So there’s this idea and theory that Taxes can be used as a sort of carrot and stick to incentivize certain actions and disincentivize certain actions. A Sort of ‘pragmatic policy decision making’ for a lack of using Vulgar Pejoratives.
You can provide tax credits to people who do X thing, like drive electric cars, or recycle plastic cans.
Or you can tax people who do Y things, like taxing them on smoking cigarettes, alcohol, or buying plastic cans.
In theory, this would be a way to get society to ‘shape up’ in a direction set by policy makers. To control consumer spending and direct it’s efforts towards something that would be a caricature of a sustainable future or whatever the fuck the government is trying these days.
Because obviously the Government knows best and should dictate how we live our lives indirectly through taxes as a lever to control our moves.
It’s already bad enough that they tax us on living in a home, I mean property taxes? That shit is criminal. If you inherent your family home that’s been passed down for generations, and because surrounding neighborhood property value has gone up due to developmental Commercial Land Lords, you’ll have to pay an ass whack in taxes for a property to be assessed by it’s land? Yea, go fuck yourself.
The Problem,
You get to a point where people are Min-Maxing their Taxes like it’s some sort of ARPG game with Nerds in a basement trying to raid the Federal Reserve like it’s the final boss. They want to maximize the subsidies and tax credits they receive, while limiting and reducing their liabilities.
Obviously no one is wanting to pay more ‘taxes’. The only people that brag about paying more taxes are retards and republicunts that have a hard on and don’t know that 9/11 was an inside job.
Eventually businesses stray away from actually making a profit through goods and services rendered, and look more for tax incentives. No longer do you need to make money, you just need to write off a bigger loss.
Ask yourself, do corporations pay a bunch of taxes?
Do rich people pay a bunch of taxes?
That’s because they’re playing the game the way the game was designed to be played. The Tax game.
They’re not doing anything illegal, they’re taking advantage of the system the way the system was meant to be taken advantage of.
And that means that as a wagie, a regular working class joe, you become the bottom of the totem pole. The Tax codes aren’t written so that a regular peon can enjoy tax breaks. And they’re convoluted so you’ll have to rely on the very system that robs you of your earnings.
There’s even tax arbitrage where people will restructure their entities to pay as little to no taxes at all. Which, anyone with any money-sense does nowadays. It’s either play the tax game to not pay taxes, or simply not pay taxes which is illegal because -reasons-.
The Problem multiplied worse,
Is that Corporations that span multiple states (and nations) will structure themselves to minimize their taxes. Obviously, it’s the sound thing to do if maximizing take home profits is the goal.
They’ll set up shop with a Headquarters in Ireland to get that Ireland tax safe haven shits.
Just look at any of the Panama Papers, the Pandora Papers, or even the Paradise papers. A lot of people are doing it.
For instance, with big oil,
Companies will sell their Crude oil at a loss to a subsidiary holding company so that they can claim business losses, While the subsidiary holding company is buying that oil for pennies on the dollar and set up in a foreign company not paying US Taxes because of the greatness that is Islam and their anti-usury policies or some other reason.
The company selling the crude oil gets to write off tax losses. The company buying the crude oil gets to make real profit.
There was great research done by Michael Hudson (an Economist that I actually -surprise- don’t hate) and he did a piece on the Balance of Payments and the Oil Industry.
Ask yourself, why do so many companies have holding companies holding their company in name, by name, and in the state of Delaware?
The answer comes down to, Taxes.
I mean, why do you think rich people have off-shore bank accounts? Or even a swiss bank account?
Taxes.
Everyone is playing a game in the tax economy.
Because unlike sales tax, people can get around taxes. And even with sales taxes, you can actually write that shit off.
Here’s another side critique,
About the horrors of Government spending, deficits, and consummation of the markets;
We are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million, and nobody has anything even resembling a proposal on how to systemically fix this.
Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now.
Whereas the sectors in blue are less regulated, technology whips through them, pushing down prices and raising quality every year.
-Mark Andreessen
The Taxed economy has turned the world upside down. It’s worse because we’re talking about the ‘world reserve currency’ being the supplier of these taxed bullshits.
No longer do many big businesses have to make a profit.
They just have to rely on the welfare of the nation and receive subsidies and bailouts. Make yourself important enough and rely on credits that the government offers. Make an excuse about ‘providing jobs’ for the state and talk about how ‘important’ the company is for the health of ‘the economy’.
Any Right winger or Republicunt should Cope and Seeth at these government handouts of megacorporations that don’t need money taking advantage of sucking the teet of the Government and taxes. And Any sound-minded left winger libtard should be anti establishment about Big Corpos getting bigger and making the working class life shittier. So this is a mutual issue for everyone.
If you paid attention to 2008, you’d know that the banks got a fat chunk of change in bail outs. Losers got a bail out.
Wall Street turned into a no lose casino.
People are having their senses degenerating since we’ve been detached from the fundamentals of making an actual profit.
It’s like playing monopoly, except someone can just give you free money from their money printer. You don’t actually need to do anything business sense or sound judgement. It’s the good times, and they’ll roll until shit hit’s the fan. Like a Bloated Silicon Valley Tech Startup that slight of hand their million dollar venture investment into a billion dollar proof of concept sold to some mega corp.
I mean, look at all the large corporations. How many government contracts are there?
Which ones are ‘too big to fail’? It’s not just banks. Look at any ‘strategic’ resource or ‘national security interest’ technology. There’s plenty that government deems too important to not have around.
And if you prop up businesses to be Zombie Businesses. Then they no longer have an incentive to do real business. They’re fucking brain dead zombies. Just like the zombie banks.
And the Execs are obviously going to milk the cash cow. I mean, what’s their punishment? Getting fired? Yea, they’ll take stock buybacks and exercising their stock options for 50k please, make that order ‘to go’.
Welcome to the Tax Economy.
In Closing,
We live in a tax economy that is devoid of what a normal person would consider ‘fundamentals’, and it’s been that way ever so slowly since, maybe the 1950’s?
You can actually take advantage of the tax system and make more money in profit from the government then actually make profit doing whatever the fuck your business is supposed to do.
The current state of affairs is some bullshit mix of Capitalism and Socialism, and it’s the worst possible mixture. The Capitalists are gamified by the socialists, and the capitalists bought out the socialists, and the socialists are gambling on the capitalists, and society is all kinds of fucked.
Which, if you think about it, what else was supposed to happen?
This is exactly what a free market would entail. People would naturally buy up the government, and then use the government to buy up people and influence markets. Ouroboros style.
There’s no better option, because going full Socialist or Communist would require people to give a fuck and actually not be retarded. And that path would end up with Government controlling the means of everything, resulting in the same thing.
This is why I hate when people talk shit about Socialism or Capitalism. They’re the same thing if pushed to their extremes. A Monopolization of either private or public sector results in the monopolization of the other.
Whatever,
Point is, everyone is playing the tax game and are following the hoops and carrots of the tax system. That’s the economy, that’s the state of the world. Run a shitty business, write losses off, get a bail out, take home free money, repeat.
Welcome to the Tax Economy.
Have a nice day,
*Not Valid Financial, Legal, Life, or Any Advice