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Comment by justaaron | Hacker News Reader

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?

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"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.

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