Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

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>This article really just emphasises the need to hold congress accountable for their actions...

That's hard though, because ideology gets in the way. Everyone has this, almost "quasi-religious", devotion to their politicians. So it becomes a lot easier to say, "Hey, look at all these rich banks and wealthy companies taking advantage of all their tailor made tax laws!", than it is to say, "OK guys, we have to sit down and get a list of everyone who voted for these advantageous tax laws that these rich companies are using."

The one is more "sound bite"-y. It's easier to get people behind such a twitter storm. The other requires a performance review of each of our political leaders, which is just not the way we as Americans have typically operated. Not to mention the fact that it requires further action. You have a list, now what do you do with it? For instance, game theoretically speaking, it may be better to hold it over the current politician's head, than it would be to get rid of him/her immediately? Or maybe we just want to send a message, and get rid of all these men and women as soon as the law permits? I mean, it just opens up a lot of questions about how best to proceed.

The other option, you know how to proceed. You just join in on the twitter storm so to speak.

Yea I've always found it odd when people blame bad legislation on corporate lobbyists. Lobbyists don't pass laws, politicians do. Directing your anger towards lobbyists is literally giving your politicians a free pass. If a politician accepts a bribe, the politician should be the one taking the heat (along with the system that enabled this to happen), not the one giving the bribe.

For example, tax filing in the U.S. could be as simple as you verifying the information they already have on you, saving you from the time and hassle of having to fill everything out yourself (often through software like TurboTax that costs money). Many countries already do this. But anytime I read an article on the subject, the narrative is that we're stuck with the status quo because companies like TurboTax with a vested financial interest in making tax filing difficult have fought tooth and nail to keep your tax filing difficult. Uh...no, this is not why we don't have simpler tax filing, it's because crooked and/or clueless politicians aren't voting it through Congress.

Found another one in the news today:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18223836/p...

A Senator introduced a bill in 2007 to ban line-standing, a bill that never ended up leaving committee.

"The line-standing industry quickly rallied against the proposal. The owner of Linestanding.com submitted testimony that argued McCaskill’s bill would eliminate “an industry that employs hundreds of entry-level workers, and instead creating positions for even more lobbyists, the bill would have the opposite effect of that intended. It wouldn’t change the composition of who ultimately sat in hearing rooms; it would simply increase costs for all involved.”"

So politicians stop the passage of a law to ban line-standing, and we're supposed to feel that it's the lobbyists' fault rather than that of the politicians who prevented the bills passage? I guess politicians can do whatever they want and receive no accountability for their voting because the media has decided that politicians are immune and the lobbyists will take all the heat.

I disagree. Politicians, like everyone else, simply respond to incentives. As long as the incentives aren't changed, it doesn't matter much who's in office. Changing the incentives in this case means limiting corporate contributions to politicians, for starters.

Clearly, this is not the result of creative accounting, but merely displays just how SKEWED the playing field is in favor of large parasitic corporations, that kill innovation for each small company they acquire or quash.

I don't see Amazon as rogue here, just as taking what they are allowed to take, and this is the problem, not the particular anecdote mentioned here in this articles healine.

In what world is Amazon a large parasitic corporation that is killing innovation? I'm no Amazon fan, but I'd say they're dong more than their fair share of innovation, and given how many companies use their online stores and cloud services, they're the opposite of parasitic.

1) Acquisitions of actually innovative tech corps and their products, which may be incorporated into Amazons products or simply killed. Microsoft is quite good at this.

2) Monopoly means no competition = bad for pricing, quality of service, and ultimately, the market.

Are you unaware of federal anti-trust law and it's history?

OK, put me on your list, I generally vote in favor of lower taxes for corporations and individuals.

> I generally vote in favor of lower taxes for corporations and individuals.

So like to have your cake and eat it too?

The implication is a smaller government and fewer public services. We could theoretically eliminate social security / medicare and immediately put extra money in people's pockets, but that would be disastrous for a number of reasons.

How does that follow? You're assuming what kind of government services he votes for.

He probably also favors less government spending.

So, essentially small businesses and lower/middle income folks will pick up the slack on the missing revenue, and in general in terms of the tax-base tilt: In essence you are excusing a heavy tilt for the large global corporations that 1) constitute monopolies, in many cases, which are anti-innovation and kill innovation, actually. 2) are killing mom-and-pop small businesses left and right.

"lower taxes for corporations and individuals" which one is it?

I've never seen a lower federal budget, and the "small government" party has brought us 2 wars costing over $7 trillion over 18 years, and a perpetual war on an emotion that has caused an INCREASE in governmental size and spending, overall.

Can you explain your stance a bit?

"essentially small businesses and lower/middle income folks will pick up the slack on the missing revenue"

This is objectively untrue. The wealthiest taxpayers, who overwhelmingly make their money off of investments in companies like Amazon, pay nearly all of federal taxes. Just because Amazon doesn't pay taxes doesn't mean the people profiting off Amazon aren't paying taxes. A big reason why corporate taxes are dumb, since the money either grows the business or goes to individuals who pay taxes.

