Forum Overview :: Balance of Power :: Basics!

[quote name="John M.F. Keynes"][quote name="Mischief Maker"]Most large C-Corporations pay next to nothing in actual taxes. Some of that is loopholes and some of that is encouraging better practices. Wanna encourage research and development? Raise corporate taxes! Why? Because R&D is tax-deductible. Basics here for a moment, money held by a C-Corporation is not actually in the owner's pocket yet, it needs to go through corporate taxation along the way. If corporate taxes are high, and you <I>could</I> do $100,000 worth of R&D that may not pay back returns for 5-10 years, it's in your interest to do the R&D because otherwise the money savings would just get gobbled up by Uncle Sam anyway. But if corporate taxes are zero, and you give the owner a choice between doing $100,000 worth of R&D for non-guaranteed delayed profit, or just pocketing it right now, they're fucking gonna pocket it right now. Especially with the golden parachute musical chairs culture in the executive class these days.[/quote] Or, what if - and hear me out before you say anything - what if the corporation passes $90,000 worth of savings on to their customers? Then the customers could easily afford to pay $80,000 in personal taxes, of which the government could put $70,000 into a <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/The_Pentagon_January_2008.jpg">black box</a>. The black box could then award $60,000 in corporate R&D contracts, and presto! We're basically at the same place your Asian-style guided economy would've landed us, only our way has three decisive advantages: 1. It's 100% kosher under the rules of the free market, provided nobody ever looks inside the black box (this is what national secrets are for). 2. At every step along the way, someone gets a little taste. Even you. 3. As long as the black box spends at least a fraction of the $60,000 wisely (ICBMs), we've got nothing to fear from the hyper-efficient $100,000 R&D economies nipping at our heels, each of which has precisely as many ICBMs as the market demands (like, maybe one? They can sit on it and rotate when they see ours coming). Of course, this entire system hinges more and more every day on our rapidly emerging economic enemies believing we have the chutzpah to push the button for entirely selfish, even sociopathic reasons, so we should probably put it in the hands of our most erratic badguy wrestler. What's Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase doing these days? Still just coke, or might he consider a bid?[/quote]