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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

This is the point where Godwin's law comes into effect. Seriously though, it was legal to own slaves in the US not all that long ago, most people now a days wouldn't say "There is no wrong doing here", just because it was legal.

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The only relationship between slavery and corporate profit tax is that both should be abolished.

There are hundreds of different ways to tax. Taxing corporate profit is controversial because it's very hard to determine what exactly constitutes profit and for multinational firms like Apple deciding in what jurisdiction profit occurs is highly arbitrary (your iPhone has parts from half a dozen countries). The most logical conclusion is to simply get rid of corporate tax and make up the shortfall by increasing other taxes. Several countries already do this, countries like the US that stubbornly persist in trying to levy such arbitrary taxes will simply chase away international business.

I agree with you to an extent, but I've often heard the argument that in that case wealthy individuals would just place all of their finances in a corporation and never have to pay any taxes whatsoever. How would you address this?

Or when the corporation buys a luxury car and the CEO leases it to himself for $1/year (this is a very common tax avoidance tactic, as the car is for "an employee" they call that lamborghini murcielago a business expense). There are too many loopholes to fix in my opinion. Why tax earnings as opposed to assets anyway?

This one is easy and points out another problem: The ability of businesses to write off expenses.

The cost of goods inside airports would be significantly lower if business travelers couldn't just expense everything they buy. As long as it's max 1/3rd of the usual food allowance businesses can charge that amount and be assured that business travelers will pay.

If you take away corporate taxes then "expensing" will go away entirely. Along with all those receipts you have to save and the entire industries and businesses that profit from it (e.g. fake receipt producers, Concur, etc).

Wealthy individuals wouldn't be able to expense their purchases through subsidiary corporations anymore which would necessitate collection via sales tax. If you think that's an awful lot like the Fair Tax system you're not far off.

I'm actually not an advocate of the Fair Tax or even a Federal-level sales tax because it would be very regressive: Vastly unfair to the bottom 50% of society. Having said that, if you abolish corporate taxes it's one of the only ways to obtain tax revenue.

Storing money inside a corporation is actually something that happens a lot already. I'm not sure that's a problem, because eventually the money has got to come out of the corporation if you want to do anything useful with it, and it will be taxable then. There are countries that have a flat yearly tax on capital, which would be one way of getting at it, but anything you do would make money flee the country. In my opinion it's more fair, and easier, to tax a flow (labour, sales, pollution) instead of a stock (bank account).

This is like saying the float on currencies should be abolished, which effectively is already done by Euro countries within the EU. They can't each set their own monetary policy independent from the EU, but they have sufficiently different economies if it weren't for having one currency, they'd have float to make up for their differences. So now the EU is trying to take away yet another mechanism by which countries are trying to get some aspects of currency float back. I think if this decision stands, it will put more pressure on the EU. And I don't think that pressure is likely to be relaxed by countries giving the EU more centralized control over monetary policy - most EU countries just aren't up for that.

So what you are saying is that we should let poor people pay more taxes instead?

Because that is what abolishing corporate profit tax comes down to. The only substantial tax most states have are consumer taxes, and we all know that these taxes disproportionately hurt people that are already poor.

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