example: while US steel was giving profit to their stock brokers and made rich men richer, nippon steel kept reinvesting in their infrastructure and R&D, US steel was always a market leader and had way more advantages right out the gate
Nippon steel is now on the cusp of owning US steel.
Why are you even here, my guy? Besides to shit-post and put up memes of Donald Trump?
But to answer you, I did 26 years in uniform while you were "creating jobs"
We all choose our own path to benefit the greater good. [Paraphrasing Adam Smith, when I read Wealth of Nations in grad school]
That's great, we all make our own choices, but 26 years in uniform doesn't mean you know anything about how to run a business. Based on your posts, you clearly don't.
Y’all have had record profit for decades, in that time you have failed to invest any real money into R&D or raising wages, while you sit and beg for gov contracts, people now just see corps and their apologists are just POS
There should be a manditory minimum tax of, what? 25%? It would also help if all G20 countries agreed to the same basic tax scheme, so there is nowhere for recalcitrant corporations to flee to.
All too often corporations don't believe they are responsible for the infrastructure that they need and use daily requires taxes, things like: highways, bridges, police, airports, fire departments, ports, sewer, water, armed forces and the cost of 3 levels of gov't. They must pay their fair share.
I agree. But taxation is social policy, so do you want unfettered capitalism or a balance between profits and reinvestment in the society that promotes growth?
Some folks argue that "taxation is theft" but taxes paid for infrastructure, education, and health services.
This is an absurdly dumb idea. There's a middle ground that starts with shutting down loop holes, simplifying tax law so profitable companies can't get away with paying no tax, and making stock buybacks for executive compensation illegal again. Communism isn't the answer.
I would modify that to say a tax system that severely punishes shareholders and owners of companies that are more than moderately profitable, and do not (in some way to be determined, I guess) spread those profits among employees equitably.
I suggest this because the incentive to do good work and produce a better product is tied to success, and profits are tied to success. Suggesting that at some point being good at what you do causes you to be punished, rather than forcing you to be better, seems less likely to succeed.
Wealth hoarding while entire nations of people starve, is no laughing matter. Wealth is a disease that we've been taught is a measure of success. It's a measure of failure to contribute to society. They are parasites sucking up lives for profit. People want to thrive. We aren't hosts for extraction
I once asked ChatGPT why there isn’t a maximum salary the same way there’s a minimum wage and it said that politicians wouldn’t fight for something that would lose them important votes
This was an anarchist proposal in the late 1800s-early 1900s, cost + 7%. 'Cost' includes labor, so everyone would get paid, and owners couldn't accumulate wealth (at least as they do now).
We need a tax system where the 1% pay a 70% tax on their annual income & that money funds Medicare for All, free education, and every social program that we have while everyone else pays no taxes and gets back $10k each.
All that plus instead of geriatric congressional comitees we have acutal experts from medical legal and engineering associations grilling CEOs for more than 30 seconds at a time.
I think we need to eliminate corporate taxes, and business taxes, and instead go to royalties. Royalties are paid off the top, off the gross. So we get paid first instead of last.
I'm fine with a company being wildly successful as long as they in turn pass those earnings back to employees and investors. Of course that depends on the type of business as well. Life saving medication should never be purely profit driven
every dollar profit a company makes could have been better quality, lower prices, better wages, higher sustainability. economic policy should be focused on minimizing profits to a reasonable point that still incentivises innovation without fucking up everything else.
No and also you will find that there aren’t that many companies that are anything but modestly profitable (EBIT %). Which companies did you have in mind?
Oh, and most pensions depend on growth and profitability.
I would like to pay taxes on what I have left after expenses, like corporations, or they pay taxes on total income like me. The Supreme Court ruled they are a person. Though they have neither body to jail nor soul to dam.
I hate considering it "punishment." It's a "return on investment." They would not be successful without the infrastructure of society - not just physical, but legal, educational, environmental, etc. We, the people, invested in them, and they need to pay us back.
It *used* to be a LOT more like this before the lie of trickle down economics.
Companies were punished for hoarding massive amounts of cash, meaning they HAD to reinvest most of their profits back into the company, which often meant better wages, more jobs, more reinvestment in the economy.
No corporation or company pays taxes. Only wage earners can pay taxes. Taxes on corporations are overhead costs, just like the electric bill. That cost is ALWAYS passed along to the end consumer. Taxing corporations is an underhanded way of hiding taxation of working taxpayers. It is a paper tiger.
