Corps pay a minimum of 15% on profits.
No more zeroing out taxes.
That'd raise quite a few pennies.
You mean take away all the tax breaks Amazon gets, I take it ("Amazon pays ZERO!!!")
How would that change their company - and other companies approach to what they do?
ExxonMobil and lots of the biggest companies make billions in profits and pay no federal tax. Willy Sutton could tel you why you should tax corporations. But Amazon and Exxon paying $0 means that someone earning $40K pays more.
The shift from corporate taxation to worker tax has had pernicious effects. People resent gov't taking away part of their earnings more than a giant company does (for which it's an accounting exercise and might weigh on the share price a little). Thus the anti-tax movement has been fueled by the shift away from corporate taxation. While both parties compete for voters by offering small middle class tax cuts, further reducing the gov't revenue stream and exacerbating deficits.
Huge untaxed corporate profits have also led to a stock boom and giant compensation packages for the top execs, both of which have fueled inequality and wealth concentration. And these corporate titans then go on to evade taxation and rail against taxes, perpetuating the cycle.
Bernie has talked about how the richest companies make Billion dollar profits, escape tax, while paying their workers sub-standard wages, and then some of these working poor rely on food stamps or other gov't assistance. So the gov't subsidizes working poor, while their employers make obscene profits off paying a sub-living wage. At the very least these workers bolstering billion dollar profits earn too little to contribute tax to the gov't. Btw, Bernie was attacking Wal-Mart. But seems the same applies to Amazon and others.
Another aspect: how productive, fair, sustainable is it for Waltons or Zuckerberg to have tens of billions of dollars while their employees are stuck in working poverty. Taxation is a means of redistributing private wealth towards greater social good. Of course some have been conditioned to think of some freeloading minority getting an undeserved handout. But much of that money can go to infrastructure projects which not only provide jobs, thus spreading wealth to working class folks, but also improve the nation broadly allowing others to more easily create more private wealth.
And as for welfare, why don't we want poor people to have some money so they can live decently and buy things thus spreading money through the economy. You give money to poor people and they spend it recycling it through the local economy quite efficiently. Efficient allocation. You allow someone to hoard $20B and there's a lot of capital being unproductive.
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5 (45.5%)