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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it would be simpler to just impose a nominal tax on the total number of job openings a company creates throughout the year. Maybe as a % of the role's salary. You could even rebate it against employer payroll taxes so they get the money back when they actually hire someone.

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You should never tax things you want people to do, like posting legitimate job openings

We tax things we want people to do all the time.

We want people to buy things, yet we have sales taxes.

We want people to work productive jobs and earn money, yet we have income taxes.

To refute the parent, you have to argue that it's a good idea, not just that it's done. It's not hard to find plenty of things that people do which are terrible ideas.

Alcohol Tax, Nicotine Tax. Good taxes on bad things.

> We tax things we want people to do all the time.

True. But why not think about ditching those taxes, and replace them with taxing things we don't want people to do? There's a double benefit - tax revenue is raised, and people do less of those things undesirable to society.

For example, "sin" taxes.

For other examples, taxing pollution. Taxing the conversion of forest land to a parking lot. And so on.

> replace them with taxing things we don't want people to do

Because your tax revenue will collapse if people actually stop doing those things?

It's not possible for people to not pollute, for example.

Well yes, but if you reduce pollution by 50% then you need to double the tax and so on and so forth.

If it’s not something that’s enforced globally you will either end up destroying certain industries and or having massive inefficiencies.

My point is that sin taxes might be a good way to discourage certain behaviors but not as good as a consistent revenue source.

Also there is a risk of perverse incentives like what happened in Tsarist Russia when most government revenue was coming from alcohol taxes.

> but if you reduce pollution by 50%

What a terrible outcome! LOL

Well yeah.. that’s my point.

If the tax works you have to keep continuously increasing it every year. At some point that becomes detrimental (I mean there are good reasons why we don’t ban the usage of fossil fuels entirely..)

So it’s not a reliable source of revenue

Tobacco tax in Australia is an interesting example. A lot of people may have stopped initially but there was a more gradual decrease over time as the tax increases annually by CPI + 5%.

The problem is not everyone will stop and they now face is that at 70% of the price it's encouraging a black market for illegal tobacco with associated crime and a decline in tax revenue.

Most economists agree that income tax and corporate profit tax should be eliminated and replaced with capital gains tax. Politically impossible, of course.

> posting legitimate job openings

You want to incentivize them FILLING job openings. Nobody cares how many jobs are posted. And posting 100 openings and filling 50 is the stated problem trying to be solved here.

The rebating idea resolves this quite neatly though. Make posting a job opening that eventually gets filled free after rebate[1], and posting a "dangling" job opening that never fills incurs tax.

Now, I can think of a dozen loopholes to get out of this[2], but it's not that it's going to disincentivize hiring.

[1] or maybe even better than free (puts a little tax incentive for hiring and keeping people beyond the typical probationary period).

[2] Can job listings be revised? Just recycle the ghost job listing in bulk before the deadline and convert it to a totally different position (Software Engineer -> Cashier) Can they not be revised? That seems like overreaching ridiculous Soviet red tape.

Nothing like this is ever going to happen. It would be incredibly expensive (on both the employer and the government side) to administer, and it would be portrayed as a tax on hiring, because that's exactly what it would be.

Rules about what a job posting can and cannot say can definitely happen, and have happened (see: salary ranges, because of Colorado's requirements). That's what CNBC depicts this proposal as comprising. Unfortunately, under the hood, it's closer to what you're talking about.

I agree with you that what I described can't and won't happen.

Instead of taxing good behavior, we could just criminalize bad behavior. Besides, companies spend billions on advertising. In a weird indirect way, "ghost jobs" are advertising.

A simple tweak here is that the tax refund can be larger than the deposit.

If you post a fake job and hire a H1B, you get automatically and inescapably slugged with a huge tax.

If you post a real job and hire someone, you get a tax refund.

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