Way back in the 1950s corporations had the option of paying 90%taxes on capital gains or using their profits to increase pay to the workers and build their company up by investing in infrastructure.
When that stopped, corporate greed started.
If we aren’t getting Federal help and they are punishing states by saying they need to handle services the Federal government did we should not pay federal taxes to them send IRS taxes to our states.
One that recognizes that no individual or corporation can make that kind of money without the help of the general population and that some of that profit needs to be returned to those that helped in order to make sure things keep working long-term.
Will you also favor a tax system that spends our collective assets to protect them from losing vast sums of money during economic shocks? Little tougher, eh?
We should also get rid of the archaic rule that publicly owned companies must do everything to benefit shareholders, all else be dammed. The environment, the health of the general public, sometimes even the companies themselves are all at risk of destruction in the name of improving the bottom line.
@yanisvaroufakis.bsky.social thinks that capitalism is being replaced by a new feudalism. I'm afraid he might be right. We have to fight for a transition to democracy and socialism instead.
I don't know that feudalism is even in the cards. The wealth is far too unevenly distributed for even fuedalism to work. The more AI takes over, we'll have to hope that the very wealthy need to create obedience with some sort of UBI.. maybe just free potatoes? 😂
No, we need to end private capital. There's no way to make capitalism good. You need to get that through your heads. It is dying. It has to die. The longer we wait, the worse it's going to get. Stop looking for pointless fixes that will never happen.
I've thought long and hard about this exact idea, and the conclusion I've drawn is, that would create perverse incentives for giant zombie corporations, as profitable companies vacuum up unprofitable ones for pennies on the dollar to reduce their tax bill.
My alternative: massive, punitive taxes on companies whose market value exceeds a given threshold (say, $100B) to encourage companies to divide and specialize like cells in an organism instead of metastasizing and engulfing every productive company like a cancer.
I’m tired of government being punitive. I like the idea of a high tax rate with incentives (tax breaks) for reinvestment, R&D, 80%+ funded pensions, matching 401ks… It was like this before. Under Eisenhower corp rates were 34-52% and our economy BOOMED!
Who determines what qualifies as "modestly profitable," and what specific measures would be used to penalize businesses that exceed that threshold?
Please go beyond the default answer of "increased taxation"—that's just surface-level thinking.
Sadly, the poor and middle class always vote against their interests or worries about other people’s money instead of their own (tax dollars being spent versus their $20K credit card debt)
Would be good, but it is a bit naive to assume that would work. These companies are so big, beyond controll and out of controll. No accountant will be able to check the books. They will always find a way to lower the profitablity in the books avoiding to pay taxes, just what #Trump always did.
I feel like with all the loopholes rich people find to pay less or 0 taxes, there should be some changes to the tax system, to make it loophole-free.
What I don't know is if such changes screw up people from lower classes as well...
After World War II, we had a huge national debt. We had the need to build an infrastructure. Eisenhower tax rates solved both of those problems. And then Nixon came along and lowered the tax rates for the rich. Reagan came along and lowered them even further. And the debt reappeared.
No, you need to put them in jail. fines become a cost of doing business.
I say we treat CEOs and board members like the poor. If they break the law, they get a mandatory jail sentence and go broke and we take everything they have. Pretty simple no new plans.
The republican small company does not want to ever show a profit because that means that they have to pay taxes. Oh no! Not taxes! They pay people off the books when they can and never pay into Social Security or Medicare so they cannot qualify for it when then want to retire. They just mooch.
I’ve been saying since the Covid lockdown that Amazon, Walmart, etc shouldn’t be allowed to profit off it. They should only have been allowed the average of 5 past years worth of profit. Actually all companies that profited hugely by it.
Yes, a progressive corporate taxation system would be ideal, since corporations are people. In addition, we need to tax capital gains as regular income, prevent corporations from doing stock buy-backs, and require some level of dividends if the company is profitable.
Remove the option to "go public". When you have shareholders, you start ignoring stakeholders, and look for ways to "cheap out" on production costs and benefits to the consumer.
We just need to raise the marginal rates so that corporations are forced to do one of three things with their excess profit. Pay their workers more, invest in their businesses or pocket 10-30% of it and give 70-90% of it to the gov't so that THEY can invest in what this country needs.