This is objectively untrue. The wealthiest corporations and people overwhelmingly pay the LEAST share of taxes.

Your shifting of the playing field smells like an excuse.

1) Whereas the federal budget has not been reduced.

2) Whereas the large monopolies and billionaires pay less (see: the $1.5 trillion tax cut for the top, and how it's hoarded rather than invested) tax

therefore we are compensating for Amazon and Netflix etc paying less tax.

Corporate taxes should grow with the size of the corporation. We should encourage small businesses as they spur innovation, mostly fail, and are the backbone of a stable economy, vs slave labor for globalized zombie corps like Amazon.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2018/09/28/wh...

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/now-we-know-how-major-corpor...

by all accounts, the opposite of an economic "pump" is when you give a tax cut to the already filthy rich.

The tax base has been shifted to the middle and lower class. Plain and simple.

CBO and IRS reports on taxes show the richest pay the vast majority of Federal taxes, and a significantly higher rate than the middle class and poor. Care to cite otherwise?

Here’s a summary of CBO data [1]. IRS also posts much more detailed tax stats with the same results.

[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-averag...

35% of trillions is still trilliions. 10% of 10k is difference between eating everyday and not. The marginal utility of money is negative past the first 10M per capita, if not less.

>I've never seen a lower federal budget, and the "small government" party has brought us 2 wars costing over $7 trillion over 18 years, and a perpetual war on an emotion that has caused an INCREASE in governmental size and spending, overall.

The "small government" party was in power that entire time? Why weren't they voted out and replaced by a party that wanted to end these disastrous and costly wars?

> replaced by a party that wanted to end these disastrous and costly wars

Because the USA only has 2 historically significant parties and both mainstreams want wars? I mean, the US has a concept of "bipartisanship", as if the entire political spectrum could be boiled down to ultra liberalism or slightly less ultra liberalism.

Because the US voting system practically only allows two parties. You will never get a diverse political landscape with First Past the Post that dominant.

Fixing that might be nice, but is probably also a distraction from more urgent matters... since it would be very expensive (in terms of political capital) to make parties give up their own monopoly.

> You will never get a diverse political landscape with First Past the Post that dominant.

The UK has multiparty democracy of sorts with FPTP; the US Presidential system (as opposed to a Parliamentary system) reinforces and more strongly nationalizes the local duopoly effect that FPTP naturally encourages.

France has a similar presidential system and even there are other parties with double digits votes. It's a purely cultural thing.

You could argue the duopoly prevents extremism by straightjacking the political options, but after the Tea Party takeover the GOP and now Trump, that has been thoroughly debunked.

> France has a similar presidential system. It's a purely cultural thing.

But France doesn't use simple one-round FPTP for either the Presidential or legislative elections, and doesn't combine the elections, either, using a two-rond majority-runoff system for each election (with additionally what amounts to a minimum threshold by eligible electorate size, rather than just share of turnout, for legislative seats for first-round wins.) Majority-runoff has a far less strong push to duopoly thaneither simple FPTP or the US Presidential election system.

It's not purely a cultural thing; to the extent it's cultural, it's largely cultural adaptation to structural incentives.

> You could argue the duopoly prevents extremism by straightjacking the political options, but after the Tea Party takeover the GOP and now Trump, that has been thoroughly debunked.

I wouldn't have argued that in the first place for other reasons, but Trump would, at worst, only debunk an absurdly absolutist version of that; electoral systems may structurally disfavor certain outcomes but they rarely absolutely prevent any particular ideological outcome.

Large corporations avoid taxes by different methods (operational transfer pricing, off-balance assets, special purpose vehicles etc.) It is the small and medium business, as well as the middle class who pay the bulk of the taxes, and yes, I believe in smaller government, regardless of the party stance.

I mean, I agree with your statement about ideology, but I disagree about everything else.

Even if Amazon is not paying taxes on its corporate profits, it's still generating a boatload of tax money through income & payroll tax. And I think it's good to reduce corporate tax rates, to encourage our amazing economic engine to grow as fast as possible!

https://taxfoundation.org/benefits-cutting-corporate-income-...

Growth without limits pushes up against Climate Change and physics.

We have believed over all these years that we could make more efficient use of the land of our planet than nature could, and we're going to learn that wasn't really the case at all.

We need to balance our economic engine against the ecological one or we're doomed. "Tax Foundation", a site that craps on carbon taxes at best over and over, and only makes one suggestion: reduce taxes.

That's a fair criticism of the tax foundation-- I do think that a carbon tax would be a good market-driven approach to reducing CO2 emissions.

I think we can provide a lot of energy without running into climate change and physics though. Nuclear energy is something I wish we did more to encourage. (It's a reliable emission-less source of energy!) Renewables are good, but we need battery tech to improve some more. (And the battery issue might also be another example of pushing against the limits of physics.)

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