around them, and it does in fact bring in more tax revenue. If it didn't, they wouldn't lobby against it.

All that being said, the corporate income tax doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the first place and we should probably get rid of it and replace it with a more economically sound revenue stream. However, as long as the law is on the books, it ought to be enforced, and even moreso ought to be enforced fairly for large corporations and small.

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Two responses:

If there was a flat tax of some sort, you might be able to say "pay their legally required tax bill" in this conversation, but considering that tax dues are the result of a formula derived from a set of laws that span multiple volumes, what is actually due is almost always subject to debate. It's not like paying $3.48 for a gallon of milk.

Second, there are always loopholes. Unless you have a vastly simplified system the way you operate your companies' financials will always have a system where there are advantageous ways to structure finances where taxes are concerned. Moving money offshore is always a possibility. You can't force money to stay in the U.S. You can create an environment such that it's the most desirable place to keep it.

While there are certainly squabbles to be had around the edges, there are also clearcut cases where companies ought to be paying more. There are definitely gray areas, and those should be dealt with in a nuanced way. But many of these things are clearly exploitative.

To your second response - your argument is akin to saying "there will always be security vulnerabilities, so why care about security?". Just because it will always be possible to evade taxes, doesn't mean we should give up and make it easy.

Corporate income tax makes a lot of sense unless you want to see all productive assets end up in a corporate shell and untaxed.

The solution is to pass a credit for the tax paid down to the shareholders which they can use against their own tax bill. We have this here in Australia (it is called Franking credits). I pay 30% tax on the profit of my company and when I pay a dividend to myself I also pass on franking credits for the tax paid on this profit which reduces my tax bill. This way income is only tax once not twice.

Ya, that is a real problem with just eliminating it. I think there are probably ways of working around that problem, but they may be messy.

I don't think just giving shareholders a credit is sufficient though. Fundamentally the problem with the corporate income tax is that it takes away productive capital from companies - capital they could be using to hire more people, invest in R&D, etc.

The reason we have a corporate income tax is that people think corporations = wealthy, and they want to tax the wealthy more. This is a fine goal, but it'd be better served by doing just that: taxing the wealthy more, rather than taking what would have been productive capital away from private enterprises.

The problem is if you don’t get the corporate and personal income taxes approximately equal is you end up with people basically running everything through a company. The nice thing about franking credits is they work like a LLC in making corporate income tax a pass-through structure to the shareholders.

At the moment US companies don’t seem to be constrained by lack of capital, more a lack of profitable investment opportunities due to weak consumer demand. I ams sure making the 0.01% richer will help solve this.

> Making companies pay their legally required tax bill is not 'taking'. It's just making them follow the spirit of the law.

They are following the law though. It's the law that allows this. If you create more laws that disencentive the behavior people will just find more loopholes.

spirit of the law is meaningless here. Generally we don't consider anything illegal unless it is actually illegal. Are you following the spirit of the tax law when you itemize your deductions and get a nice tax break?

Exactly! There is no "spirit" of the law. You don't give someone a speeding ticket for going 25 in a 25 because the spirit of the law is that they should be going slow.

I wasn't making a moral argument about the companies themselves. They are following the law, and that's fine. But the authors of the law did not intend for things like corporate inversions to be used to avoid tax bills.

Again, this is not a moral judgment of the company. It's simply a flawed law. The law was poorly written and these companies have exploited that. That's ok, but we should fix the law.

Ah, "spirit of the law". A favorite of the authoritarian (unless, of course, we are talking constitutional law).

At what point do taxes become "taking"? Do they ever? I mean, why isn't the forceful confiscation of someones labor/result of labor considered "taking"? Just because in this one instance we change the definition? Seriously never understood this...

Well, i'm starting from the premise that governments have the right to levy taxes. If you'd like to argue that point we can do so, but that is not particularly relevant to this discussion.

Nitpick: Governments don't have "the right" to do anything. We the people consent to grant them abilities. I think reasonable taxation is a perfectly legitimate function of government -- not many would argue that. However, we are light years away from reasonable taxation. I'm a year out of school and already I work over 6 months of the year to pay taxes... But, I digress...

The law is the law. This notion that "the spirit of the law" is king is incredibly dangerous. Next level dangerous.

Have you ever seen the tax code printed out? To argue that you should "just close the loopholes" is absurd.

Also, the notion that if companies keep more of their earning then tax revenue will fall is a huge fallacy. If you over tax, tax revenue will fall. It's a proven fact, all over the world.

The answer is to simplify the tax code. Create economic certainty (from a tax liability standpoint) and the economy, as well as tax revenue, will surge.

I don't disagree with any of that. I wasn't arguing that the spirit of the law should be enforced despite it not being written, I was arguing that the law should be rewritten to better conform to its spirit. And I agree that probably the best way of accomplishing that is to simplify the tax code. You'll get no argument from me there.

Fair enough, sounds like we agree. Sorry for sounding combative; I get a little touchy about this stuff :) Have a good one internet stranger!

The spirit of the law is much different than the actual law. What these companies are doing isn't illegal.

Closing these loopholes may bring in some more revenue in the short-term, but if it no longer makes sense financially, they will just move their HQ to another country completly.

Ya I don't necessarily disagree. I think the economics should be considered. But I think we should fix the law so that it operates as intended, and/or re-evaluate the original intent in light of economic realities. What we should not do is say "hey wait, this bug is actually a feature, if we fix it, these companies will leave". That seems silly to me.

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