How ironic that the very period apt to be labeled "great" by most magats was economically dominated by policies and an ideology the socialistic vibes of which would make maga heads explode and send them running for their ARs if only they weren't too stupid to grasp them.
This also a legacy of Reagan
Yeah, but not enough of it went straight to the top for republicans. That pesky middle class started having kids with nothing better to do than protest the wars that feed our oligarchy. We needed a dimwitted stooge to tell the folks our scraps are good, the best scraps ever.
We shall call him Reagan
So the problem isn't the amount of profit they make. It's what they do with that profit and at what point do they start declaring that they're profitable. You can pay yourself $10M, pay your workers min wage and declare that your company made no profit. Happens ALL the time. Trump does it every day.
Used to have that. When marginal rates were 70+%, execs would have to decide whether to pay their workers more, invest in their biz or pocket all that extra profit but have to give 70% to the gov't. Now, the incentive is to keep every penny for their greedy selves instead of investing or paying more
Why would I work my ass off, spend years and years of not taking profits, suffer through anxiety, high blood pressure, toll on family so that when my company finally makes money I should be satisfied with moderate profit? Not every business owner/CEO is a billionaire. Vast majority are not
While we're at it can we implement a penalty of being immediately dissolved if they don't put how much they've shrunk a product and not the price, in letters taking up more than 50% of the packaging?
All that will do is ensure that companies will no longer innovate or have any incentive to expand their operations and create jobs. Taxes were never meant to be punitive, although liberals have never understood that concept. But hey, carry on, I'm looking forward to Vance 2028
What we need is for everyone to get that taxes are not a penalty. Taxes pay for everything. They give us fire departments and schools and medicine and light.
Taxes are the price of civilization.
I say enforce trickle-down, if your lowest paid employee/contractor is not within 1/30 range to the CEO then the shortfall is applied as tax. CEO wants a raise? Everyone else gets one too!
I'm about to the point of most insurance companies just not existing. Cars, homes/real estate, life insurance, yes. Health insurance? Take that money and create a national health service, so those insurance workers do the paperwork for the government, and let the agency owners sell the other kinds.
What, because corporations have done such a great job taking care of their workers and contributing to the public good? I think you're the one leaking marbles, cousin.
We replace them. The people who actually do the work would still be here and there's plenty of management material who would be happy to run a company for 20-30x the compensation the workers get.
Where are the new companies going to get the investment money to buy all new equipment, facilities, and pay the workers? Not to mention most of the banks will fail when the companies move all their assets overseas. If the banks themselves don't just move overseas too.
Who is we? Also this isn't a communist country. Any attempt to nationalize things is going end any chance of investment and the economy will crash. Countries have tried that and it doesn't end well.
There should be a cap on the difference in compensation at a company between the lowest and highest earners of 10x. Any company producing a public good or using public infrastructure - ISPs, delivery companies, factory farms - should be under strict gov't oversight or acquired outright.
Base the company's taxes on the multiple between the highest and lowest paid individuals, including contractors. If that multiple goes over 40, company taxes to up. At 100, the tax rate goes to 90%. And tax the dog shit out of stock buy backs.
The typical small business operates on a 30% gross profit margin basis (or usually about a 3x markup I you're talking about small business retail), meanwhile large corporations are often at a profit margin of thousands of times cost.
How about a absolute basic minimum tax? 25%? 35%? 50%? No more "GE paid no taxes last year."
All G20 countries agree to the same tax scheme, so recalcitrant corporations can't flee to the next tax free country. And hopefully many, many more.
I think this idea has been around for a few years.
I once worked for a co that was in the habit of providing bonuses, extra $$ to 401Ks, and other forms of profit sharing. Some years were better than others. It will not surprise you that the average employee tenure was almost 20 years. Loyalty begets loyalty.
Also restrict any CEO to and board to have pay and remunerations no higher than a total of 70k max and voted for on yrly contracts by the employees who have shares to promote actual performance.
Better to just make dividends and stock buybacks more equivalent in terms of tax implications. The idea that firms shouldn't be able to return money to shareholders doesn't make much sense.
I don't really like the way incentives work in these proposals. The best way to pay yourself more under this plan is to outsource the low wage stuff to a contractor company.
Also, the biggest issues are more with stock than with salaries.
IMO we could do a pretty good job at this using existing corporate tax rate mechanisms. What is usually missing from the "don't tax the job creators" discourse is that any salary increases or employee bonuses are expenses and thus NOT subject to corporate income tax. GOP pretends otherwise.
The anti-taxers would argue that increasing employees’ pay just shifts the burden to them, and at a higher rate too. Then they say, why not just keep funds within the corporation or invested in capital and not tax it so much? They keep pretending it’s worse for the economy when workers have money.
If workers were truly better-off with more of their pay reinvested into business capital at their workplace, then they could probably be talked into voting to do exactly that. If you can't make that idea fly at the union meeting, there's a distinct chance it's not actually good for the workers
More-heavily taxing dividends and short term cap gains and making buybacks illegal again is basically this. Those are all the ways in which cos “return money” to short-term-focused investors, rather than reinvesting in the business.
You could also mandate profit sharing and/or cap the pay ratio between workers and execs, and incentivize or require stronger employee profit-sharing or stock ownership programs
what even counts as “modest” profit? a small shop’s version ain’t the same as some mega corp’s. one rule for everyone either crushes the little dudes or lets the giants sneak by. plus they’d totally find ways to duck it—stash cash overseas, mess w the books, split up or whatever.
Just the other day I decided that any person or company being a 'billionaire' should be an offense akin to murder. Syphoning off trillions of tax dollars into off shore accounts should be a crime against humanity.
This wastes the possibility of a system that will function efficiently:right now economic model is bottom up;new economic model is top down;the profit is clipped at a certain level(R&D inclusive),the overage goes back down to work up,paying for medical,education,infrastructure,et al.; this will work
yeah but you can’t sue *successfully* for any reason, and successful lawsuits set legal precedents. this doesn’t feel like you’re discussing this in good faith.
Good point on the salary cap! I mean how much bigger of a superyacht can you have to probably only spend a few weeks per year on it? Then hopefully we’d all have more to give to worthy causes or other people in need since the Elords of this world dont seem to have the time or ideas to do it!
There were several in 2023 and 2024. Against Meta, Microsoft, and Google, for starters. One was threatened at Kroger and Albertsons and their merger was blocked.
People don't talk about that enough. Those laws were introduced for good reason (to stop companies from swindling their shareholders) but they've had some grotesque effects and need updating.
sounds like you're proposing marginal tax rate for corporations
which only makes sense to me because generally larger corporations get to benefit from economies of scale way more than individuals (and smaller companies) do
also it doesn't help that corporate tax was dropped from 35% to 21% in 2017
or the fact that top tech companies often use tax loopholes and foreign tax havens to lower their tax burden even lower, such as Amazon paying effectively 12.7% over 10 years (when many of those years, the tax rate was still 35%)
Not punishing but has rules like Japan. Your highest paid person can only make say 20 times your lowest paid worker. Instead if what we have here which is over 450 times. So u can make all the money u can u just have to share it with ur employees
Never going to happen. Too many politicians profit from them.
The states need to quit offering tax incentives to locate for jobs that disappear when companies move on to next state that offers better incentives😡🤨🤔
Very high profits would be OK I think, if they weren't so devoted to shareholder dividends and stock prices. The corporate obsession of short term performance and taking it off the top harms the long term business health, corrodes product quality and shafts the employees
Every year we should throw the richest person (or people) into a volcano as a sacrifice. And their wealth gets distributed to the poorest people. And watch them fight to give money away.
Let's close some loopholes.
For the purposes of this calculation, the compensation of all employees from the same household (e.g. the CEO's spouse and kids) should be pooled.
Corporate tax rate is computed based on total compensation numbers for past 3 years (less incentive for games)
Yeah, definitely need to have a few workshops to identify and close loopholes, but what I like is that it’s a self-balancing system, which allows corporations to reduce tax, if they do the right thing. And if you don’t want to? Fine, you just pay more tax.
Yep the balancing is great, as long as it is super-easy to understand. Anyway, business will surely call it "too complicated!" Perhaps sell it as "fair employer tax rate discount". Maybe regular corp tax rate should be 35% again, but companies can *earn* a lower rate by balancing their payrolls.
That’s exactly how I’d sell it. And say it benefits small business, since they rarely make massive salaries over their employees, they’d basically be getting a tax cut
It’s also simple enough to explain to someone not well informed, it doesn’t discourage company profits, just how they’re distributed, pretty easily to sell and hard to argue against without effectively saying fuck the poor.
Comments
example: while US steel was giving profit to their stock brokers and made rich men richer, nippon steel kept reinvesting in their infrastructure and R&D, US steel was always a market leader and had way more advantages right out the gate
Nippon steel is now on the cusp of owning US steel.
But to answer you, I did 26 years in uniform while you were "creating jobs"
We all choose our own path to benefit the greater good. [Paraphrasing Adam Smith, when I read Wealth of Nations in grad school]
Y’all have had record profit for decades, in that time you have failed to invest any real money into R&D or raising wages, while you sit and beg for gov contracts, people now just see corps and their apologists are just POS
Almost every public corp takes money from the gov and plenty of private ones, they also get tons of tax cuts and build for them loopholes.
Notice you avoided the real meat of my comment, I’m not suprised.
Spending back into your company is a business expense, as is the cost of labor.
Some folks argue that "taxation is theft" but taxes paid for infrastructure, education, and health services.
Since Reagan, we've given ALL GAINS to the top 1%.
It has cost everyone else $50 TRILLION.
More info look up Benjamin Tucker.
👍
But how can we realize it?
The problem is deeper than the tax system, but the tax system is part of the solution.
https://bsky.app/profile/bjchippindale.bsky.social/post/3lacq4nvxsb2t
every dollar profit a company makes could have been better quality, lower prices, better wages, higher sustainability. economic policy should be focused on minimizing profits to a reasonable point that still incentivises innovation without fucking up everything else.
Oh, and most pensions depend on growth and profitability.
Companies were punished for hoarding massive amounts of cash, meaning they HAD to reinvest most of their profits back into the company, which often meant better wages, more jobs, more reinvestment in the economy.
Reagan was the beginning of the end
When that stopped, corporate greed started.
One that recognizes that no individual or corporation can make that kind of money without the help of the general population and that some of that profit needs to be returned to those that helped in order to make sure things keep working long-term.
But that is a good start
Hefty accumulations of power and wealth are very, very, very destructive to the social fabric and must be stopped immediately.
We're witnessing the endgame of the wealth class agenda: oligarchy.
Please go beyond the default answer of "increased taxation"—that's just surface-level thinking.
What I don't know is if such changes screw up people from lower classes as well...
I say we treat CEOs and board members like the poor. If they break the law, they get a mandatory jail sentence and go broke and we take everything they have. Pretty simple no new plans.
Cap Executive Level wages at 10x the average person they employ.
And tax the entire tax base appropriately.
Whatever the "Fair Market" number is would be world's better than the current 200% in 2023 for the median CEO vs the median Worker in the US
It made the US economy into a fire breathing monster of wealth creation.
This also a legacy of Reagan
We shall call him Reagan
Whole lotta really bad ideas in here these replies. 😂
* yes I know lawyers & lobbying that someone on 40k couldn't afford. But it's never even proposed
Taxes are the price of civilization.
Huge fines and imprisonment
for CEO and CFO.
Tax Multinational Corporations and redistribute that money to smaller businesses to help them pay their workers a living wage.
This is Snaps way.
All G20 countries agree to the same tax scheme, so recalcitrant corporations can't flee to the next tax free country. And hopefully many, many more.
I think this idea has been around for a few years.
If you don't like that tax policy, move.
Keeps wages moving together, doesn't hurt small businesses and forces reinvestment if they can't afford to raise all up.
Also, the biggest issues are more with stock than with salaries.
got a real social safety net?
Providing raises works during profitable years but will cause layoffs during lean times. Bonuses may be a happy medium both ensuring job security.
which only makes sense to me because generally larger corporations get to benefit from economies of scale way more than individuals (and smaller companies) do
also it doesn't help that corporate tax was dropped from 35% to 21% in 2017
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/silicon-valley-giants-accused-of-avoiding-100-billion-in-taxes.html
The states need to quit offering tax incentives to locate for jobs that disappear when companies move on to next state that offers better incentives😡🤨🤔
tax rate = (max-med)/(max+med)
Encourages companies to pay workers more, and pay executives less. Would need to include shares and bonuses.
Let's close some loopholes.
For the purposes of this calculation, the compensation of all employees from the same household (e.g. the CEO's spouse and kids) should be pooled.
Corporate tax rate is computed based on total compensation numbers for past 3 years (less incentive for games)